Aston Elaine, Harris Geraldine (ред.). Feminist Futures? Theatre, Performance, Theory
Подождите немного. Документ загружается.
166 Feminist Futures? Theatre, Performance, Theory
among others argues. We must remain vigilant in this new technological
Eden, so that we might distinguish between the consumeristic notion
of ‘choice’ provided by ART and the real meaning of reproductive
freedom. Our reproductive future, whilst bearing the promise of
freedom and choice that ART and reprogenetics might bring together
with a potential revolution in sexual relations, will depend on our
knowledge and our ability to challenge our legislators accordingly. For
no amount of spectacle, insight or wonder provided by technology and
no amount of successful IVF statistics can detract from the fact that
where the real power lies is not with the tools of such technologies
themselves, but with those who control them.
Notes
1 Jacqueline Brown, Thinking Egg, quoted in Deborah Law and Sandra Peaty,
Angels and Mechanics, Catologue (London Arts Board/ Arts Council, 1996), p.47.
2 ‘At twenty week’s gestation, the peak of the female’s oogonial load, the fetus
holds 6–7 million eggs. In the next twenty weeks of wombing, 4 million of
those eggs will die, and by puberty all but 400,000 will have taken to the wing,
without a squabble, without a peep’ (Natalie Angier, Woman: An Intimate Geog-
raphy (London: Virago Press, 1999), p.2).
3 In Vitro Fertilization. The sine qua non of IVF is that it constitutes fertilizing
eggs outside of the body. Meaning, ‘fertilization in glass’, the IVF process
actually takes place not in the ghoulish test-tubes of popular imagination but
in a petrie dish. A great deal of detail goes into the preparation for this occur-
rence, with regular monitoring throughout. The procedure for the woman
involves, first, a dose of hormones to shut down the menstrual cycle – in
effect a chemically designed menopause – followed by intense doses of
hormones taken subcutaneously to stimulate hyper ovulation. This causes
the ovaries to swell (usually quite painfully). During this super ovulation
phase you are ultrasound scanned, to check follicle and egg production. This
is followed by egg-collection: surgery either via laparoscopy (keyhole surgery
via an incision in the navel) or via the vaginal wall. Viable eggs can range
from zero to the high twenties. Even more sometimes. If your eggs do ferti-
lize, the pre-embryos are surgically transferred back into the womb or fallo-
pian tubes.
4 Spit Lit Festival of Women’s Writing presented by Alternative Arts, London,
March 2005.
5 See Lee M. Silver, Remaking Eden: Cloning, Genetic Engineering and the Future of
Humankind? (New York: Avon Books, 1997).
6 ICSI is the acronym for Intra-Cytoplasmic Sperm Injection, a relatively new
technique used in cases of male sperm deficiencies, immotility or low counts
for example.
7 See Dion Farquhar, ‘(M)Other Discourses’, in G. Kirkup, L. Janes, K. Woodward,
K. and F. Hovenden, eds, The Gendered Cyborg (London and New York:
Routledge 2000), pp.209–220, pp.214–15; and Deborah Lynn Steinberg,
1403_945322_14_cha10.fm Page 166 Wednesday, January 25, 2006 6:58 AM
Performing in Glass 167
‘Feminist Approaches to Science, Medicine and Technology’, in The
Gendered Cyborg, pp.193–208, pp.200–3.
8Robin Baker, Sex in the Future: Ancient Urges Meet Future Technology (Basingstoke:
Macmillan – now Palgrave Macmillan, 1999), pp.379–80.
9 See Phillippe Comar, The Human Body: Image and Emotion (London: Thames
& Hudson, 1999), p.89.
10 Emily Martin, The Woman in The Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction
(Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1992), p.20.
11 The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, a government quango
that licenses clinics and regulates legislation.
12 See Anna Furse, Our Essential Infertility Companion (London: Thorsons/
Harper Collins [1997], 2001).
13 For a brilliant analysis of Magdalene’s role in Christ’s life – and her possible
pregnancy – see Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (London: Penguin Books,
1990).
