Body, Paper, Stage

Writing and Performing Autoethnography

Tami Spry

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315432793
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Research & Methodology in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Tami Spry provides a methodological introduction to the budding field of performative autoethnography. She intertwines three necessary elements comprising the process. First one must understand the body – navigating concepts of self, culture, language, class, race, gender, and physicality. The second task is to put that body on the page, assigning words for that body's sociocultural experiences. Finally, this merger of body and paper is lifted up to the stage, crafting a persona as a method of personal inquiry. These three stages are simultaneous and interdependent, and only in cultivating all three does performance autoethnography begin to take shape. Replete with examples and exercises, this is an important introductory work for autoethnographers and performance artists alike.

Chapter One

Body

Conceptualizing Performative Autoethnography

Why Do Performative Autoethnography?

In addressing this question, consider the following work first printed in 1997. It contains both the autoethnography (then referred to as autobiography) and the analysis of the autoethnography:

Skins: A Daughter’s (Re)construction of Cancer

(A plain straight-backed wooden chair is placed CS. The rest of the stage is bare. Carefully placed over the back of the chair is an opulent full length mink coat. The chair and coat are prelit in a wide dim spot, all else is dark.

The daughter enters slowly from LCS. She is dressed in a classic basic black dress with heels. As she enters, the spot level increases. She very tentatively enters the space delineated by the spot, then walks slowly toward the coat. She circles the coat, touching it gingerly. She picks the coat up to put it on. The coat is heavy in the daughter’s hands and she is conflicted about donning the coat.

Finally, she puts it on and is transformed into a caricatured model on a runway. The daughter/model smiles garishly walking briskly DSC as if modeling and selling the coat; she speaks to the audience.)

Skins

Dead skins

Skins of mothers:

(As mother) “Little…Tami?…Little?…”

Skins of daughters:

(As daughter) “Oh, mom…where are you?…”

(Daughter enacts the action of the narrative as she speaks it.) Do you remember the commercial where the model strides down the runway, takes a big turn at the end of the runway, and as she turns blood comes out of her fur coat

and spatters

the faces

of the audience?

I remember that.

I also remember this:

(In a bright and emotionally distanced tone:) A small hunched woman whose skin is falling from her face and her neck and her body. She is wrapped in these very skins (indicating the coat). On one elbow is a daughter, on the other is a husband.

They help her to the car in the middle of a cold January Michigan winter and whisk her off to the hospital where she dies four days later. After the four days, the daughter wraps herself in these skins. She leaves the hospital, goes to the mother’s house, up the stairs into the mother’s bedroom, goes into the closet,

(The daughter now begins to embody the described experience as her own:) parts the clothes, and slides down the wall with the clothes around her.

(Crouched DSC) I wrapped these dead skins tight around me and cried for my mother’s death, and mourned my life. How would I ever grow new skins now?

And I feel the blood tears on my face as the skins whip around on the final turn of the runway.

(She stands and crosses USC) And I remember this:

(As the mother:) “Now, Little, you need some new clothes. So, you and Mumma will go to lunch and go shopping.”

“Oh, Little, that is absolutely darling. Well, you have to have that.”

(As saleswoman:) “Oh, Mrs. Spry, your daughter is a perfect size 7.”

(As mother, scrutinizing the daughter:) “Gads, she really is.”

(As daughter to audience:) Did you see the dignity and power and grace?

(As mother:) “Little, that is absoLUTEly darling.”

(As daughter to audience:) My mother died of ovarian cancer when I was 26 years old. And I look just like her—so much so that my grandfather, her father, would not be in the same room with me for two months after she died. My father would come visit us in Southern Illinois and would stand at the door for the first five minutes weeping at the sight of me.

(Crossing US of chair and draping coat over chair) She wrote herself all over this body.

And the cancer did some writing of its own.

I remember this:

(The daughter experiences the narrative action as she speaks it.)

BANG BANG BANG.

I remember waking up in the middle of the night to a

BANG BANG BANG.

It was faint but very direct.

My father and I were light sleepers during this time

because my mother had to sleep downstairs in a hospital bed.

She was too weak to climb the stairs.

BANG BANG BANG.

I went to the top of the stairs and looked down into the darkness. Mom was having trouble sleeping and wanted all the lights off.

I went down the stairs and flipped the hall light on and

BANG BANG BANG…

there was my strong, powerful, beautiful mother

banging on the bed stand with a brush

because she was in too much pain to cry out.

