Staging Feminisms

Gender, Violence and Performance in Contemporary India

Anita Singh

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000411706
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book questions how feminist beliefs are enacted within an artistic context. It critically examines the intersection of violence, gender, performance and power through contemporary interventionist performances. The volume explores a host of key themes like feminism and folk epic, community theatre, performance as radical cultural intervention, volatile bodies and celebratory protests. Through analysing performances of theatre stalwarts like Usha Ganguly, Maya Krishna Rao, Sanjoy Ganguly, Shilpi Marwaha and Teejan Bai, the volume discusses the complexities and contradictions of a feminist reading of contemporary performances.

A major intervention in the field of feminism and performance, this book will be useful for scholars and researchers of gender studies, performance studies, theatre studies, women's studies, cultural studies, sociology of gender and literature.

1
INTRODUCTION

Performance seems an ideal space for the exploration of cultural identity holding within it the possibility of reconfiguring the ways that we think about each other and view the world (Conquergood, 2002, 145–156). Performance is at the intersection of social and cultural practices. Performance, to use Richard Schechner’s words, is “the whole constellation of events … that take place in/among performers and audience” (1988, 39). My work establishes the mutuality between performance, culture and feminist discourse. This study addresses some case studies of contemporary performances (mostly performed in the early 21st century). These are necessarily selective; the practitioners chosen are those who explicitly tackle issues of violence.

The book sees the nexus of feminism, performance and activism against the violence that constitutes an active engagement with contemporary life. Definitions are often fuzzy. The term contemporary has been used to refer to performances made and produced by artists living today; as a term, it is open ended, constantly evolving and reflective of the world today. Contemporariness is, then, a particular connection with one’s own temporality.

The idea of staging refers to performance, theatre, music, films, dance, art and also artists, practices and innovations. The term holds other inventories of performance and enables us to consider the performativity of language, gender, nation, politics and protest. Staging conceptualises our perceptions about society, history, literature and culture to speak about the way we are, the way we have been and the way we think we should be as persons and collectively as a society. The purposes of the performers and their performances selected for study are not merely to stage issues about rape and gendered violence, but to throw open a passageway for questions for the actors and spectators in their act of performance and reception. Examples of performances aimed to raise pertinent queries have a profoundly political approach; this investigation, then, is fundamentally about the politics of performance.

This work will engage in performance in a multilateral and holistic perspective as what Patrick Pavis calls “integrated semiotics” (1997, 203–230). Integrated semiotics and phenomenology will be used as a key performance analysis approach. The proposed methods for analysis include all elements of performance, including the mise-en-scene, the actor and the auditory, visual and spatial aspects of performance, besides the spectators’ experiences. Performance is perceived as an embodied, material event. Issues of representation, signification, language, sound, song, silence, violence and body are considered. In Geographies of Learning: Theory and Practice, Activism and Performance, Dolan argues that performance is a site of progressive social and cultural practice. Performance offers the liveness, the present tenseness and is a participatory forum and space of desire. These Utopian performances are not only intellectually clear but felt and lived by spectators as well as actors (Dolan, 2001a, 455–479). The book’s overarching concern is to consider the effective power of performance (Kershaw, 2002) and the balance between representing women as victims and exploring how performance rescripts rape/gendered violence in differently empowering ways and how it responds to violence ethically and with efficacy.

The explorations that energise this work embed these problems, but also extend them:

1. How does theatre rescript rape/gendered violence in differently empowering ways?
2. What does it mean for performance to be having an empowering presence, and how does embodied presence become a political act?
3. How does the ethic of a script and performance take responsibility, and what might it reveal to a sympathetic audience? Could it allow us to craft an ethical, contemporary response to the rape’s representations?
4. How have changes over time in the general sense of the tag “feminist” influenced the ways we might recognise theatre and performance work that identifies as such – or that declines to be labelled as such? Are such performances feminist? And if so, according to whose standards – theirs or someone else’s?
5. To the question of value: who defines it and to what ends?
6. Do the performances generate an in-between space which demands a self-reflexive approach?
7. How do we as spec/actors respond to these politically conscious narratives?
8. What is the problem? What is the goal? Who are the audiences? What is their attitude to the subject and how does the performer/performance want them to respond?

The work does not propose to provide definitive answers to these questions but rather to offer a symptomatic reading of the performance/performer and the conscious and empathic understanding of the problem of violence against women that may serve to concretise and generate awareness and encourage activism/reflection via theatre. Along with the attentiveness to the political intent of these performances, the study will focus on the medium, the theatrical elements – songs, dance, music and movements – as publicly encoded signs. The recurrent emphasis is on researching the liveness of the performance event along with seeing the Internet as an archival source, thereby creating an assemblage of real/virtual/digital performance.

