Aston Elaine, Harris Geraldine (ред.). Feminist Futures? Theatre, Performance, Theory

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186 Feminist Futures? Theatre, Performance, Theory

for an arranged marriage in Australia. Torn from her Chinese roots, a

victim of rape, domestic and racial abuse, her mother committed

suicide when Yen was in her teens. In stage and film versions of Chinese

Take Away Yen’s style is presentational: she plays and presents all the

family characters in her story (including her father). Chinese Take Away

arguably belongs to an autobiographical tradition of solo work that

draws on a feminist legacy of the personal as political: stages one

woman’s personal story in an epic, political framework. In piecing

together the story of her mother’s life, her enforced marriage, her rape

and her suicide, Yen also connects to her grandmother’s stories of being

sold as a child into servitude. The show is a constant weave between the

autobiographical (as Yen comes to an understanding about her

mother’s suicide and learns more about her family) and the political (as

she exposes the mother’s suicide as consequent upon and resulting

from a damaging set of patriarchal, colonialist and material conditions).

As spectators of Chinese Take Away the mother’s story is one that

affected us emotionally: prompted connections to our own mothers

(one living and one dead) and to ourselves as daughters. It was clear at

the end of the film screening that many, if not a majority of the

mostly women spectators were affected, moved in similar ways. To

make an observation of this kind, however, runs contrary to the ‘anti-

essentialist project’ informing recent feminist thinking. To state the

powerful connections women have to the mother figure seems like a

reductive return to the limitations set by an earlier mode of cultural-

feminist, essentialist thinking: one that risked fetishizing the mother

figure and prioritizing the mother–daughter ‘bonding’. If we ‘loosen up’

on the ‘anti-essentialist’ feminist project, and if we acknowledge the

maternal feelings stirred up in this viewing, can these be helpful to us in

some other (less reductive) ways? And is it possible to ‘stir up’ our

theoretical response? What comes into view if we risk this ‘step to the

side of antiessentialism’ (Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, p.6)? Can it ‘move’

us towards another way of knowing the maternal? Harder, ‘messier’, but

arguably more progressive, we would argue, are the (future) ways of

‘surprising’ or of ‘moving’ our own Western feminist thinking through

the maternal to a different ‘place’ of knowing.

Crucial to this shift in knowing, is the way in which Yen’s personal

story about her mother is presented through and as a part of an epic

history of patriarchal and colonialist violence. As spectators, when we

are touched by Yen’s personal portrait of the maternal and feel our own

maternal connections to this, our connections are also being disturbed,

moved by, this colonialist history – one that is not our own, is distant to

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‘It is Good to Look at One’s Own Shadow’ 187

our own, but that we are ‘touched by’. It would be easy, too easy,

dangerous even, for us to ‘take away’, to assimilate, Yen’s imaging of

Asian-Australian maternal ancestry back into the ‘mother’ as she is

already known to us, both personally and theoretically. Yen signals this

danger in Chinese Take Away: it is the mother’s assimilation into white

Australia that covers up the violent domestic, cultural and social history

that she is subjected to. If we want our feminist thinking to move to a

different place, we must avoid the (colonialist) temptation to think we

already know this ‘distant’ mother by taking her for our ‘own’, and, at

the same time, allow her to ‘mess up’ our own personal and feminist

histories of feeling and knowing the maternal. If we allow for this to

happen, for example, if we move closer to the colonialist history Yen

portrays, then ‘seeing’ this, knowing this, we cannot simply, easily, go

back to the maternal as figured in European feminisms (from Kristeva,

Cixous and others): as a site of marginal-to-be-celebrated-potentially-

transgressive-otherness (not least because in psychoanalytic terms the

colonialist history forecloses on the polymorphous jouissance of mother–

child relations). Nor, given Yen’s representation of this damaged

maternal in both the psychic and the social, can we resign, abject the

maternal to the margins of a feminism that has bordered its thinking

through its insistence on an anti-essentialist position. Rather, the

maternal emerges as something women have in common (we all have

mothers at some point, we all have feelings, different feelings about

mothers), embodied responses, but not to be read back into a reductive

site of essentialist, universalizing celebration (of what we have in

common), but in view of the local specificities of cultural, colonialist,

psychic and social damage(s) emerges as an issue that demands an

urgent (future) critical attention.

