Charlotte M. Canning

Feminist Performance as Feminist Historiography

Given performance historys disciplinary complexity, not to mention the complications of a “we” comprised by so many different scholars, Theatre Survey s question is, in one sense, unanswerable. In another sense, if I translate the question to what I can do (staying fully aware that others will propose answers different from mine), however, I can offer an answer from my position as a feminist performance historian and historiographer. My response to it is twofold. The argument I make here is for performance that foregrounds historiographical operations, making physical, gestural, emotional, and agonistic the processes that construct history out of the past. Concomitantly, I am arguing for history that overtly acknowledges the ways in which it is a performance of the past, but not the past itself. This dual approach is especially important in feminist accounts of the past because performance has historically been a crucial constituent of feminist theories and practices.

Editorial: Looking Ahead

This is my first issue as Senior Editor of Theatre Research International . As I have worked I have been conscious of the editors who have preceded me, first and foremost Elaine Aston. Her wit, insight and generosity have been models for me over the three years we worked together. Now, as she has ended her term and I have begun mine, I am more aware than ever of the precedent she has established. I will have to work very hard to match her editorial discernment, wisdom and creativity. But I am also aware of a legacy from previous editors – Freddie Rokem (with whom Elaine was privileged to work as Associate Editor), Christopher Balme (currently President of the International Federation for Theatre Research) and Brian Singleton (also a past IFTR President). What this means to me is that I am privileged to inherit a journal that has long been recognized as a leader across the globe for the best in original content and methodology. Joining me is the new Associate Editor, Paul Rae from the National University of Singapore. He has already proven to be an invaluable colleague, and I am happily anticipating our work together on TRI over the next three years.

Directing History: Women, Performance and Scholarship

The emergence of the director is usually seen as a crucial moment in late nineteenth-, early twentieth-century theatre history. Traditionally, the narrative of that emergence has focused on the director as a sole heroic individual, usually male. This article questions how that figure and those practices have been historicized. That historicization process has been (and continues to be) a disciplinary demonstration of power marked by the concomitant political operations of personal, geographical, and institutional identifications and affiliations. The specific political operation explored here is that of gender as the primary identification of the figures, institutions, and arguments. The thirty-year collaboration of Edith Isaacs and Rosamond Gilder on Theatre Arts, the primary voice in the United States for the reform of the theatre during the era that saw both the emergence of the director and the celebration of that emergence as the pinnacle of theatrical achievement is the example on which the article focuses. Gilder was Isaacss assistant and successor, and she was also the author of Enter the Actress, the first book to create a history for women in the theatre. In three parts the article demonstrates how focusing on the journal, the collaboration, and the book offer a new conception of the directors history.

Contemporary Feminist Theatre

When Patricia Van Kirk founded the Front Room Theater in Seattle in 1980, she knew that lesbians did not comprise a large part of Seattle theatre audiences. In fact, they rarely attended the theatre. ‘Why would you?’ Van Kirk asked. ‘You don’t see yourself up there. There’s no reflection.’1 While Van Kirk described a particular situation for lesbians in Seattle she could also be describing women’s position in theatre for most of its history. Until the feminist movement of the late 1960s there had never been a theatre movement that specifically expressed material existence as women experienced it. This radically challenged the structure and substance of theatre and created new theatrical and theoretical work.

Rehearsing Citizenship: Performance as Public Practice in the Undergraduate Curriculum

How can and should a theatre and/or dance graduate emerge as a democratic citizen? Our response to the volume about the relationship of theatre and performance to change is a strategic approach to theatre and dance training. When the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of Texas undertook to reinvent its B.A. degree, the Performance as Public Practice Program (PPP) faculty used the opportunity to design a new introduction for undergraduate majors, TD 311C Performance as Public Practice.

