Feminist Theatre Practice: A Handbook

Elaine Aston

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134771509
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

Feminist Theatre Practice: A Handbook is a helpful, practical guide to theatre-making which explores the different ways of representing gender. Best-selling author, Elaine Aston, takes the reader through the various stages of making feminist theatre- from warming up, through workshopped exploration, to performance - this volume is organised into three clear and instructive parts:
* Women in the Workshop
* Dramatic Texts, Feminist Contexts
* Gender and Devising Projects.
Orientated around the classroom/workshop, Handbook of Feminist Theatre Practice encompasses the main elements of feminist theatre, both practical or theoretical.

Chapter 1

Introduction:

‘Stages’ in feminist theory and practice

As an academic discipline, theatre studies involves three key areas of study: history, theory and practice. On both sides of the Atlantic, theatre history has the longest pedagogic ‘tradition’, while the 1980s explosion of critical theory has, arguably, had the most exciting impact on approaches to plays and performance in both critical and practical modes of study. Practice, however, is the element that distinguishes the discipline from its ‘sister’ arts, where drama or performance may be studied—in literary, English or cultural studies, for example—but not as a practice-based subject.

In an introduction to feminist theatre, Lizabeth Goodman highlights how, as an academic subject, feminist theatre is ‘informed by’ a number of disciplines, including, for example, women’s studies, media studies or politics, at the same time as it is marginalised ‘even within otherwise “liberal” institutions’ (Goodman 1996:20). Goodman further makes a distinction between feminist theatre as an academic area of study and as ‘an art from which is performed and shaped primarily in public, outside academic institutions’ (Ibid.). To situate the practice of feminist theatre as primarily ‘outside’ of the academy, however, in turn threatens to marginalise what has, since the late 1980s and early 1990s, become one of the most exciting areas of study: feminist theatre practice.

Finding ways of making theatre feminist, or making feminist theatre, has evolved principally (although not exclusively) out of two spheres of activity: feminist critical theory and feminist performance. In an earlier (1970s to early 1980s) phase of feminist theatre, these could be said to be operating more discretely: feminist performance happening outside of the academy in the professional practice/s of women making theatre in the context of the 1970s Women’s Liberation Movement; feminist critical theory evolving inside the academy—as I have explained elsewhere, slightly later in the theatre academy, than in ‘sister’ disciplines such as literary or film studies (see Aston 1995a:1). By the late 1980s, however, there was an increasing exchange of cultural ideas on theory and practice as professional feminist practice came into the academy (in the form of workshops, performances and talks by practitioners); feminist scholars began to write about and to theorise this work; and, in turn, some feminist playwrights and practitioners became interested in theory. Playwright April de Angelis, for example, describes the women writers’ salon hosted in 1990 through the new writing company Paines Plough:

The salon met once fortnightly at the Paines Plough offices. It was attended by a varied group of women united by a common interest in writing for theatre and aware that a whole canon of difficult but potentially thrilling literary criticism…awaited them and was ready to revolutionise the way they wrote for theatre. Film theory, we reflected, had already got there, so why couldn’t we?…

The speakers that visited the group all seemed pleased with the prospect that normal folk outside of the environs of academia wanted to know more of their territory. These varied theories and approaches were out and getting an airing. Why aren’t they more widely acknowledged? Because they are complex, difficult? Dangerous? All three, especially the last. Very dangerous and challenging to how we see the world. Contentious, tending to tip the world on its head, not pack-agable under neat ideological labels, these theories felt ‘hot’.

(de Angelis and Furse 1991:27)

In Upstaging Big Daddy, the 1993 American anthology of essays devoted to feminist directing in the academy, Sabrina Hamilton argues that ‘the art of theater consists of knowing who to steal from’ (1993:133). Since the late 1980s, feminist theatre-making in the academy has been busy ‘stealing’ from critical theory and professional practice to the point where, in the 1990s, it has emerged as a theoretical field of practice that deserves more attention than it has been given.