The final image of Chinese Take Away is of Yen swinging backwards and

forward on a slackrope. In the screen version she is suspended above the

land: swinging backwards and forwards, facing out to sea. The image

suggests the idea that histories, ancestries, are balanced by, are in tension

with, the promise of future directions. It is important, however, that the

figure of the daughter, Anna Yen, now performing herself, is in movement.

Representationally, this resists the idea that Anna is somehow ‘complete’:

has found out what she needs to know and can move forward leaving her

past behind. Instead, it suggests a constant, perpetual movement:

forwards and backwards, forwards and backwards, in tensions of knowing

and not knowing, constantly transforming.

Similarly, the combined affect on us of these various theatrical

‘encounters’ in the space of the festival has been to move us to look back

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188 Feminist Futures? Theatre, Performance, Theory

at our own feminist ‘shadows’ and forwards to future ways of knowing.

Equally, as an experiment the creation of this dialogue between three

voices has itself been one of movement, forwards and backwards between

us, a process that has not been without its tensions, surprises and conflicts.

Despite its moments of apparently authoritative (and theoretical)

statement, this process is not at an end. As three different individuals

interested in feminism, theatre and performance, we are still at the start

of using the space opened up and inhabited by this festival, to find out

what as women we might as yet have in common.

I think of Mirjana Vukovie, a Women’s Studies graduate and a performer

from Serbia and Montenegro. Because Mirjana graduated in Women’s Studies

she doesn’t have a formal theatre education (which is a must if one is to do

professional theatre in the Central/Eastern European countries, because the

whole of the professional and academic theatre culture tends to be centralized

around one Academy of Dramatic Arts). But Mirjana came to theatre during

the bombardment of Belgrade by participating in some drama workshops. She

found that theatrical space offered the possibility of being inside and outside

at the same time. It is her longing to be outside in the street during the danger

that brought her to the safe inside of the theatre. With two other women she

founded a collective ‘Feministifko pozorište’ (‘Feminist Theatre’). They

decided to call it ‘feminist’ in order to create a polemic, to provoke discussion.

The group abolished hierarchy in favour of more tolerant structures, but found

this difficult, encountered conflicts through a lack of clear aims, and fell apart

after a couple of years.

Yet Mirjana is moved and surprised by women’s creative and political

efforts and energies. She feels that in Serbia and Montenegro it was the

women who took charge of the peace process and saved the disintegrating

academia during the years Serbia and Montenegro were facing sanctions and

cultural and political isolation from the rest of the world. Women, she

contends, are also a moving force in the theatre scene in her country with Dah

Theatre, Omen Theatre, Ivana Vujie and Biljana Srbljanovie. Now Mirjana is

thinking about theatre through female motifs, about exploring a new aesthetic

and what that might open up in and for the future.

Notes

1 Sarah Ahmed, Strange Encounters (London: Routledge, 2000).

2 Ruth Frankenberg and Lata Mani, ‘Crosscurrents, Cross Talk: Race “Post-

Coloniality” and the Politics of Location’, in Kum-Kum Bhavnani, ed., Feminism

and Race (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp.479–516, p.487.

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‘It is Good to Look at One’s Own Shadow’ 189

3Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity

(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).

4 Janelle Reinelt, ‘Staging the invisible: The crisis of visibility in theatrical

representation’, Text and Performance Quarterly, 14: 2 (1994): 97–107.

5 Susan Bassnett, Magdalena: International Women’s Experimental Theatre

(Oxford: Berg, 1989) writes: ‘Magdalena had started with an idealistic, some

would say utopian, belief in the capacity of women to come together and

share their lives and work. Differences of culture, language, race, class, age

and sexual propensity would, in this idealistic vision, be subordinate to the

commonality of women’s experience...(p.94).

6Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (London:

Routledge, 1993), p.114.

7 Anna Yen performed the opening to Chinese Take Away. This was immediately

followed by a screening of the film version.

