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Volume 16 Issue 2
2025
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Emerging Feminist Theatre
| Author(s) | Dr. Savita Goel |
|---|---|
| Country | India |
| Abstract | During the post sixties era, women moved into every area of production, questioned the structure and administration of theatre organizations, the creative process that produced theatrical works, the acting theories and methods that shaped performance, and the forms that governed the spectator-spectacle relationship. Many women had started out in the experimental theatre groups of the 1960s but when these. groups, ostensibly committed to radical change and ending oppression, refused to examine their own gender politics women left, taking with them their expertise. They then went on to found theatre groups of their own. Each group defined for itself what feminist meant and what feminist theatre should include. Some groups included men, some did not. While all groups felt a substantial, commitment to representing women's experience, there was no consensus as to what that meant. No single figure set the agenda and no national organisations suggested guidelines; instead, groups looked to feminists in other arenas for interaction and support. In areas where more than one theatre group existed, contact among them was important, but no more important than with other kinds of feminist groups 'After the early 1980s when the number of feminist theatre groups began to decline, women did not stop doing theatre dedicated to exploring and challenging women's situations. Some women continued to work with theatre groups, others struck out on their own with one-woman shows or writing plays to be produced by other theatres. The number of women directors, designers and administrators increased, as did the number of women teachers and critics. In theory and criticism women also began to draw upon gender issues to find a new language through which to discuss theatre. Many of these first works were deconstructive in nature as critics identified the ways women had been oppressed or their experiences erased. Concomitantly, there was an investment in recuperating the work of women that had been elided by a male-defined history. These efforts both challenged male representations and placed women in history. From these efforts women theorists and critics went on to suggest and identify positive strategies for resistance and change Thane strategies were positive because they did not emerge from deconstructive critiques of male works or studies of women's exclusion or victimisation. Instead, they were based on women's experiences and differences and drew upon women's work. Women in theatre reached across disciplinary boundaries to other fields, including the newly emerging theory in film, anthropology, social studies and history in order to explore how representation constructed and was constructed by women. Despite changes in methods and approaches, there has existed since the 1960s in the United States a significant and growing body of work by women in theatre and theory that relentlessly interrogates gender and politics, while challenging and displacing traditional methods of analysis, creation and production. From the beginning gender issues questioned boundaries erected by tradition that had operated to exclude or erase women discursively and materially. One such distinction was that between the public and the private arenas, keeping women isolated from one another and without a 'public' voice. Observing how this division worked to disempower women, women writers began to ask what purpose or whose interests did the distinctions between public and private or personal and political serve? Interrogating the exclusionary relationship between the political and the personal eventually served as the basis for consciousness-raising, a dialectical method for achieving a critical consciousness used by the feminist movement so that women might identify and change oppressive situations in their lives. Consciousness-raising emerged from the belief that women have so naturalised and internalised their oppression that they themselves cannot identify it. In order to change this, women writers created a sequence of discussion sessions encouraging women to draw on their own lives and identify important directions for feminist thought and activism. Personal testimony was offered and interpreted in the light of political criteria. This demonstrated to women that what they had previously understood as private failings or personal problems were part of the pervasive material oppression of women. The subsequent collectivized view of experience was ended to serve as the foundation for political actions. By proclaiming the personal political, and the political personal. women writers radically destabilised both categories and redefined them not as opposite but mutually dependent and intertwined. Politics did not end where the private sphere began, nor did the private sphere remain uninfluenced by politics. Instead, as Judith Butler summarised it, the link existed in "the recognition that my pain or my silence or my anger or my perception is finally not mine alone, and that it in turn delimits me in a shared cultural situation which in turn enables and empowers me." (Butler 271). The recognition Butler describes originally emerged for women writers through the process of consciousness-raising, and it was this realisation that feminists carried with them as they used their political insight to change and influence all areas of their lives. Women saw their gender concerns in dialogue with other concerns, establishing relations rather than divisions. As Janelle Reinett succinctly put it: "of course, gender study is completely interdisciplinary" (Reinett 228). Writing on the birth of New Women's History in the 1970 Carroll Smith-Rosenburg commented that the historical inquiries she and others pursued were shaped in part by the interests and awareness awakened by the feminist movement. The historical and scholarly work was interwoven with the political project, "the focus of women's history followed contemporary concerns." (Rosenburg 14). The connections were similarly made in theatre when Sue-Ellen. Case identified a "natural working alliance" among "Writers, artists, theorists, historians, critics, and social activists" (Case, Feminism 113). On the stage artists created new plays with opportunities for "women's narratives and dialogues largely denied in the history of the dominant culture". These plays worked to further challenge women's isolation by using the collective effort of theatre to present women working together and to provide opportunities for women to gather together in a communal event. Concomitantly, critics and theorists were able to "aid in consciousness-raising by accurately Identifying the psychological, cultural, and educational controls on women's consciousness and suggesting alternative modes of perception". Thus, together in related but not necessarily collaborative efforts, women began to articulate feminist methods and approaches that focused inquiries and identified crucial emphases. This work defined the intersection of feminism and theatre. Critics and theorists were responsive to the work they saw on the stage and to the interests and concerns articulated by practitioners. Practitioners could avail themselves of the existing criticism as both inspiration and critique in order to further their own efforts. One significant line of inquiry for feminist theorists has been