This book explores the question of how feminist beliefs are enacted within an artistic context to engage in purposeful performance practices. The intersection of violence, gender, performance and power is investigated through these inter-ventionist performances. This leads the work on to the study of diverse styles of performance, varying from one-woman performance to an interactive forum theatre, street plays and the urban proscenium stage, all accentuating the impracticality of considering Indian performance practice under a unified framework. There are several reasons to choose these particular performances as case studies. My language ability has restricted me to selecting performances in Hindi (Usha Ganguly’s Rangakarmee Theatre Group and Shilpi Marwaha’s Sukhmanch Theatre), Bengali (Sanjoy Ganguly’s Jana Sanskriti, Centre for Theatre of the Oppressed), English (Maya Krishna Rao) and Chhattisgarhi (Pandavani by Teejan Bai), and my familiarity with the contexts, culture and language of performance allows me to “soak and poke”, as Fenno (1986, 3–15) puts it. Genre, geography and the social/cultural and linguistic contexts of these performances vary within the India setting. The selected performance practices span several geographical areas within India (West Bengal, Chhattisgarh and New Delhi) to indicate the heterogeneity of performance spaces and cultures in India. The geographical spread encompassing all these theatres has different contexts. Jana Sanskriti (1985) is a group based in villages and small towns of West Bengal; its headquarters is located in Thakurhat Road, Badu, Kolkata. Shilpi Marwaha’s Sukhmanch Theatre (2017) is based in New Delhi. Pandavani is situated in Chhattisgarh village. (Chhattisgarhi is an Eastern Hindi language is also known as Dakshin Kosali and Dakshin Hindi.) The urban proscenium plays of Usha Ganguly’s Rangakarmee (1976) theatre group are from Kolkata; Maya Krishna Rao’s free-flowing solo performance grammar with training in Kathakali (English and Hindi) is located mainly in Delhi. The social, geographical and theatrical contexts that form these case studies vary widely, enabling the book to engage with diverse styles of politics conveyed through the contextual specificity of these performances. All performances and practitioners address gender ideology in differently enabling ways. All these performances have different standpoints fraught with the socio-cultural dynamics of the space they inhabit. These performances are not fashioned out of a scripted text/playscript but are based on an “event”, even if they are based on some previous text, as in the case of Pandavani (sourced from Mahabharata). These performances are primarily improvisatory, and the process of embodiment is experienced and empathised by the actor and the audience alike.

This volume is an effort to analyse gendered violence represented in some select performances attentive to the issues of gender violence. Each of the three chapters that make up this book deals with the specific performance expressions which seem most appropriate to the issue under consideration. The three chapters further engage with the people involved in theatre, with history, genre, subjectivity, agency, author, character, performer, audience and the collaborations which theatre entails among all those involved. It will explore what constitutes feminist politics and how performance gets created within the rules of various theatre genres to express those politics. In the performances selected, the female presence is not projected as a historical essence but is both contextually and bodily created and exercised by acting subjects. The performances then take multiple shifting forms; they do not subscribe to a single way or militate for a coherent ideology. To do this is to overlook the possibilities of the rich and varied feminist dramatic activities around us. The work will further show how these performers bridge the gap between form and content, which enables them to express their feministic concerns.

This introductory chapter will unpack the methodological tools for interpretative criticism and performance viewing/reviewing; it will look at the emerging field of performance studies. Secondly, it will structure arguments initially by analysing the conceptual implications of gender, violence and performance and what the combination of all three means for a general definition of performative violence. It will further engage with four key terms used in the title of this work – feminism, gender, performance, and violence –to see how these are interlocked in the performances selected for study. Several conclusions will be drawn from this discussion. The causes and effects of performative violence are tied together, for effects feed into causes. Finally, as a self-critique, it questions the use of this approach. Does this position permit us to transform anything in the world substantially? The question is always open to deliberation.

The transformative possibilities of performance

Performance studies as a discipline emerged in the United States during the 1970s at New York University and Northwestern University. It is heavily indebted to the terminology and theoretical strategies in the fields of anthropology and sociology. The writings of Richard Schechner are predominantly associated with the birth of performance studies as a discipline in the United States. Performance studies as a discipline, anti-discipline and trans-discipline has been mapped by writers such as Dell Hymes (1981 [1975]), John J. MacAloon (1984), Philip Zarrilli (2002), Richard Schechner (1988, 2002), Dwight Conquergood (2002), Janelle G. Reinelt and Joseph R. Roach (1992), Jill Dolan (2001b), Philip Auslander (1999), Marvin Carlson (1984, 1993, 1996), Peggy Phelan (1993) and Jon McKenzie (2001), among others.

Performance means to do something; in common parlance, the term performance is used to refer to artistic events such as the performance of a play, a show, a mime, a dance and so on. Performance was defined in the 76th Burg Wartenstein Symposium, sponsored by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, as: “occasions in which as a culture or society we reflect upon and define ourselves, dramatize our collective myths and history, present ourselves with alternatives, and eventually change in some ways while remaining the same in others” (MacAloon, 1984). This, simply put, suggests that firstly, performance is a social occasion; secondly, it gives us space to define ourselves and thirdly, it opens space for rethinking and altering ourselves. Richard Schechner (2002), the anthropologist Victor Turner (1982) and Erving Goffman (1959), the sociologist, were the three major contributors to establishing the connections between performance theory and the social sciences (Carlson, 1996, 13).

In Performance Studies: An Introduction, Schechner says “Performance should be construed as a ‘broad spectrum’ or ‘continuum’ of human activities including ritual, plays, sports, popular entertainments, the performing arts, everyday life performances, popular entertainments, enactment of social, professional, gender, class roles, healing, the media, etc.” (2002, 2). He calls performance a “restored” or “twice-behaved behaviour”. Performance, being a restored behaviour, exists as “second nature” and is subject to revision and change. Seeking to describe cultural performances not merely as entertainment, mostly performance scholars (Goffman, Turner, Conquergood and Madison) stress what Schechner called the “efficacy” of performance, its abili...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Feminism and folk epic: Draupadi, Dharma, performance and protest in Teejan Bai’s Pandavani
• 3 Community theatre: performance as radical cultural intervention
• 4 Urban proscenium stage: volatile bodies, celebratory protests in Maya Krishna Rao’s Walk and Usha Ganguly’s Hum Mukhtara
• 5 Conclusion
• Index