Rehearsing Justice: Theatre, Sexuality and the Sacred

This is an exploratory research into my own quest for Self in the feminine, through theatrical performance and performative narrative. In a first-person approach, I trace a path of discovery from a crisis that I am going through at the age of retirement which I problematize into the axis of my research. Through performative writing, I seek through language to embody a feminine Self, from which I feel cut off. At each stage of my research, I enter into an interpretative process of deconstruction and reconstruction of the internalized meaning of my own story and the myths of the culture in which I grew up. Through performative narrative and the ritual of the theatre, I discover a metaphorical language that propels me into the world of the imaginary, where my encounter with archetypal and mythological figures becomes my path of discovery and transformation. This thesis is the narration of this five-year journey in which I recount my quest from the time of my crisis, and through the unveiling of aspects of my psyche symbolically expressed in the writing of a “scenario”. This is a significant turning point in my research, which brings me to participate in a ritualized theatre practice. Through play, improvisation and exploration, I encounter archetypes which reveal to me the extraordinary story of a feminine rooted in a mythological and cultural history in which I can finally recognize myself and embody this feminine in relation to others and in the world I live in.

In this presentation I discuss my experiences in running a year-long legal theatre clinic. The course was premised on two interlinked questions: How can the theatrical space help us imagine different legal futures? In particular, how can we use theatre as a generative lens to approach gender and sexuality law? Conducted across two semesters, the first half of the course focused on the aspect of reading theatrical texts alongside resonant judicial decisions, while simultaneously looking at the mechanics of playwriting. In the second half, students were assigned the task of refining and producing a set of three original scripts, all dealing with different questions of gender and sexuality law.

The paper aims to explore how sexuality is understood and performed on stage. I will be speaking to various women of different age groups. Through interviews and reference texts, I will be writings about their stories. However, I will be looking at the performance and sexuality through two different view points, those of men and those of women. In my experience, women’s sexuality is either branded within the bracket of perversion or showcased for the male gaze, especially in consideration of mainstream performances. I will be focusing mainly in the world of the Theatre as a performance art. When I began thinking about the paper, I realised that I wanted to explore how society places cages around women, in relation to sexuality. Throughout the process of researching and realising the foundation of the paper, I began to realise that the notion of sexuality is interpreted and realised in different ways by different human beings. This is why the paper has become more than just about breaking cages. It has rather become an exploration of personal stories in relation to sexuality. The paper is meant to be an understanding of how we perceive sexuality to be on stage and how it truly is experienced and understood by performers. The texts that I will be referencing are: Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory by Judith Butler Inside the Culture of Abuse in Indian Theatre: Everything Changed For Me When My Co-Actor Slapped Me and My Director Bruised Me by Nandini Krishnan Women: A Cultural Review: Volume 5, 1994 - Issue 2 And various other texts that look at the different ways sexuality is understood and performed on stage. I have chosen my subjects after intense interviews where we talk about our lives, issues and sexuality in detail. Keeping in mind the issues of privacy and comfort in mind, those who choose to remain anonymous will not be named. Through my paper, I would like to show their journeys, their lives and most importantly their stories.

Peter Lang eBooks, 2016

In this chapter I will explore the discursive constructions of gender: its normative performance and its subversive performative constructions. The institutional rules of gender, I will show, include woman positioned as Other (especially woman as object of speech, vision, and act), woman as body inscribed by various controlling discourses (including costume and the general stylization of the body), and woman as body to be surveyed. Applying Searle's basic formula concerning the constitutive rules of institutions, "X counts as Y in context C" (Speech Acts 52), to the construction of the gendered subject, one can say that when positioned as the Other, an object, whose inscriptive body is foregrounded and put forth as spectacle, the person is constructed as a woman. Indeed, womanhood came to be naturalized in the position of the marked Other (of the dichotomy of man/woman), which society has declared as "natural" and "normal" for her. This means that woman has typically been the object seen (while she herself did not see), the person spoken to or spoken of (while she herself did not speak), and the one acted upon (while she herself did not act). Only around the turn of the 20th century did the new female character appear in the subject position: empowered now to see, speak, and act, the modern woman appropriates for herself the possibility of self-construction as subject and agent (a possibility to be called into question by postmodernism later). Both are discursive processes producing social-cultural constructs; but while the first scenarioillustrated here by pre-modernist texts, where woman is produced, through performance, as an object-is the replaying of existing social scripts, the second-illustrated here by texts taken from modernist women writers-ignores, resists, and subverts normative expectations when, by applying radicalontological performative processes, it produces woman as a speaking and seeing subject, as well as acting agent. Moreover, woman's construction in the object position runs parallel with the similar naturalization of colored and gay persons as cultural Others. As members of culturally imperialized groups, they have followed similar trajectories of disempowerment (excluded from the category of the human, the "rights of man," and deprived of subjecthood and agency) and empowerment (claiming inclusion into the human and appropriating subjecthood and agency). Indeed, the persons constructed into objects along axes gender, race, and