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190

Gendering Space: The Desert

and the Psyche in Contemporary

Australian Theatre

Joanne Tompkins

Geography and space are always gendered, always raced, always

economical and always sexual.

A discussion of spatiality in a collection on feminist theatre and its

future(s) is as essential as a discussion of bodies or sexuality or any other

major concern of/for women, since the function of space/place directly

influences individual identity construction:

Identity, as well as being about identification and organisation is

also about spatiality. In part, this means that identity involves an

identification with particular places, whether local or national. It

also means that certain spaces act as sites for the performance of

identity.

Further, space and geography also affect identity construction at the

level of cultural organization:

Just as none of us is outside or beyond geography, none of us is com-

pletely free from the struggle over geography. That struggle is complex

and interesting because it is not only about soldiers and cannons but

also about ideas, about forms, about images and imaginings.

In these terms – and most especially in the context of the urgent need

to address the material and psychic effects of the geopolitical reconfigu-

rations produced by the processes of globalization, past and present – a

concerted focus on the relationship between subjectivity, space and

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Gendering Space: The Desert and the Psyche 191

spatiality must necessarily be part of feminist thinking about the future,

both political and theatrical.

In this chapter I explore these issues through an examination of the

ways that four contemporary women playwrights have found the

Australian desert a fertile setting for explorations of landscape, corpore-

ality and subjectivity. While theatre has not completely overlooked the

desert in the past, its use as a location has been more common in other

genres, notably film and fiction.

The renewed interest in desert locations

that characterizes the four plays addressed here would not surprise

Roslynn Haynes, whose analysis of desert representations in Australia

illustrates that:

few other landscapes have been so variously perceived or have elic-

ited such diverse responses as the Australian desert. In the two centu-

ries since European settlement of the continent it has been promoted

from ‘best forgotten’ oblivion to centre stage prominence. Once

execrated for its failure to provide an inland sea, the Centre is now

the most exported image of Australia: in tourist offices around the

world Uluru vies with the Sydney Opera House as the icon of the

continent.

(Haynes, Seeking the Centre, p.3)

Often called the ‘dead heart,’ the extensive landscape that could be

termed desert in Australia is remote from most of the nation’s inhabit-

ants who live on the more verdant perimeter of the continent. Plays set

in the desert naturally explore this remoteness, but there is, of course,

more to the use of this location. The relationship between (white)

women and the desert is, according to Rachel Fensham, ‘an encounter

with the unknown, here not only the feminine unconscious, but also

the “political unconscious” of the nation. And it is a place in which

ghosts appear, shadowy figures, unfamiliar to the urban fringe dweller.’

Therefore, the desert setting in Australian plays by women operates

on at least two levels: it fixes a literal, geographical site on the map, and

it also marks the significance of politically important psychic ‘locations’

that may be less identifiable on a conventional map.

These tropes are very much in evidence in Jenny Kemp’s Still Angela

(2002), Noëlle Janaczewska’s Historia (1996), Josie Ningali Lawford,

Angela Chaplin and Robyn Archer’s Ningali (1994), and Andrea Lemon

and Sarah Cathcart’s Tiger Country (1995), all of which are at least partly

set in the desert. While these plays have attracted critical attention for

their use of bodies and narrative, I want to read them in terms of the

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192 Feminist Futures? Theatre, Performance, Theory

poetics of space that is increasingly significant in contemporary Australian

theatre. In highlighting setting as much as corporeality, language or

action, these plays endeavour to map a space for women in Australia,

literally and metaphorically. In doing so, they also highlight more

generally the need to read subjectivity in terms of spatial context.

Spatial practice in Australia has, in Edward Said’s terms cited above,

been ‘complex and interesting’ for the two centuries of white Australia’s

settlement, achieved, in effect, by dispossessing indigenous peoples of

their land. In the most recent expression of the ongoing anxiety regarding

Australia’s settlement, or ‘unsettlement’, as it were, the government has

even altered the nation’s borders to exclude certain islands from

counting as ‘Australian’ territory, in an attempt to halt refugee claims

being made there. ‘Imaginings’ of Australian spatiality and its resonance

within the nation’s ‘political unconscious’ thus necessarily incorporate

diaspora, exile and dispossession, matters generally associated with an

absence of space. Desert settings also foreground compromised space:

the plays discussed here disrupt ‘known’ space to privilege what we

could call a ‘psychic’ space, associated with Fensham’s conception of

the ‘feminine unconscious’.