Practice, more specifically feminist practice, as taught and experienced in the theatre academy is the subject of this volume. My primary concern is not to identify and to analyse this aspect of feminist theatre studies, but to document practical proposals for its actualisation or realisation: for making it happen. I wish to use this introduction, however, to outline some of the key ‘stages’ in the evolution of feminist theory and performance as a contextualising background to the practicebased chapters that follow.

Beginnings: objecting to objectification

In the 1970s feminism began to change women’s lives. Those women with access to feminist ideas, thinking and publications—mainly white middle-class women—discovered and challenged the male dominance of social, political, cultural and, for our purposes, theatrical systems. In brief, feminism encouraged women towards a political understanding of how they had been either oppressively positioned, or completely left out of, the ‘malestream’ of social, cultural and political activity.

As women began to demand equal rights with men, agitating specifically on four basic issues (equal pay; equal education and opportunity; twenty-four-hour nurseries; and free contraception and abortion on demand), their protests made use of agit-prop techniques in street demonstrations. Feminists made ‘spectacles’ of themselves to object to how women were objectified in dominant social and cultural systems of representation. For example, feminist protesters at the Miss World beauty contests in the late 1960s and early 1970s staged counter spectacles, by decorating their own bodies with flashing lights attached to clothing at their breasts and crotches, or parading a dummy draped in the symbols of domestic oppression, such as an apron, a stocking, and a shopping bag (see O’Sullivan (1982) for details and illustrations; see Canning (1996:46) for details of American protests). This kind of early street protest is embryonic of the body-centred critique of gender representation that, subsequently was to dominate feminist theatre, theory and practice in the 1980s.

Meanwhile, the street theatre beginnings and theatre festivals seeded the desire among feminist practitioners for a more sustained approach to theatre-making. Consequently, feminist practitioners began to set up their own ‘spaces’, companies in which they could explore women’s issues in a more developed way. As mainstream playhouses, and even some of the newly formed left-wing socialist companies, failed to give women an equal platform (either in the hierarchical structures of maledominated theatre work, or as a dramatic subject), forming a company was one way for women to claim a counter-cultural ‘space of their own’. In practice this meant that women had greater control over the organisation, content and style of their theatre work. In consequence, they organised their work democratically and non-hierarchically, in line with the consciousness-raising model of the Women’s Liberation Movement, and developed acting styles and aesthetics that would facilitate the ethos of collectivity and collaboration, rather than the cult of bourgeois individualism (see Chapter 2 for further details).

Where mainstream theatre represented women as ‘belonging’ to men, counter-cultural feminist theatre-making sought to re-present women as subjects in their own right: to move women’s issues, experiences and stories centre stage. Women desired to be ‘seen’ as women and not as a representation of a masculinist imagination. This was explored in many different ways, although principally it involved a greater attention to intra-feminine relations (i.e. relations between women—between mothers and daughters, sisters, lesbian lovers, women friends, etc.) on the one hand, and a demonstration of the potentially damaging consequences of inter-sexual relations (i.e. between men and women— husbands and wives, fathers and daughters, brothers and sisters), on the other.

Objections to realism

To develop counter-cultural practices, feminists needed to be able to understand the formal properties and ideological content/s of dominant cultural forms. In cultural fields concerned especially with imagemaking— theatre, art, advertising, television or film, for example— feminist critics sought to challenge the ways in which women were ‘seen’. In the context of film, Laura Mulvey’s groundbreaking essay on ‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’ (1975), drew our attention to the binary heterosexual polarisation of ‘woman as image, man as bearer of the look’ (Mulvey 1992 [1975]:27), in her exploration of what has commonly become known as the male gaze. Although subsequent critiques of Mulvey’s proposal, including her own self-critique (see Mulvey 1989), have challenged the oversimplification of the gaze as male (singular), her criticism of the ‘active/male and passive/female’ mainstream (Hollywood film) conventions of looking and narrative organisation remain important to theorising gender in visual forms of culture.