2019

In the past the word most likely to be yoked to the word tragedy was genre: the genre of tragic literature, the genre of tragic drama. yet, intriguingly, in two important recent works discussing the tragic and theater the word yoked to tragic is "experience." both Hélène Cixous in "Enter the Theatre" and Hans-Thies Lehmann in Tragedy and Dramatic Theatre write of the "tragic experience." why? I would suggest this shift has to do with an understanding of where tragedy occurs. In a time when our common usage of the word tragedy seems to be rendered banal by its ubiquitous appearance across every electronic form of media, what forms of art actually awaken us to the consequences of our actions and the actions of those in power? what forms of art reveal how the daily saturation of "disaster porn" threatens to freeze all sensory perception leaving only overwhelming powerlessness and its attendant anxiety? first and foremost, a spectator's experience of tragedy in the theater, which indeed can be intense and provoke profound change in understanding and potentially in behavior, remains protected from the everyday experience of tragic catastrophe: war, famine, death, loss, and the sudden reversals life seems to delight in. but as all artists and audiences for artistic productions know, recognition, sensory understanding, and personal or political change often can only occur at a distance from the living out of tragic circumstances. In Hans-Thies Lehmann's figuring of the "tragic experience": The tragic cannot be conceived either as a manifestation of dialectic or as an intellectual paradox; it also cannot be conceived as an insoluble conflict or "insight" into subjective or world-historical collapse. .. if tragic experience were really thus, then tragedy. .. would merely illustrate relations that concepts can grasp more deeply and fully. 1 when my students explore practice as research methods, often I find myself inviting them to move beyond "illustration," a paint-by-number rendering of the idea into the performance. so with Hans-Thies Lehmann, I argue that the spectator who is practicing, who is in the midst of a partnership with the theatrical art before her or him, becomes the locus for the transformation from illustration to experience, to recognition and beyond. The scope of Lehmann's book makes it impossible to do justice to his arguments, particularly about post-dramatic theater, in this chapter. However, with the emphasis of my work on the particularities of the bodies in the theater, their gender, race, nationality,

Whatever - A Transdiciplinary Journal of Queer Theories and Studies, 2020

Researcher Josette Féral has studied the reciprocity between performativity and theatricality in the field of theatrical studies. With the term “performative theatre”, she intends to build continuity between the notions against the traditional view which opposes theatre and performance. Taking her works as a starting point, I explore the dynamics of what I call the state of trans- (trance, transition, transformation, transidentity, transgression, transfer…) in performative theatre. The idea is therefore to go beyond the dualisms that oppose theatre and performance as well as femininity and masculinity, among others. How did the performative turn foster the emergence of a queer theatre? To what extent does this affect the way bodies exist on stage?

2020

Researcher Josette Feral has studied the reciprocity between performativity and theatricality in the field of theatrical studies. With the term “performative theatre”, she intends to build continuity between the notions against the traditional view which opposes theatre and performance. Taking her works as a starting point, I explore the dynamics of what I call the state of trans- (trance, transition, transformation, transidentity, transgression, transfer…) in performative theatre. The idea is therefore to go beyond the dualisms that oppose theatre and performance as well as femininity and masculinity, among others. How did the performative turn foster the emergence of a queer theatre? To what extent does this affect the way bodies exist on stage?

The Palgrave Handbook of Testimony and Culture, 2023

Isaias Fanlo offers an examination of queer testimonial narratives in theatre, performance, and other visual arts. Focusing on recent case studies such as A Strange Loop and Raphaëlle, which unfold in the intersections of gender, sexuality, class, and race, the author explores how queer testimonies provide cathartic dignity to subjects that have traditionally been relegated to the margins of the stage. Fanlo indicates how, in the case of queer testimonies, mediation might play a necessary role for non-normative narratives to access a central positioning. Finally, Fanlo addresses the challenges of archival work to retrieve queer visual testimonies. He argues for the critical importance of these images, as well as the artistic reinterpretations of archival findings, to provide representation and produce knowledge that contests normativity.

South African Theatre Journal (SATJ), 2012

This article documents and reflects on making an autobiographical performance piece with a black South African lesbian performer. The occurrence of 'corrective rape' amongst lesbians in South Africa, particularly black lesbians, is alarmingly high. This particular performer approached me about facilitating the making of a work that drew on her biography. She felt the need for her story, as a black lesbian, to be heard and taken seriously. She felt the need, through the telling of her story, to celebrate her sexuality in the light of the stigma attached to being a lesbian in South Africa that often leads to 'corrective rape.' The process of making the work engaged methods of mapping that involved creating a physical life-sized map of the body as well as utilising the Destructuring aspect of Fitzmaurice Voicework † as a way of mapping the breath in the body and engaging the imagination in the remembering of stories that reside in the soma of the performer. The article explores how the suggested methodology, i.e. that of somatic mapping, might assist the performer in dealing with, and expressing freedom from, the heteronormative ideas around the body and sexuality. I investigate how this methodology can potentially assist the exploration of the body's story as it intersects with the personal and political body through the notion of destructuring and restructuring.

ARIEL: A Review of International English …, 1992