Space is, of course, gendered, like other socially constructed institu-

tions; for Doreen Massey, ‘this gendering of space and place both

reflects and has effects back on the ways in which gender is constructed

and understood.’

Landscape itself has frequently been figured as female,

as Annette Kolodny describes in the American context and Kay Schaffer

in Australia. In fact, Sue Best maintains that ‘in an extraordinary array

of contexts, space is conceived as a woman’.

Gillian Rose pursues this

masculinist perspective which is, for her, characteristic of the study of

geography generally: ‘[t]he geographical imagination thinks space can

always be known and mapped, and that’s what its transparency, its

innocence, signifies: that it’s infinitely knowable; that there are no

obscure corners into which geographical vision cannot penetrate.’

The

plays considered here attempt to compromise this ‘knowability’ by

focusing on a ‘known’ location at the same time as they shift the setting

to a psychic location, one that, in its unmapped state, appears to be

‘unknown’. The women journey to/through the interior, which is both

geographic and a representation of subjectivity. I explore this topo-

graphical and performative layering of locations, the spatial ‘geology’ of

these plays. Of course, theatre inevitably operates on the construction

of various imaginary locations, some of which represent real places and

some of which do not, but all of which combine to form a production’s

diegesis. The difference in the spatial geology constructed in these plays

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Gendering Space: The Desert and the Psyche 193

is that the desert landscape only comes to make sense in terms of

setting and subjectivity when the layers of its various manifestations are

accrued, combined and contrasted.

Still Angela

[T]here are two landscapes, Angela. One always on top of the other.

Jenny Kemp argues that her work ‘attempts a dialogue with the

disjunction that exists when you walk down the street and see the real

world but feel aware of an “inner world”’.

She locates on stage the

‘inner landscapes of the female psyche’ (Fensham, ‘Modernity’, p.9),

exploring the lives of contemporary women through doubled characters,

flashbacks and fractured narratives. Fiona Scott-Norman writes that a

Kemp play:

is about the fracturing of a single moment, and the exploration of

every shard of possibility, every perspective, every fantasy, every

memory and resonance connected with that moment. . . [A]lthough

there are only shards of meaning present, they are of sensations and

situations relevant to everyone.

Kemp spatializes and narrativizes each shard as a location of the char-

acter’s subjectivity, with the eventually reconstructed shattered object

resonating more productively than the original. Spatial geology is

described most simply in Still Angela by the epigraph above: the real

landscape exists with an internal, psychic space (although the presence

of just two landscapes is arguable).

Still Angela traces the life of Angela, about to turn 40, as she looks

back at herself through various ages: as a 6-year-old when her mother

died, in her late twenties, and early thirties, each played by a different

actor. At the end of the prologue, Angela 3 says: ‘There was something

to discover about time, it was as if the sandwich, the bushes, the trees,

the earth, were all getting on with something and she just wasn’t

quite getting it. Something important was eluding her’ (Kemp, Still

Angela, p.2), something she comes to find by exploring her physical

surroundings and her psychic landscape, and the interrelationship

between the two.

In order to understand this relationship between physical and

psychic, one must apprehend the nature of the physical set. The play’s

geographical settings are framed by her kitchen and by the desert. It is,

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194 Feminist Futures? Theatre, Performance, Theory

however, difficult to determine which are real and which are not, since

Kemp uses as the basis for her work the paintings of Paul Delvaux which

‘remind me that the world on stage is a timeless place, a kind of land-

scape of the psyche where anything can happen’.

