Languages of Theatre Shaped by Women

Description

Jane de Gay is Lecturer in English at Trinity and All Saints, University of Leeds. Lizbeth Goodman is Director of the SMARTlab Centre for Site Specific Media utilising 'smart' technologies, at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, the London Institute.

Sujets

• Theater
• Theatre
• Literature
• Performance art
• General officer
• General
• Cultural Studies

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books Ltd
• Date de parution: 01 septembre 2001
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781841508788
• Langue: English

Extrait

Languages of Theatre Shaped by Women
Jane de Gay and Lizbeth Goodman
Reprinted in Paperback in Great Britain in 2003 by Intellect Books , PO Box 862, Bristol BS99 1DE, UK
Published in Paperback in USA in 2003 by Intellect Books, ISBS, 5824 N.E. Hassalo St, Portland, Oregon 97213-3644, USA
Copyright 2003 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
Consulting Editor: Robin Beecroft Cover Illustration: Mark Mackie Copy Editor: Holly Spradling Typesetting: Macstyle Ltd, Scarborough, N. Yorkshire

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Electronic ISBN 1-84150-878-0 / ISBN 1-871516-78-1
Printed and bound by The Cromwell Press, Trowbridge, Wiltsire
Contents
List of Illustrations
Notes on Contributors
Introduction: Speaking in Tongues - Making (Sense of) Women s Languages in Theatre
Part 1 - Re-Shaping Theatre Traditions
1 Seizing Speech and Playing with Fire: Greek Mythological Heroines and International Women s Performance
Jane de Gay
2 Lear s Daughters on Stage and in Multimedia and Fiona Shaw s King Lear Workshops as Case Studies in Breaking the Frame
Lizbeth Goodman
3 Playing (with) Shakespeare: Bryony Lavery s Ophelia and Jane Prendergast s I, Hamlet
Jane de Gay
4 Theorizing Practice-Based Research: Performing and Analysing Self in Role as I , Hamlet
Jane Prendergast
Part 2 - Speaking for Themselves: Women Theatre-Makers at Work
5 Transmitting the Voices, Voyages and Visions: Adapting Virginia Woolf s To the Lighthouse for Radio
Lindsay Bell
6 Voicing Identities, Reframing Difference(s): The Case of Fo(u)r Women
A brief commentary on the text of Fo(u)r Women
Adeola Agbebiyi
Fo(u)r Women
Adeola Agbebiyi, Patience Agbabi and Dorothea Smartt
Part 3 - Practising Theory and Theorizing Practice
7 Scratch in the Record
Leslie Hill
8 One-to--One: Lone Journeys
Helen Paris
9 Mouth Ghosts: The Taste of the Os-Text
Jools Gilson-Ellis
10 Afterword - Shape-Shifters and Hidden Bodies
Jane de Gay
Bibliography and Further Reading
Index
List of Illustrations 1.1. Gerd Christiansen in Persephone: Bringer of Destruction, Promise of Resurrection . 1.2. Gerd Christiansen in Persephone: Bringer of Destruction, Promise of Resurrection . 1.3. Sally Rodwell and Madeline McNamara (Toad Lilies) as Roberta and Sisterloo in Crow Station . 2.1. Hazel Maycock as Fool, recording the audio version for the OU/BBC in 1997-98. 3.1. Shakespearean heroines at the funeral of Old King Hamlet, in Bryony Lavery s Ophelia. 3.2. Barbara Mayor as Nurse in Bryony Lavery s Ophelia. 3.3. Daniel Skinner as Claudius manipulates a puppet of Gertrude in I, Hamlet . 3.4. Daniel Skinner as Hamlet and Joe Carey as Laertes in I, Hamlet . 4.1. Jane Prendergast holding papier-m che skull in rehersals for I, Hamlet . 6.1. Fo(u)r Women logo. 6.2. Patience Agbabi. 6.3. Adeola Agbebiyi. 6.4. Dorothea Smartt. 6.5. Adeola Agbebiyi in Ident from Fo(u)r Women . 7.1-11. A sequence of photos of Helen Paris in The Day Don Came with the Fish . 7.12. Digital program: The Day Don Came with the Fish . 7.13. 8.1. Helen Paris in C est La Vie . 8.2. Cath and Debs Sibbald in Vena Amoris .
Notes on Contributors
Patience Agbabi was born in London in 1965 and educated at Pembroke College Oxford. She has published two collections of poetry: R.A.W. (Gecko Press, 1995) and Transformatrix (Payback Press, 2000). Renowned for live performances, her poems have been featured on radio and TV worldwide. Having been Writer in Residence at the Poetry Cafe during 1999 and Flamin 8 Tattoo Parlour in 2000, she is currently Writer in Residence at Oxford Brookes University (Humanities and Health Care).
Adeola Agbebiyi was born in Toronto and brought up in Burnley and the Midlands. As a singer/songwriter, she has played gigs with Labi Siffre, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Desree and Andy Fernbach among others. She released an album Crystal Visions (Shango Music, 1993) before featuring as The Jazz Singer in the short film B.D. Women (Channel Four and various film festivals 1994). Having worked as an actress for two years, she is currently writing and recording a new album.
Lindsay Bell is a PhD candidate at the Graduate Centre for Study of Drama at the University of Toronto. Her doctoral thesis focuses on feminist strategies of adaptation in four plays by Sally Clark. Other adaptations include Priest (from the screenplay by Jimmy McGovern, 1997), and a Shaw Festival/CBC radio adaptation of Emily Carr s Klee Wyck (produced at the Shaw Festival August 2001, and was broadcast on CBC in April 2002).