A Cold War Battleground: Catfish Row versus the Nevsky Prospekt

On 26 December 1955 the first US theatrical production to perform in the Soviet Union opened in Leningrad. In January, the Everyman Opera production of Porgy and Bess ran in Moscow for eight days, then moved to Poland and Czechoslovakia. The African American cast was the toast of the Soviet Union, enjoying cheering crowds wherever they went. Russian media trumpeted the tour, with Nikolai Mikhailov, Minister of Culture, declaring it a successful strengthening of cultural ties. The tour was not sponsored by the US government. Despite pleas from the Everyman producers, the State Department refused to fund it (although it would fund other legs of the tour). Instead, the Soviet government sponsored the company and made much of the presence of the African-American actors, who could move more freely in the Soviet Union than in the USA. While the company’s presence may have been the result of a thaw in US–Soviet relations after Stalin’s death in 1953, it also marked the fierce cultural battle the two powers were waging with race as a significant front. At stake were the many non-aligned nations of colour who were suspicious of both powers. This paper will explore the ways in which the Soviet Union used a cultural product of the USA against it in the global struggle over race that so marked the Cold War. Drawing on first-person accounts, Soviet reviews, and archival materials, I will demonstrate how theatre was a vital weapon in the Cold War arsenal for all combatants.

When Will They Hear Our Voices? Historicizing Gender, Performance, and Neoliberalism in the 1930s

Charlotte Canning’s chapter historicizes neoliberalism through Flanagan and Clifford’s Can You Hear Their Voices?, written in 1931, and performed at Vassar College (a school for the daughters of wealthy US elites) by students, faculty, and local residents of Poughkeepsie, New York. In 1932, German economist Alexander Rustow, disillusioned by Soviet communism and equally troubled by classic liberal economics, coined the term ‘neoliberalism’ as a new way to theorize the relationship between ‘free markets’ and the democratic state. While Flanagan/Clifford could not have anticipated neoliberalism, their play contains a critique of Rustow’s ‘third way’ by offering an alternative to homo oeconomicus. In every scene of Can You Hear Their Voices? women characters drive the action, and the construction of their agency offers twenty-first-century feminism possibilities for rethinking and challenging neoliberalism.

Editorial: Theatre's itinerant routes/roots

These four articles are very different in subject, geography, methodology and evidence. Despite these significant divergences, their presence in a single issue is fortuitous. What these articles offer as a single entity is an important reminder of how theatre is always concerned with and emerging from exchange and movement. Sometimes the movement is across global geopolitical boundaries; sometimes it is only across counties in a single nation. Sometimes the movement is the global circulation of ideas, and artists of very different cultures may be approaching similar subjects in similar ways although they have never met. Sometimes those routes may be traced on a map; sometimes they are roots only revealed as pathways through the transformative act of performance. Sometimes, of course, the movement is simply that of the body in representation. In all these essays the routes/roots involve challenges to collaboration and understanding, and results may come from achieving the goal of connection and/or from falling far short. Through comparing these articles with one another, we can enrich our own work as scholars and artists because they remind us to re-examine how we define even our most basic terms and assumptions. Nic Leonhardt’s article ‘“From the Land of the White Elephant through the Gay Cities of Europe and America”: Re-routing the World Tour of the Boosra Mahin Siamese Theatre Troupe (1900)’ demonstrates how global routes of transmission are not confined to a single historical moment. As part of a recent movement towards global and transnational theatre histories, Leonhardt takes up a recent Thai performance in Germany by Pichet Klunchun inspired by photographs of dancer Vaslav Nijinsky in the 1910 La danse siamoise. As Leonhardt researches Klunchun’s work, she realizes that the Nijinsky performance was inspired by a Thai dance company that choreographer Mikhail Fokine had seen ten years earlier. This Möbius-strip-like movement of performance crossed the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, where imperialism and industrialism allowed for the movement between East and West while artists from different parts of the globe inspired each other, in some cases through misreading created by intentionally altered texts. Leonhardt is careful to document the ways in which the power relations are not equal – these are neither exchanges she documents, nor are they really a balance of import and export – instead, they are refractions of the inequities of global politics. From the profoundly global explorations of Leonhardt’s article, this issue of Theatre Research International moves to interrogate specifically local implementation of an internationally circulating performance pedagogy. Yonghee Lee takes an autoethnographic approach to theorize her participation in a Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) workshop. In ‘Theatre for the Less Oppressed than I: Reconsidering Augusto Boal’s