14 Rachel begs her husband Jacob for a surrogacy solution to her childlessness,
asking him to go to her maid Bilbah and conceive their child with her.
15 Henrik Ibsen, Hedda Gabler, trans. Christopher Hampton (London: Samuel
French, 1989), Act 3, p.50.
16 Federico García Lorca, Yerma, Plays One, trans. Peter Luke (London:
Methuen, 2000), Act 1 Scene 2, pp.173–4.
17 Michelene Wandor, AID Thy Neighbour in Five Plays (London: Journeyman
Press, 1984).
18 Michelene Wandor, Wanted (London: Playbooks, 1988).
19 Liz Lochhead, Perfect Days (London: Nick Hern Books, 1999).
20 Timberlake Wertenbaker, The Break of Day (London: Faber, 1995), Act 2, p.71.
21 Ben Elton, Inconceivable (New York: Bantam Doubleday Dell; new edition,
2000).
22 Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution
(London: Virago Books, 1977).
23 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith,
(London: Routledge, 2002), p.106.
24 Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1994), p.94.
25 Hélène Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ [1975], in Elaine Marks and
Isabelle de Courtivron, eds, New French Feminisms (Brighton: Harvester Press,
1981), pp.245–64.
26 Louisa Buck, ‘Unnatural Selection’, Stilled Lives (Edinburgh: Portfolio Gallery
Catalogue, 1996).
27 I wrote and directed a play for 4–7 year olds, The Peach Child (Little Angel
Theatre, 2000–1), based on an ancient Japanese folk-tale about a miracle
baby boy born to a childless old peasant couple. Yerma’s Eggs was a devised,
physically driven, multi-media performance for a young person and adult
audience (2003).
28 I wish to distinguish between science and technology. The word ‘science’
means ‘knowledge’ and ‘technology’ (from the Greek techne) means ‘art’ in
the sense of skill, craft and how-to. To Heiddegger technology is a ‘bringing
forth’ that which is latent (Martin Heiddegger, The Question Concerning
Technology and other Essays (New York and London: Harper Row, 1977)).
1403_945322_14_cha10.fm Page 167 Wednesday, January 25, 2006 6:58 AM
168 Feminist Futures? Theatre, Performance, Theory
Does ART (an apt acronym), then, merely bring forth the material possibility
of babies from latent, organic materials (male and female gametes) which
possess only potential life and only in combination with each other?
29 Abridged.
30 Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch (London: Flamingo, 2003).
31 Boston Women’s Collective, Our Bodies, Ourselves: A Health Book for Women
(London: Allen Lane, 1978).
32 Henry Gray, Anatomy (London: Bounty Books, 1977), p.1027.
33 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill &
Wang, 1981) p.27.
34 Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature
(London: Free Association, 1991) p.150.
35 Donna Haraway ‘The Virtual Speculum in the New World Order’, in Kirkup
et al The Gendered Cyborg, pp.221–45.
36 Barbara Duden, Disembodying Women, Perspectives on Pregnancy and the
Unborn, trans. Lee Hoinacki (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1993), p.92.
37 See Duden, Disembodying Women, and Rosalind Pollack Petchesky ‘Foetal
Images:the Power of Visual Culture in the Politics of Reproduction’, in
Kirkup et al. The Gendered Cyborg, pp.171–92.
38 Lennart Nilsson and Lars Hamberger, A Child is Born (New York: Doubleday,
1990).
39 This idea lies at the centre of my installation Photogenic Looks at the Chelsea
and Westminster Hospital, forthcoming 2006. With this work I am exploring
the relationship between the body of the spectator and that of the disembodied
reproductive material introduced to them. The purpose of the project is to
narrow the distance between the image-object and its spectator. I want
to convert the spectator, just as theatre can do, into participant. I want to
engage the imagination of the spectator-participant, explore the emotions
and physical responses the experience arouses and offer ways to locate,
describe, analyse and express this verbally, visually, even physically.