Jane de Gay is Lecturer in English at Trinity and All Saints, University of Leeds. She was a key contributor to Feminist Stages (Harwood Academic Press, 1994) and co-editor, with Lizbeth Goodman, of two performance readers for Routledge. She has published articles on Bryony Lavery, Louise Page and Caryl Churchill. Her research interests also include intertextuality and she is currently writing a book on Virginia Woolf s responses to the literary past.
Jools Gilson-Ellis is a writer, choreographer, performer and installation artist. She is co-director of the performance production company half/angel, founded in 1995 with Richard Povall. half/angel develops projects involving new technologies, poetic text and performance. She teaches performance at University College Cork in Ireland.
Lizbeth Goodman is Director of the SMARTlab Centre for Site Specific Media, Performing and Digital Arts at Central Saint Martin s College of Art and Design, the London Institute. She also directs the Practice-based PhD programme for CSM. She is the Principal Investigator of the SMARTshell Project (creating innovative tools for synchronous and asynchronous online/integrated performance and learning), and of the Virtual Interactive Puppetry Project, the British Council s Cultural and Media Studies development programmes in North Africa, and the European Commission s RADICAL project (Research Agendas Developed in Creative Arts Labs). She is also the UK Executive Producer of Sara Diamond s Code Zebra Project, working with international partners at the Banff New Media Institute, BBC Imagineering, V2, UCLA, UC Berkeley, et al. Dr Goodman has written and edited some 12 books including a range of titles on women and theatre, the arts, representation and creativity. Her books have been translated into several languages and are set on courses internationally.
Leslie Hill is a writer and performer whose work has been widely shown in a variety of venues across the US and UK and commissioned by major institutions such as the Arts Council of England, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Institute for Contemporary Arts. Articles by and about Hill have appeared in two dozen publications over the past few years, including Performance Research and New Theatre Quarterly and The Routledge Reader in Politics and Performance. Hill is artistic director, with Helen Paris, of London-based curious.com Performance and Multimedia Company. Hill is currently Head of Media at the London College of Music and Media.
Helen Paris is a nationally and internationally commissioned performance artist of solo and collaborative works. Her work has been supported by, amongst others, the Arts Council of England, the London Arts Board, the National Endowment for the Arts, The London Filmmakers Co-op, London Electronic Arts, the Institute for Contemporary Art, South East Arts and Artsadmin where she is an Associate Artist. With Leslie Hill she is co-artistic director of curious.com performance and multimedia company: www.placelessness.com . Hill and Paris s recent book, Guerilla Performance and Multimedia is published by Continuum. curious.com are currently working on a live art installation and TV documentary On the Scent exploring live performance and the olfactory, funded by the Wellcome Trust. Paris holds a PhD from the University of Surrey and is Lecturer in Drama at Brunel University, London.
Jane Prendergast is a performer, writer and teacher of theatre. She is presently teaching drama in Singapore, at the National Institute of Education, a section of The Nanyang Technological University. Her current performance research is a solo performance called Tempes[t]sepmet , based upon Shakespeare s The Tempest. Her project combines Asian and Western theatre styles, and the discourses of postcolonialism and feminism. The project will be toured internationally.
Dorothea Smartt , a poet, writer and live artist, was Brixton Market s first Poet-in-Residence, and a former Attached Live Artist at London s Institute of Contemporary Arts. She has been awarded several commissions and bursaries; lectures part-time at Birkbeck College; provides workshops to diverse communities; and performs nationally and internationally. In 2000 her commissioned multi-media children s play, Fallout (Theatre Venture), successfully toured London schools. Her poetry collection, Connecting Medium , was published by Peepal Tree Press in 2001.
Introduction: Speaking in Tongues - Making (Sense of) Women s Languages in Theatre
Jane de Gay and Lizbeth Goodman
The notion of speaking in tongues (as it is found in the Biblical story of the Christian apostles speaking many languages and being understood by an international crowd of onlookers) articulates an ideal of communicating across national and linguistic boundaries. This is something to which theatre, and international performance in particular, has often aspired. Theatre is a place and space in which we can dream such large dreams and attempt to realise them, which is one reason why women whose energies are often blocked in other areas of life and forms of expression will turn to the theatre.
In practice, however, speaking with the languages