Editorial: Performance moves

One of the most productive contributions to performance that scholars have made to theorizing globalization is to document how people understand global transformation as expressed through representation. An additional element of this contribution is the examination of reception – what understanding did audiences and critics glean from what they saw onstage. This issue of Theatre Research International brings together a diverse set of articles, ones that were not written with any of the others in mind. Despite this, however, read together these articles offer a primer on the effects, successes and failures of performance in the context of global movement currently and in the past. Some of these authors look at theatre that literally travels – around the world, around the nation – and others that travel more figuratively – as part of historical circuits of transmission like colonialism. In whatever sense travel is defined and explored in this issue of TRI, all of these articles remind us that live performance is always about the circulation of embodied ideas through time and space. Travel is built into the form itself. Nicola Hyland’s ‘Unsettling Blanket Man: The “Ecological Māori” as a Pākeha PlayThing’ is aimed at one of the most troubling tropes of white-settler colonialism – the character of the deeply spiritual indigenous person with profound connection to the earth. The Wellington, New Zealand, BATS Theatre 2013 production of The Road That Wasn’t There had a pivotal character based on a local homeless Māori man, Ben Hana, also known as ‘Blanket Man’. The inclusion of Hana was intended to recognize Hana’s presence in the city, but the choice to embody the character through a puppet, and one animated by a non-Māori performer, doubly marginalized and erased Hana. This was achieved first by representing him as a non-human and then by representing him as homeless – both in the contemporary urban landscape and then as ‘unsettled’ from Māori lands by centuries of colonialism. In this article Hyland explores in detail the ways in which racism is and can be staged and received. This exploration reminds us that what is intended as a new and empowering representation of the marginalized may simply be, in fact, one of the oldest and most familiar forms of racism. While TRI is not primarily a journal for historical work, one of the most important discursive challenges any moment faces is how it will construct and debate the past. Such debates may allow us to identify the ways in which settler colonialism continues to inform performance in many parts of the world, or, as in ‘The Bandmann Circuit: Theatrical Networks in the First Age of Globalization’, it may offer us new ways to understand how theatre is a transnational enterprise. Christopher B. Balme documents the important shift in European theatrical production from the actor–manager to the producer. This move established global networks that allowed European theatre to extend its reach further than ever before. Michel de Certeau argues that history is ‘founded on a rupture

Editorial: The Importance of the Astonished Eye

The four articles in this first issue of 2014 could not have, at first glance, less in common. The first piece, ‘Zooesis and “Becoming with” in India: The “Figure” of Elephant in Sahyande Makan: The Elephant Project ’ by Ameet Parameswaran, examines the theatrical adaptation of a 1944 Malayalam poem by the company Theatre Roots and Wings. In ‘The Dynamics of Space and Resistance in Muhammad ‘Azīzs Tahrir Square: The Revolution of the People and the Genius of the Place ’, Salwa Rashad Amin discusses the importance of ‘Azīzs play in the context of Egypts recent and historical revolutions. Ketu Katrak takes up the performance of affect and its implication for social justice in ‘“Stripping Women of Their Wombs”: Active Witnessing of Performances of Violence’. Finally, Katia Arfara explores the work of a performance artist in terms of early twentieth-century precedents for European performance art, ‘Denaturalizing Time: On Kris Verdoncks Performative Installation End ’. Theatre Research International readers will find much of value in each article, and they represent the kind of broad international focus our journal endeavours to provide.