40 Today, anatomy meets art. The magnificently curated Spectacular Bodies
exhibition at London’s Hayward Gallery in 2000, the hugely popular plasti-
nated corpses of Professor Gunther von Hagen’s Bodyworlds seen in London
in 2003 and televised anatomy lessons on Channel 4 TV in 2005 are evidence
that we retain a ravenous appetite for witnessing the explicit body, the sight
of our bodies within, preserved, bottled, flayed or simply magnified.
41 See note 37.
1403_945322_14_cha10.fm Page 168 Wednesday, January 25, 2006 6:58 AM
169
11
‘It is Good to Look at One’s Own
Shadow’: A Women’s International
Theatre Festival and Questions for
International Feminism
Elaine Aston, Gerry Harris and Lena Šimie
This essay is a three-way collaboration arising out of our participation
in ‘Roots in Transit’, an international women’s theatre festival held at
Odin Theatret in Hostelbro, Denmark (15–25 January 2004). The three
of us – Elaine, Gerry and Lena – work together in Lancaster University
(United Kingdom): Elaine and Gerry as academic colleagues and as
collaborators on a large-scale project concerned with women’s contem-
porary performance (to which this collection of essays contributes);
Lena as professional practitioner and research student (originally from
Croatia, now living in the United Kingdom) working alongside Gerry
and Elaine, participating in the large project and pursuing her own
feminist performance research. Our interest in the ‘Roots’ Festival came
out of these home-based projects, though we had different (feminist) ways
into and different sets of questions and (theatre) concerns to bring to,
the event.
In producing this essay we have attempted to preserve our different
perspectives on this event. Functioning primarily as engaged observers
and audience members at the performances, talks and discussion
events of the second week of the Festival, Elaine and Gerry have
melded their voices together to produce a more formal account: one
that offers some theoretical reflections on issues of feminist theatre
futures in an international context. As a participant in the first week
of workshops as well as an audience member for the second week of
events, Lena’s interventions (presented in italics) are informal, more
immediate and are deliberately presented so that they interrupt and
1403_945322_15_cha11.fm Page 169 Wednesday, January 25, 2006 6:58 AM
170 Feminist Futures? Theatre, Performance, Theory
lie alongside the more formal text, enabling the two to reflect on,
comment on and even, at times, to contradict each other. Charged
with the task of talking feminism, theatre and futures with other
festival participants, Lena’s interventions also bring in reflections
from an international mix of women practitioners from different
geographical, feminist and performance ‘locations’. The punctuation
and fragmentation of the formal text signals the ‘imperfections’ neces-
sary to a ‘futures’ debate: figuring a desire to resist an homogenization
of feminism, feminist theatre or feminist performance.
Roots in Transit
Roots in Transit was the fourth international women’s theatre festival
in a series inaugurated in 1992 by Julia Varley of Odin Theatret,
Denmark. While Varley has lived and worked with Odin since 1976,
she also has strong connections to the women’s Magdalena Project
dating back to the project’s inception in Cardiff, Wales, 1986, and its
First International Festival of Women in Contemporary Theatre. This
first Magdalena festival seeded the idea of establishing an on-going
women’s network for an international exchange of performance
cultures. Up until 1999, when it lost its Arts Council funding, the
Magdalena project regularly presented workshops, performances and
festivals. As the project successfully fostered links through associate or
host projects, such as those with Odin and Varley, the idea of a
‘space’, an international meeting ground, for women practitioners to
come together has succeeded in taking root elsewhere, with festivals
in numerous places in the world.
What is the point of a network? Should I aspire to belong to one? Isn’t it only
natural that each network has its borders, issues and prejudices?
Like any other sort of ‘meeting place’, academic, artistic or political,
theatre festivals are inevitably bound up in complex sets of relations,
both material and discursive, that condition exactly ‘who’ is repre-
sented at them and in what terms. Yet this does not detract from the
value and importance of the Magdalena project in bringing together
work drawn from all kinds of theatre cultures and born out of different
social experiences for women. Work that we saw at Transit included
performances from, amongst others, artists based in Argentina, Peru,
Spain, Italy, Bali, Morocco, Algeria, Egypt, France, Britain, Germany,
Denmark and Taiwan.
