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Abstract Body Language: Documenting Women's Bodies in Theatre

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2009

Anna Cutler
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Abstract

In this article, the first of a sequence on the ways in which women's bodies are recorded in performance documentation, Anna Cutler offers a new conception and systematic definition of three performance documentations – the ‘Proper’, the ‘Processual’ and the ‘Residual’. She argues against traditional and literary forms of documentation (the ‘Proper’) as a means by which women and women's bodies have been and continue to be excluded from performance records, and proceeds to discuss two theoretical types of body in performance: the ‘Inscribed’ (which represents an ideologically shaped, constructed, and censored body) and the ‘Potential’ (which represents the creative and ongoing moments of change made by the body in performance). She proposes the ‘Potential Body’ as a model for performance documentation, since, though difficult to translate into written forms, it offers a more effective communication of both the body and of live performance. Given the continuing prevalence of the written word as the primary mode of performance documentation, the author makes a case for écriture féminine to be appropriated as a writerly tool to document women's bodies and particularly the ‘Potential Body’ in performance. She concludes with a discussion of the theory and practice of Hélène Cixous' writing in relation to women's performance methodologies. The debate is taken up by Susan Melrose in the article following this. Anna Cutler is currently producing events for the Belfast Festival, while completing her doctoral research in the Department of Literary and Media Studies at the University of North London.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Theatre Quarterly , Volume 14 , Issue 54 , May 1998 , pp. 111 - 118
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1998

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References

Notes and References

1. Griffiths, T. R. and Woddis, C., Bloomsbury Theatre Guide, new edition (London: Bloomsbury, 1991), p. viiGoogle Scholar.

2. Banham, M. and Stanton, S., eds., Cambridge Paperback Guide to Theatre (Cambridge University Press, 1996)Google Scholar.

3. Sue Ellen Case points out that despite more recent uses, the female body as text is ‘traceable to the women mimes of Greece and Rome … and continuing through the personal sexual salons of Varnhagen and Barney’. See Case, S. E., ‘Personal Theatre’, in Feminism and Theatre (London: Macmillan, 1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4. London Theatre Record, 4–17 June 1994.

5. Long, J., 1994: What Share of the Cake Now? (University of North London: unpublished, 1996)Google Scholar.

6. Such as: Case, S. E., Feminism and Theatre (London: Macmillan, 1988)Google Scholar; Aston, E., An Introduction to Feminism and Theatre (London: Routledge 1995)Google Scholar; Keyssar, H., Feminist Theatre (London: Macmillan, 1984)Google Scholar; Davis, T., Actresses as Working Women: Their Social Identity in Victorian Culture (London: Routledge, 1991)Google Scholar; Gilder, R., Enter the Actress: the First Women in Theatre (London: Harrap, 1931)Google Scholar.

7. Foucault, M., ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, The Foucault Reader: an Introduction to Foucault's Thought, ed. Rabinow, Paul (London: Penguin, 1991), p. 78Google Scholar.

8. Grosz, E., Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 146Google Scholar.

9. Segal, L., ‘Hiding Out or Moving On? Feminism in Psychoanalysis’, Radical Philosophy, No. 68 (Autumn 1994), p. 1Google Scholar.

10. Quoted in E. Grosz, Volatile Bodies, op. cit., p. 146.

11. Ibid.

12. The Potential Body is conceptually ungendered, but is being used here strategically for the purposes of discussing the female form. The Potential Body more generally offers mutability of gender, and is therefore open to greater flexibility and less fixity concerning perceptions of the body in performance. Its primary feature remains that it is the live and creative moment of change in performance.

13. ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, in The Foucault Reader, op. cit.

14. See Running-Johnson, quoted in E. Aston, An Introduction to Feminism and Theatre, op. cit., p. 42.

15. For the reasons discussed below, écriture féminine is used here to describe and discuss the female body. The male body or constructions of gendered bodies may also be analyzed and discussed using écriture féminine since it does not define itself or its subject by biological difference.

16. See H. Cixous, ‘An Exchange with Hélène Cixous’, in Conley, V. Andermatt, Hélène Cixous: Writing the Feminine (Lincoln; London: University of Nebraska Press, 1991), p. 128Google Scholar.

17. Sellers, S., Language and Sexual Difference: Feminist Writing in France (London: Macmillan, 1991), p. 133CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18. Ibid., p. 140.

19. Cixous, H., ‘The Laugh of The Medusa’, trans. Cohen, Keith and Cohen, Paula, Signs: journal of Women in Culture and Society, No. 41 (Summer 1976), p. 881Google Scholar.

20. Ibid., p. 880.