In theatre, Mulvey’s concept of the gaze assisted with an understanding of the ways in which the conventions of the dominant tradition of domestic realism could be seen to uphold an ‘active/male and passive/female’ structuring of narrative and agency. Although some feminists, both in the academy and in the profession, adopting a bourgeois or liberal feminist position, were prepared to argue for a greater representation of women in the theatrical ‘malestream’ on ‘malestream’ terms, others objected to the objectification of women in the realist tradition, and in particular, to the character-based, Methodacting, derived from the teachings of Constantin Stanislavski, attendant upon it. The character roles made available for women to ‘get into’ in this ‘method’ invite the actress to identify with the oppression of the female character to whom she has been assigned. As feminist theatre scholar Sue-Ellen Case explains ‘the psychological construction of character, using techniques adapted from Stanislavski, placed the female actor within the range of systems that have oppressed her very representation on stage’ (Case 1988: 122). Or, as Gillian Hanna, a founding member of the socialist-feminist theatre company, Monstrous Regiment, objected:

Rarely were we able to play women who lived on stage in their own right. We were always someone’s wife, mother or lover.
(Someone being a man, of course.) Our theatrical identity was usually defined in terms of our relationship to the (more important) male characters. We only had an existence at all because we were attached to a man…. As Mary McCusker was often heard to muse: ‘If I have to play another tart with a heart of gold in a PVC skirt, I’m going to throw up.’

(Hanna 1991:xvii)

Feminist playwrights and practitioners who felt alienated by the realist structures of ‘women-belonging-to-men’ wanted to explore other theatrical forms and acting styles to represent their experiences, themes or subjects. It was not so much a question of finding new forms, but of re-working old or established forms and styles, in the interests of feminist dramatic and stage practice/s. Playwright Caryl Churchill, for example, talked about an awareness of ‘the “maleness” of the traditional structure of plays, with conflict and building in a certain way to a climax’ (Churchill, quotation in Fitzsimmons 1989: 90). Company members of the lesbian group Siren felt that everything they needed to say, show, communicate could simply not be contained ‘in a naturalistic setting or with a narrative that just went beginning, middle, end, or a one-act play’, rather, ‘what we needed were slicing techniques, ways of suspending belief, to get the imagination and the emotions operating on many different levels’ (Siren 1997:81).

Despite the recent move towards the critical ‘rehabilitation’ of realism (see Chapter 6), practitioners whose sexual politics are at odds with the heteropatriarchal systems of realist belonging, remain unequivocal about the dangers of realism. To offer a brief example: in Belle Reprieve, a collaborative, transgressive queer re-visioning of Tennesse Williams’s A Street Car Named Desire (produced 1991), Blanche, ‘a man in a dress’, stops a scene in which the cast are singing and dancing in lanterncostumes. He/she protests ‘I can’t stand it! I want to be in a real play!’ (Bourne, et al. 1996:178). Stanley played by ‘a butch lesbian’, takes Blanche back to the ‘real play’ of Street Car. A violent encounter between them ensues. Blanche objects, but Stanley counters: ‘If you want to play a woman, the woman in this play gets raped and goes crazy in the end’ (see page).

Re-figuring the body: cultural-feminist theory and practice

By the late 1980s there was a body of feminist theatre scholarship devoted to re-visioning theatre history, theory and practice. The dramatic syllabus had begun to change as feminists took issue with those ‘canonical’ texts, written mostly by men, for their representation of women (see Chapter 5), and, also searched for ‘lost’ works by women buried underneath the male tradition of ‘great’ literature (see Chapter 6). As Gayle Austin argues in her introduction to Feminist Theories for Dramatic Criticism, if we start to notice when women appear as characters and when they do not, then this ‘means making some “invisible” mechanisms visible and pointing out, when necessary, that while the emperor has no clothes, the empress had no body’ (Austin 1990:1). Feminist theatre scholarship has drawn our attention to those ‘stages’ in theatre history when women did not have bodies at all: when the male actor mimed the ‘feminine’. Consequently, it is not surprising to find that a principal concern for many feminist practitioners has been the re-appropriation of their own bodies.