1403_945322_15_cha11.fm Page 170 Wednesday, January 25, 2006 6:58 AM
‘It is Good to Look at One’s Own Shadow’ 171
A women’s festival?
Many participants came with a previous interest and/or background in
the Magdalena project while others were attracted not because it was a
women’s festival, but because it was held at Odin. It was noticeable, for
example, that the festival attracted significant representation from
countries where Odin’s work has been influential through their festivals,
work demonstrations, productions – especially parts of Northern and
Eastern Europe and South America. Arguably, a proportion of the partici-
pants and the practitioners at Roots in Transit were already connected
through shared theatrical ‘languages’ as much, if not more than, broadly
political and/or specifically feminist interests.
Asked what it means to be a female working in theatre and a part of a women’s
international festival workshop, participants offered a wide array of views,
ranging from disinterest in anything feminist (Cristina Galbiati, actress,
director, and Ledwina Constantini, actress, from Switzerland; Aleksandra Ilie,
visual artist, performer, Serbia and Montenegro) to political activism (Biljana
Stankovie, lesbian activist from Novi Sad, Serbia and Montenegro, within the
organization \ene na delu – ‘Act Women’.)
A number of people were affiliated to theatres or academic institutions that
promote women’s events, but do not declare themselves or their work feminist
or gender specific. Quite a few participants felt deeply encouraged by being
part of a female artistic community and a gathering that offered a nourishing
environment, especially through contact with a large number of older
women artists: Janica Draisma, filmmaker, director, performer, photographer,
Netherlands; Karin Koob, performer, Germany; Laurelann Porter, playwright,
singer, composer, United States; Margaret Cameron, writer, performer, pedagogue,
Australia; Marisa Naspolini, actress, director, university lecturer, Brazil;
Mirjana Vukovie, actress, Serbia and Montenegro; Sharna Vrhowec,
performer, Australia; Sandra Dempster, performer, Germany/New Zealand.
Many expressed a belief in a specifically female, nurturing, generous character
when working in the arts, a somewhat maternal instinct that places emphasis
on the process, transformation and making of the artistic material. Others
such as Kasia Kazimierczuk believe feminism enhances a division between
men and women that can be detrimental to art, but she acknowledges a need
for a women’s festival because a lot of female practitioners define themselves
through gender and this festival is a way to reach them.
Janica, an artist from the Netherlands, observed that in her work she is
interested in the struggle with male and female identities and their definitions
rather than feminism.
1403_945322_15_cha11.fm Page 171 Wednesday, January 25, 2006 6:58 AM
172 Feminist Futures? Theatre, Performance, Theory
Deirdre Roycroft, actress, Ireland (Loose Canon Theatre Company), came to
the festival not believing it important that it was a women’s festival, but left it
feeling differently. In her opinion the work presented at the Festival was a kind
of political activism, grounded politically not emotionally. She found herself
thinking a lot about ‘roots’ – the festival’s theme.
Feminism and theatre
We were drawn to this festival because our current research project is
focused around women practitioners based in Britain and while unable,
for pragmatic reasons, to extend its geographical scope, at the very least
we wanted to extend our thinking around feminist futures by means of
‘encountering’ works from other countries as part of our process. As it
turned out, from the very first night of the festival, we found ourselves
being challenged to review our positioning on a number of levels. Not
least we felt prompted to revisit the concept of ‘feminist theatre’ –
something which, for various reasons, we have not specifically engaged
with for some considerable time.
This is largely because recently, in the field we work in, the focus has
been very much on particular modes of anti-essentialist theory. Within
the terms of this theory, the question of what constitutes feminist
theatre appears to have become redundant, inadmissible or answerable
only in purely relativist terms. However, as the shows and discussions at
Roots in Transit clearly demonstrated, the thinking which informs such
conclusions is not necessarily shared by all women or all women
theatre practitioners, on a ‘local’ let alone a global scale. In Europe, the
United States and Australia the dominance of such paradigms has also
sometimes led to the privileging of particular aesthetic strategies for
political performance. As a result, certain types of women’s theatre and
performance-making have become problematic to discuss in ‘feminist’
terms. Within the academic field, this issue is sometimes avoided very
simply through focusing on types of works that fit particular theoretical
and aesthetic models, or by narrativizing shows through the dominant
paradigms.