And I remember:

(As mother) “Little, you need some new—” (As if the sound is going off in the daughter’s head.) BANG BANG BANG

(As mother) “Little that looks absolutely—”

(As daughter, sound building) BANG BANG BANG

(As saleswoman) “Mrs. Spry, your daughter is a perfect size—”

(As daughter, sound building and reaching a crescendo)

BANG BANG BANG.

(Crossing to coat and clutching it, the daughter is afraid, angry, confused.) I clung to these dead skins. But they kept drying up and flaking off. These new ones would appear, but she’s not here to initialize them.

(Desperately indicating initials in the coat) Look. BMS. Belle Marie Spry. (Indicating self) Who is this woman? Who is this woman whose skins are not notarized by Belle Marie Spry?

(The daughter crosses and places the coat on the chair.) A few weeks after her death, the Black Hole Dreams began.

(She crosses DSC and intimately tells the story to the audience.) The Black Hole Dreams went something like this:

I would come home after a long time at college or a long theatre run. I would come in the back door where Mom would be standing at the top of the stairs. She would say, “Hi, Little!”

Well, in the dreams, I was at the top of the stairs looking down at a black hole. From the hole would come my mother’s voice,

“Little…Tami…Little…”

I could never see her,

but I imagined her reaching for me.

And I was too afraid

to go into the black hole

to help her.

Now,

on a bad day,

I cry, “Oh, Ma, come out of there.”

(Crossing US to coat and placing hands on coat) But on a good day…

on a good day I say,

“Oh, Ma, come out of there and be with me.”

And she does.

(Crossing CS) And she seeps into, through, and all around this body.

And the haunched woman,

and the daughter sinking into the closet,

and Little

and Belle

and Tami

all work to reweave and remake these live skins.

And on a very good day,

you can hear them singing:

“Little…Tami…Little…………”

The debut of “Skins: A Daughter’s (Re)construction of Cancer” in 1994 at the Speech Communication Association convention in New Orleans marked the beginning of my journey into performing autobiography; it also marked the seventh year of my mother’s death from ovarian cancer. I was confused and devastated at her death and tried numerous times to compile a script that would offer myself and others some clarity and insight into this complex experience. However, each time I began to research the experiences of motherless daughters, I would become emotionally paralyzed and artistically bereft. This, of course, only exacerbated the confusion and devastation.

Then, in 1993 a close friend and colleague asked me to contribute to a panel on autobiography. She said, “It’s been six years, Tam. Talk about your mom.” I did. In my twenty years of performance experience, this was truly the most terrified I had been before a performance. An hour before “curtain” I was in my hotel room sobbing in the arms of two dear friends as I tried in vain to run the show. These women knew my mother Belle, they knew how she had notarized herself upon my body, and knew how I had struggled to be a reliable narrator to her text all of my life. Performing the highly contested relationship between Tami/Belle/Little in the intimacy of our hotel room was more than I could bear. However, I later realized that the public performance of “Skins” would have been impossible without the private cradling by these women as I wept.

Although the performative autobiographical location is a space of intense personal and cultural risk, it is simultaneously a space of profound comfort. It has become for me a site of narrative authority offering me the power to reclaim and rename my voice and body privately in rehearsal, and then publicly in performance. The process enables me to speak about the personally political in public, which has been liberatory and excruciating, but always in some way, enabling. Performative autobiographies are, as Dwight Conquergood (1991) might say, “enabling fictions.”

In the process of performing autobiography, the performer concentrates on the body as the site from which the story is generated. She seeks to read what she and others have written on the pulpish hides of her skins. The performative autoethnography process turns the internally somatic into the externally semantic. I try to coax words out onto the surface of my body. Words write themselves on and in the layers of my skins, introducing me to myself. My reading of those textual pelts becomes the semantic interpretation of my own somatic experience.

In “Skins” I use the body’s skin as a unifying and fracturing metaphor for the cultural narratives played out upon bodies. Sidonie Smith articulates the corporeal and conceptual complexity skin suggests when trying to semanticize autobiographic experience:

Skin is the literal and metaphorical borderland between the materiality of the autobiographical ‘I’ and the contextual surround of the world. It functions simultaneously as a personal and political, psychological and ideological boundary of meaning….Skin has much to do with autobiographical writing, as the body of the text, the body of the narrator, the body of the narratee, the cultural ‘body,’ and the body politic all merge in skins and skeins of meaning. (1998, 127–128)

Smith suggests further that the autobiographical subject can find herself outside of her skin, homeless inside her own body. This is certainly an experience I lived after my mother’s death. In “Skins” I use my mother’s full length mink coat as an iconic symbol of her sociocultural identity that was often illustrated upon my body. I perform:

(Crossing to mink coat and clutching it, the daughter is afraid, angry, confused.) I clung to these dead skins. But they kept drying up and flaking off. These new ones would appear, but she’s not here to initialize them.