The desert, for

instance, is both a literal place (the play opens with a shot of the

Simpson Desert on the narrow backdrop of video screen) and an

interior landscape (a glimpse of the past). Thus few locations on stage

come to have just one meaning: beyond the narrow corridors of light

and the barest representation of a kitchen are dimly lit (in blue) tree

branches that represent an undefined ‘outside’. The most articulated

versions of the ‘outside’ come from either the video footage of the

desert or the garden path that her father literally builds on stage. Yet we

know that this action also takes place in her mind’s eye and is one of

the actions that takes Angela back to her mother’s death. When Angela

sits in her kitchen – a barely realized space that also comes to represent

the kitchen of her childhood – she comments: ‘There’s a picture on the

wall of the desert, it looks bare and austere, it looks as if it goes on

forever’ (Kemp, Still Angela, p.13). That psychic landscape is then

animated on the video screen, which becomes the image Angela sees

from the train, moving in the desert. It is left unclear, deliberately,

whether or not Angela actually does travel to the desert, even though

the play records the train trip she takes. Either way, psychic space

comes to be more extensive than conventional space, as it spills over

walls and borders to become all encompassing. Fully realized space lies

over the top of psychic space for the first part of the action; once Angela

visits the desert, the layering of spaces appears to be reversed. The

psychic space has a transformative effect on the character of Angela:

after Kemp’s characters inhabit psychic space, they are subsequently

more able to negotiate the fully realized and mapped physical space.

Angela’s reintegration following her visit to psychic space is theatrically

complex. Kemp characteristically works closely with a choreographer

(Helen Herbertson) to establish a pattern of movement that is appro-

priate to the action: spatiality is written into the printed text in Kemp’s

work as both inner and outer landscapes appear to dissolve into each

other. As Angela sifts through her mind and memories to try to discover

what’s been eluding her, the Angelas traverse the floor in an apparently

random, confused pattern. ‘As she sits (or at times moves) she travels inter-

nally, her memories and emotions bounce, jostle and nudge her for attention.

The action should be rhythmic, as if Angela inhabits areas as she gives them

focus’ (Kemp, Still Angela, p.3). At other times the movement is regular

as the metaphor of the chess game that is introduced into the action by

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Gendering Space: The Desert and the Psyche 195

Jack. John Mangan explains that the production of Still Angela is struc-

tured using ‘corridors, layers,...and grids’.

These corridors and grids

are provided by the chessboard, and the rules of direction for chess

pieces also contribute to the movement, a chessboard itself being a

representation of both real and imaginary space. The chessboard is

frequently the only prop lit in this relatively dark play, and the board’s

pattern is also projected on to the garden path that the father builds on

the stage. Angela is encouraged by her mother’s voice to use her ‘horse’

(Kemp, Still Angela, p.26); the movement pattern of the knight chess piece

is also reflected in the shape of the father’s path. Rather than charting

these various movements and locations, all of which contribute to

spatializing the ‘lost in thought’ part of Angela, Still Angela suggests that

a definitive mapping is unnecessary. The space appears to be alterna-

tively random or governed by a different type of spatial logic that is not

cartographic but still essential to Angela’s course of direction. The

layering of the psychic and ‘real’ landscapes is a sufficient map for the

nature of Angela’s current journey.

Whether or not Angela actually travels to the desert, she hears a

voice-over on the train that explains the topographical transforma-

tional powers of the Simpson Desert: the otherwise dry bed of Lake Eyre

can fill up with water several times a century, and the desert’s former life

as a radically different landscape (as ocean) is brought home to Angela

when she finds a seashell on her desert walk. The topographical trans-

formation becomes allied with the psychic, as the two landscapes

continue to be layered over the top of each other. The stage directions

suggest Angela ‘is orientating, coming to terms with the enormity of the

space around her, with fear of the dark and the unknown’ (Kemp, Still Angela,

p.18). Following the trauma of re-enacting her mother’s death, the

earlier scenes are played out again, in the desert, as it were, with

domestic space layered over desert space. This time,

the form [of the action] is changed totally. This is really as a result of

new energy and clarity found in the desert. Now there is some space,

distance between things, and an ability to feel things physically.

There is more of a sense of Angela being ‘embodied’.

(Kemp, Still Angela, p.21)

Identifying the different spaces – both literal and psychic – enables her

to achieve this embodiment. Kemp’s women must exist in conventional

social space but they also walk through and past such literal spaces to

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