The return to the ‘female’ body or to ‘female’ culture characterises the feminist position originally termed radical feminism, now more commonly designated cultural feminism. This position sees patriarchy at the heart of inequality between men and women, and addresses oppression by prioritising experiences peculiar to women: birthing, mothering, menstruating, and so on. Radical—feminist performances highlighted the reclaiming of the ‘female’ body from patriarchal victimisation. Case described how, for example, the 1970s American company It’s All Right to be Woman Theatre began ‘its productions with a woman touching various parts of her body, reclaiming them from patriarchal colonisation. The troupe and audience would chant, “our faces belong to our bodies, our bodies belong to our lives”’ (Case 1988:66).

Subsequently, however, the essentialist premise of radical-feminist performance has made it the object of much feminist criticism. As lesbian—feminist practitioner and scholar Jill Dolan summarises ‘they [cultural-feminist critics and artists] assume that subverting maledominated theatre practice with a woman-identified model will allow women to look to theatre for accurate reflections of their experience’ (Dolan 1988:83). One of the particular difficulties of the ‘womanidentified model’ is how to encourage the spectator to ‘see’ differently. For example, where many of the 1970s women performance artists appeared naked in a reclamation of their bodies, for themselves, and for other women, there was no guarantee that the naked body in this ‘woman-identified model’ would subvert the sign of the ‘feminine’ in dominant systems of gender representation. As art historian Griselda Pollock explained: the ‘attempt to decolonise the female body, [is] a tendency which walks a tightrope between subversion and reappropriation, and often serves rather to consolidate the potency of signification rather than actually to rupture it’ (Pollock 1992 [1977]:140).

That said, the return to the woman’s body as a means of giving ‘voice’ to experiences repressed by the logocentrism of a patriarchal culture, was an important ‘stage’ in the evolution of feminist ideas and practice. The theoretical model most commonly identified as cultural feminism is the European ‘body’ of French feminist theory, represented by Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigarary and Julia Kristeva. Although different from each other in many ways, the work of these women is generally identified with a psychoanalytic, Lacanian exploration of women as ‘other’ in relation to the symbolic ordering of social and cultural representation and communication. In this model, subjectivity is recognised as problematic for women, who are required to participate linguistically, socially, culturally, etc., in a system that constructs them as marginal and alien. ‘No longer wishing to be excluded or no longer content with the function which has always been demanded of us (to maintain, arrange, and perpetuate this sociosymbolic contract as mothers, wives, nurses, doctors, teachers…),’ then, as Kristeva explained, the question that arises is ‘how can we reveal our place, first as it is bequeathed to us by tradition, and then as we want to transform it?’ (Kristeva 1982 [1979]: 41–2).

Cixous’s proposal for how women should resist and transform their ‘place’ as marginalised Other was her call for woman to ‘write her self’. Cixous’s écriture féminine, ‘writmg said to be feminine’, was a call for a ‘new insurgent’ writing which would have two inseparable parts:

1. ndividually. By writing herself, woman will return to the body which has been more than confiscated from her, which has been turned into the uncanny stranger on display—the ailing or dead figure, which so often turns out to be the nasty companion, the cause and location of inhibitions. Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time…
2. An act that will also be marked by women seizing the occasion to speak, hence her shattering entry into history, which has always been based on her suppression. To write and thus to forge for herself the anti-logos weapon. To become at will the taker and the initiator, for her own right, in every symbolic system, in every political process.

It was this appeal to the body as the site and practice of écriture féminine which made it appear particularly attractive to feminist theatre practice. Indeed, for a moment in the 1980s (however essentialist this may appear in retrospect), it seemed as though the future of our practice might lie in the possibility of staging a ‘feminine’ language that would ‘speak’ differently to us as women. Writing specifically about theatre, Cixous proposed a transformation of the stage ‘so that a woman’s voice could be heard for the first time’, further stating that ‘if the stage is woman, it will mean ridding this space of theatricality. She will want t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue:
• Chapter 1
• Part I Women in the workshop
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Part II Dramatic texts, feminist contexts
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Part III Gender and devising projects
• Chapter 8
• Chapter 9
• Chapter 10
• Appendix: to make your ‘self’
• Glossary
• Notes
• Bibliography