(Desperately indicating initials in the coat) Look. BMS. Belle Marie Spry. (Indicating self) Who is this woman? Who is this woman whose skins are not notarized by Belle Marie Spry? (364)

My life had been largely built around emulating my mother, grafting her skins upon mine. This bodily housing construction fit the social and ideological specifications of my surround. But a person cannot grow within the hide of another. I was not-me and not-not-me simultaneously (Schechner 1985).

In performing “Skins” my hide became a corporeal semaphore signaling to myself and others that I was the agent and author of these embodied illustrations. After decades of reading my body according to my mother’s authorship, performing autobiography has been a central tool in the reconstitution of my identity. The performing body offers a thick description of an individual’s engagement with cultural codes and expectations; it is an ancient scroll upon which is written the stories of one’s movement through the world.

This is one example of why I write and perform autoethnography. As mentioned in the analysis of “Skins,” through this performance I was able to understand and articulate deeper complexities surrounding my mother’s passing. Moreover, following this performance, audience members were anxious to tell me about their own experiences with family members, grief, and healing. Notice, rather than telling me how much they “liked” the performance, the performance generated meaning, ideas, memory in their own lives that they wanted to share. This audience response was deeply transformational for me personally and professionally.

This is an example of why I do performative autoethnography. Why should you?

It is final performance time in my autoethnography class. Students are working on the development of one piece throughout the fifteen week semester. This student, who I will call Amanda, has been working on an autoethnography about the sexual assault she survived in high school. This is her first foray into performance and writing. Her first two instalments of this performative autoethnography were beautifully crafted, and then fully embodied in performance.

In this last development, she had the class get up on stage and stand at the back of the stage facing the wall. She then stood on the floor in front of us where she was three feet below us as we stood on the back of the raised stage looking down. Looking up at us, she began her performance critically reflecting upon where she stands in relation to the assault: looked down upon. She then took autoethnography to task commenting upon what is at stake in excavating pain for critical pedagogies of hope and transformation.

All this while, Amanda had on a backpack. She then told us the last name of her attacker: Lemon. And as she took the backpack off she began to relate an event that happened a few days after the attack. In the middle of her driveway one morning was a brown paper bag. As she opened the bag she found that it was full…of lemons. Students at her school had found out about the attack, and this was their response. As she told us this story, she began reaching into her backpack and handing each of us a lemon. On the lemons were written words. As we read the words, Amanda went into a treatise on the symbology of language, ethics, group think, and the Lucifer Effect (how violent or unethical behaviour becomes normalized within groups). We peeked around at each other’s lemons; some said “courage,” “insecurity,” “power.” I was given the last one, “self-reflection.” In her last line, still standing three feet below us, she confessed to yet feeling looked down upon, and expressed her desire to someday stand eye-to-eye with others as she thinks about her assault.

Silence.

One of those classroom performances where there is just… silence.

And surely, one of those classroom performances where we allow ourselves to weep.

I swear to you, she was radiant. Radiant during and after the performance. She made this experience HER story, her analysis. Her pain. Her hope. Her strength. Her meaning. No longer Lemon’s. Hers. And, now, ours.

Self-Other-Context

This is only one of many illustrations of why any of us might invest the time, energy, and heart into performative autoethnography. It is important to note that Amanda had never written autoethnography or performed anything before enrolling in this class. It is also important to note that Amanda’s work reflects a common level of attainment for students in autoethnography; in other words, this level of writing and performance is attainable through hard work and commitment. The purpose of performative autoethnography is to better understand who we are in ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Dedication
• Dedication1
• Foreword Performing Authoethnography: Making the Personal Political
• Preface Autoethnography Lost and Found
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction The Textualizing Body
• Chapter One Body Conceptualizing Performative Autoethnography
• Chapter Two Paper Writing the Body
• Chapter Three Paper Composing Performative Autoethnography
• Chapter Four Stage Performing the Autoethnographic Body
• Chapter Five Stage Embodying Performative Autoethnography
• Chapter Six Body, Paper, Stage and Back Again
• References
• Index
• About the Author