Analysing Gender in Performance brings together the fields of Gender Studies and Performance Analysis to explore how contemporary performance represents and interrogates gender. This edited collection includes a wide range of scholarly essays, as well as artists’ voices and their accounts of their works and practices. The Introduction outlines the book’s key approaches to concepts in English language gender discourses and gender’s intersectionalities, and sets out the approaches to performance analysis and methods of research employed by the various contributors. The book focuses on performances from the Global North, staged over the past fifty years. Case studies are diverse, ranging from site-specific, dance theatre, speculative drag, installation, and music video performances to Mabou Mines, Churchill, Shakespeare and Ibsen. Contributors explore how gender intersects with sexuality, social class, race, ethnicity, indigeneity, culture and history. Read individually or in tension with one another, the essays confront the contemporary complexities of analysing gender in performance.
Author(s): J. Paul Halferty, Cathy Leeney
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 322
City: Cham
Acknowledgements
Contents
List of Figures
Chapter 1: Introduction
Analysing Gender in Performance: The Essays and Case Studies
Bibliography
Suggested Readings
Gender and Its Intersections
Feminisms
Masculinities
Disability
Race and Racialization
Trans* and Non-binary
Class
Nation
Queer
Performance Analysis and Research Methods
Companies
Performance Event
Archival Research
Scenography
Bodies
Casting
Part I: 1970s–1990s
Chapter 2: Pina Bausch’s Kontakthof: Choreographies of Gender and Costume
Contexts of Bausch’s Dance Aesthetic
Costume, Process, and Gestus
Choreographing Gender and Repetition
Power, Gender, and Costumes
Costume’s Hauntings
Conclusion
Bibliography
Chapter 3: Queer Becomings: The Ridiculous Theatrical Company’s Camille and Split Britches/Bloolips’ Belle Reprieve
Charles Ludlam and Camille
Revisiting the Ridiculous
Ludlam and Camp
In Performance
Gender, Authority and Drag
Split Britches/Bloolips’ Belle Reprieve
Gender Unbecoming or Dragging Realism
Conclusion: Camping the Canon
Bibliography
Chapter 4: Théâtre du Soleil and Ariane Mnouchkine: Living and Performing Gender Politics
The Cartoucherie: Building: A Community
Dissolving Hierarchies at Soleil
Gender and the Oresteia Trilogy (Les Atrides)
The Female Body and Soleil’s Performance Ethics and Aesthetics
The Resistance to Theory
Rethinking the Rehearsal Process Through the Lens of Gender
Le Dernier Caravansérail: The Failure of the Fictional
Conclusion
Bibliography
Chapter 5: Nora, Lucia, and Lear: Gender and Performance at Mabou Mines
Lear: More Queen than Mother
Lucia’s Stage
Tall Dolls
Bibliography
Chapter 6: Freaks and Not Freaks: Theatre and the Making of Crip Identity
What Is a Freak Show?
The Last Freak Show
Theatre Studies and Spectatorship
Freaks and Not Freaks
The Mutilated
Administrative Disability
When Is a Freak Not a Freak?
Bibliography
Chapter 7: Fires in the Mirror: Representations of Race, Gender and Class in Anna Deavere Smith’s Search for American Character
Training and Re-training
Writing ‘the Act of Speech’
Space, Acting and Performativity in Fires in the Mirror
Bibliography
Part II: Interruption: Artists Speak About Their Work
Chapter 8: Black Women Performers: ‘I Don’t Want to Do Anything Else’
Biographies
Bibliography
Chapter 9: Trans-body-text: Exploring Performance Disruptions, a Discussion with Lazlo Pearlman
Bibliography
Chapter 10: Embodied and En-sited Performance: Reflections on Gender in Cooking Miss Julie/Miss Julie Cooks and March of Women
Performing Housework: Women in the Vicinity of the Stage—A Shared Context for Both Case Studies by Kathleen Irwin
Case Study: The Food Project: Cooking Miss Julie/Miss Julie Cooks by Kathleen Irwin
Open the Road! Women Centre Stage: Case Study: March of Women, and MARCH by Anna Birch
Conclusion
Bibliography
Chapter 11: A Manifesto of Living Self-portraiture (Identity, Transformation, and Performance)
Working Principles and Inspirations
Development of Practice1
Documentation, Artefacts, Aesthetics
Projecting the Self
Living Metaphor, Living Myth
The Anti-discipline of Being
A Line of Flight, a Ray of Light
Conclusions
Bibliography
Part III: 2000s–2020s
Chapter 12: Love and Information by Caryl Churchill, or Sexuality and Gender in Non-binary Times
I
II
III
Bibliography
Chapter 13: Gender and the Aesthetics of Occupation: Making Room for Women’s Labour at the Theatre
Preface: Taking Up Space
Social Space as Social Labour
Gender, Space, and Work at the Modern Theatre
Get Me out of This Place!
Where Else Might We Be Together?
Bibliography
Chapter 14: Performing Reproduction in an Age of Overproduction: Environmental Installations by Ai Hasegawa
Bibliography
Chapter 15: Loose Wrists: Camp and Intersectional Politics in the Works of Cazwell, Todrick Hall, and Big Freedia
Cazwell
Todrick Hall
Big Freedia
Conclusions
Bibliography
Chapter 16: Riotous Assembly: Performing Gender and Social Justice in thisispopbaby’s RIOT
thisispopbaby: The Company
Masculinities and the State
Challenging Neoliberalism
Power and Play
Bibliography
Chapter 17: From Gimmick Casting to Standard Practice: Re-gendering Shakespeare in Performance
Julius Caesar in Performance
Bibliography
Chapter 18: ‘Women’s Business’: Leah Purcell’s The Drover’s Wife and the Reclamation of Black Australian History
Bibliography
Chapter 19: Gender-Assemblages: The Scenographics of Sin Wai Kin
Sin and Speculative Drag
Gender-Assemblages
Gender Scenographics
Bibliography
Notes on Contributors
Index