I fear to be known as a New Born Feminist among the participants of the festival.
I make sure that the participants I talk to know I don’t belong to the club.
It is not, we should stress, that we believe that there is or should be an
answer to the question ‘what is feminist theatre?’, or even that it is the
most relevant or important question to ask. Rather, our point is that
1403_945322_15_cha11.fm Page 172 Wednesday, January 25, 2006 6:58 AM
‘It is Good to Look at One’s Own Shadow’ 173
attending this festival reactivated this question for us in a way that
seems productive in challenging some of our own assumptions as feminist
academics, concerned with theatre, theory and performance. Not least,
this is because we were strongly reminded that these two words, ‘feminist
theatre’ embrace (at least) four different, and complexly related, fields
and different types of knowledges: feminist theories, women-centred
social practices and experiences, theatre theories and theatre practices,
all of which are also culturally inflected. How could any single ‘theory’
even begin to embrace the complexity of these fields and the way in which
they touch on, complicate or cross each other’s boundaries, especially in an
international context?
The sorts of issues that arise from this complexity were demonstrated
by audience responses to the very first show we saw. Salt by Odin
theatre, was performed in Italian by Roberta Carreri, with musical
accompaniment by Jan Feslev and direction by Eugenio Barba. Salt is
described in the programme notes as ‘A female Odyssey’ in which
‘A woman travels from one Greek island to another in search of a loved
one who has disappeared. A phantom accompanies her in a dance, which
brings her closer to an awareness of a definitive absence.’ The
programme notes anchor the show – but seeing the show without the
notes (and without speaking Italian), as most of us did, all of us saw
something different: it was about a woman’s political life (she cradles a
red book, while other images are reminiscent of torture/political protest);
it was about the death of her children (lots of funereal images); it was
about the pain of living (lamentational style of delivery), and so on.
At one level, we could argue that this is characteristic of theatre
spectatorship in general: the old cliché of nobody seeing the same
show. Aspects of Salt also suggested that it was a relatively ‘open’ poetic
text, but this does not indicate a text that is essentially meaningless except
in the process of individual interpretation. Moreover, in this instance, the
variation between these interpretations and the programme summary
specifically reflects the experience of watching a show in another
language, even though for many of us the theatrical and cultural signposts
were apparently familiar. How much greater, then, the problem with
works in the festival where more marked theatrical and cultural differences
were in operation, as well as linguistic ones. How as spectators and
commentators could we begin to genuinely engage with these various
‘differences’, to do them justice without misrepresenting them or
‘appropriating’ them? In this context, on what basis could we speak
about these shows in relation to feminism and theatre – in fact on what
basis could we speak about them at all?
1403_945322_15_cha11.fm Page 173 Wednesday, January 25, 2006 6:58 AM
174 Feminist Futures? Theatre, Performance, Theory
Encounters with theory
While these questions were prompted by the practice within the festival,
paradoxically perhaps, we found ourselves turning to theory to help us
work through these concerns. After all – we are academics. In the first
instance, in our minds was Sara Ahmed’s monograph Strange Encounters,
1
a
work that is concerned with the problematics and possibilities of interna-
tional feminism in the context of globalization. Writing in Britain and
from the perspective of poststructuralist/ postmodern feminism, Ahmed is,
nonetheless, as critical of the various ways ‘difference’ has been fetishized
in anti-essentialist approaches, as she is of ‘universalism’. Ahmed points to
the way that such thinking can produce a return to ‘universalism’ by other
means, analysing, for example, how anti-essentialist theories of cultural
hybridity and diaspora can sometimes, as Ruth Frankenberg and Lata Mani
argue, be used to imply that ‘we can all [our emphasis] be defined as
decentred, multiple, minor or metiza, in exactly comparable ways’.