the exploration of the notion of the subject position and its possibilities for women. Examining the socially produced ways of being an individual allowed feminists to explore what Chris Weedon called a "whole range of discursive practices (21). This move connected with the feminist redefinition of the personal, as it called into question the naturally or biologically created self, and substituted a notion of shifting and unstable codes and approaches. Silverman offered a similar definition of the subject position as a site where the intersection of discourses is foregrounded. "It helps us to conceive of human reality as a construction, as the product of signifying activities which are both culturally specific and generally unconscious." (130). Feminist definitions and deconstructions were able to reveal the specificity of the position and propose a more particular and local definition of the subject position. Women writers from the beginning worked to produce a subject position that was always conscious of its specificity and hence, its instability. "It is important to see subjectivity as always historically produced in specific discourses and never as one single fixed structure." (90). The notion of a collective subject emerges directly from the works of women writers to erase boundaries and question divisions. As women had worked to infuse a notion of the personal with the political and thus reconstitute both categories into something new and less distinct, they also worked to articulate a way for women to work across differences towards coalition. Sue-Ellen Case saw the collective subject as particularly productive for the field of drama and performance and suggested, following Rachel Blau DuPlessis, that "a collective subject can mark a work with multiplicity rather than the old protagonist-antagonist polarization" (Case Split 129) No longer based on a system of two polar opposites, the collective subject is in motion, not settling for a singular position that would fix her within the field of representation and lock her into the very system she works to subvert. Embracing and stressing heterogeneity, as de Lauretis described the collective subject, offers the possibility for representing woman as 'as a social subject and a site of difference". (143). The notion of a collective subject also works against the traditional view of the subject as an isolated individual. Instead, the collective subject always operating within a field that by definition includes others, and is always being defined relationally. Concomitantly with the theoretical exploration, women theatre practitioners were also interrogating the position of women. Taking for granted that a play could centre on a woman or that it could be based on women's experience, these playwrights experimented with the bases of theatre as they revised form, content and history. They understood that there was a relationship between their material existence and their work in the theatre. In 1974 Roberta Sklar told Charlotte Rea: "Women's theater is created by women who are in a state of experiencing the fact that they are women in new ways. What they want to do as they create is share this experience with other women bringing them into a new state of awareness" (Sklar 79). For feminist theatres, the investment was in the identification and articulation of women's lived experience. Believing that until that point this experience precisely what had been elided and erased feminist theatre practitioners set out to give voice to that experience. This feminist theatre was a significant departure from the pro-war dramatic forms. This transformation was rooted in political events as well as social and cultural ones and was engaged in interrogating, displacing. disrupting accepted art forms and political systems. Now more open, more fluid, more exploratory and perhaps even more fragmented forms began to evolve. Drama moved off the proscenium stage into cafes, basements, attics and galleries. It disrupted author-text relationship. It heightened the sense of the dramatic through confrontation and conflict. Dramatic forms and techniques thus changed, expanded, borrowed from other mediums to accommodate new concepts of reality, new theatrics of psychology and the changing form of perception. Amongst the major influences on the theatre were Antonin Artaud and Andre Breton. White Artaud stressed the need for ritual and sheer physicality of the theatre, Breton through his sheer physicality of the theatre, Breton through his surrealistic techniques hoped to achieve "A mode of experience and perception in which opposites would cease to appear contradictory and would be reconciled in a new vision and knowledge of reality" (Orenstein). Some women writers used images and language became a powerful medium of reflecting and communicating this transformation. Space on stage was also used to depict character changes, hallucinations, dreams, trances, monologues were some other ways. Character at times obliterated itself to merge with the narrative, erasing the margins fully, allowing itself to be used for this purpose unfolding. The theater of the sixties was a rebellion against the atrophying of human experience of the limiting and curtailing of his sensibility. It wanted to force of moment of recognition through indicating the hollow interior, the empty self and this it attempted through dismantling the main categories and concepts of theatre. The present work explores gender and social concerns and experimentation in the plays of three American women dramatists Adrienne Kennedy. Maria Irene Fornes and Megan Terry. The crucial factor in the choice of these playwrights is their constant engagement with the meaning, consequences and significance of women's subjectivity Their plays and theoretical positions represent certain changes or shifts in women's theatre and theory over time, certain questions continued to be asked but the answers changed, the approaches differed, and the frame shifted. One of the most provocative and least studied black American dramatists to emerge in the sixties is Adrienne Kennedy. Set in the surrealistic theatre of the mind, her dramas are rich collages of ambiguities, metaphors, poetic insights, literary references and mythic associations, all of which provide a dramatic form unique to Kennedy. Having the power of myths, her plays suggest an awareness of reality contingent upon the images that man is conditioned to expect in his culture. Moreover, they draw upon that peculiar quality of myths which enables a person to externalize his deepest feelings. Kennedy's controversial, often violent plays use symbolism to portray African-American characters whose multiple or uncertain identities reflect their struggle for self-knowledge in a white-dominated society. Although some audiences have expressed discomfort with the dark, brutal nature of Kennedy's plays, critics have consistently praised their lyricism and expressionistic structure, frequently comparing them to poetry. Wolfgang Binder observed: "These dramas are to some degree exorcizing personal and collective racial traumas and have anger, the urge to communicate and (attempted) liberation as the motivating forces." (Matuz. 201). Kennedy grew up in a multi-ethnic, middle-class neighbourhood |
| Keywords | . |
| Field | Arts |
| Published In | Volume 6, Issue 1, January-June 2015 |
| Published On | 2015-04-14 |
| Cite This | Emerging Feminist Theatre - Dr. Savita Goel - IJAIDR Volume 6, Issue 1, January-June 2015. |
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