2
Ahmed argues that both essentialist and anti-essentialist modes of
thought can assume to ‘already know the difference’, in ways that hold
hierarchies in place and foreclose the possibility of reciprocity and
negotiation (Strange Encounters, p.167). As such, her concern is to think
through what might constitute ‘ethical encounters’ with different and
distant ‘others’ in ways that avoid both the appropriations of cultural
(and theoretical) imperialism and the ‘indifference’ of pure relativism.
She stresses the importance of acknowledging the broader material and
economic relations that inevitably inform such meetings, whether
literal or figurative. However, by the same token she insists that they
must be premised on a recognition of the absence of knowledge that
would allow one to control the encounter or predict its outcomes,
allowing for both surprise and conflict. In such encounters: ‘one gets
close enough to others to be touched by that [the different and specific
histories and experiences] which cannot be simply got across.’ In such
encounters Ahmed argues, ‘“one” does not stay in place, nor does one
stay safely at a distance (there is no space which is not implicated in the
encounter)’ (Strange Encounters, p.157).
In addition to Ahmed’s thinking around ‘strange encounters’ we also
turned to Eve Sedgwick’s recent monograph Touching Feeling.
3
Through
a discussion of affect, pedagogy and performativity, Sedgwick argues a
need for thinking that helps to get beyond the versions of what we
already know or what we have already learned to look for. Like Ahmed,
Sedgwick is concerned with the way that anti-essentialist methodologies
have hardened into an approach that has come to dominate, define and
1403_945322_15_cha11.fm Page 174 Wednesday, January 25, 2006 6:58 AM
‘It is Good to Look at One’s Own Shadow’ 175
ultimately limit, the fields of enquiry in Euro-American feminism, queer
theory and postcolonial discourse. She argues that these methodologies
may ‘have made it less rather than more possible to unpack the local,
contingent relations between any given piece of knowledge and its
narrative/ epistemological entailments for the seeker, knower, teller’
(Touching Feeling, p.124). Yet Sedgwick’s aim is not to critique or reject
the theories that have generated this paradigm. Rather, it is to ‘loosen
them up’, reopening their potential by considering them through other
ideas and texts that might be excluded in advance by too rigorous ‘theoret-
ical hygiene’. One of the ways in which Sedgwick performs this is
through drawing on Sylvan Tomkins’s conceptualization of subjectivity,
influenced by systems theory and based around ‘theories of affect’.
Sedgwick uses Tomkins’s approach to argue that beside ‘the structural
dominance of monopolistic “strong theory”, there may also be benefit
in exploring the extremely varied, dynamic, and historically contingent
ways that strong theoretical constructs interact with weak ones in the
ecology of knowing’ (Touching Feeling, p.145). As part of her argument
she points out the ‘interesting’ nature of the proposition ‘beside’:
a number of elements can lie alongside each other, although not an
infinity of them . . . . Beside comprises a wide range of desiring, iden-
tifying, repelling, parcelling, differentiating, rivalling, leaning, twisting,
mimicking, withdrawing, attracting, aggressing, warping and other
relations.
(Touching Feeling, p.8)
I am an artist and a student. I am female, and therefore I feel as though I am
allowed to make feminism my calling card. Feminism gets me funded in my
studies and in my art. In public I sell feminism.
On a more personal level I sometimes feel like an opportunist feminist,
sometimes I believe in its causes, sometimes I find it silly, sometimes I am
inspired by it, sometimes it fuels my anger, sometimes I forget about it ...
I see feminism in academia as a safe friend to all the girls, in the art world
I fear it is a quick categorization. There are prejudices about feminism; there
are advantages as well.
Feminism is there to be used, abused, abducted, changed, born again,
personalized – it is up to you and I.
To this we would add one further point of reference that informed our
thinking around the festival experience: Janelle Reinelt’s article on
‘Staging the invisible’.
4
The link with Ahmed and Sedgwick is through
1403_945322_15_cha11.fm Page 175 Wednesday, January 25, 2006 6:58 AM