Reading the feminist spectator PDF

Preview

Summary

Performance styles and traditions second year WDP taught by Karen ...

Description

Performance Styles and Traditions ~ Week 3 Reading ! The Feminist Spectator ! Lecture! The gendered gaze at the theatre ! - cultural v individual ! - Theatre ‘directs its address to a gendered - specific spectator (Jill Dolan, 1988, pp.1-2)! - Identifying with specific characters and how we relate ! - Relationship between text and performance ~ How the theatrical machine can move out thinking along through rethinking a production as something else. ! How is this image being offered for your view? Unlike film within theatre you chose where you look and focus, however this can be manipulated through the stage pictures dictated within the blocking and directorial features. ! Laura Mulvey ~ The Male Gaze - Suggesting scopophilia the pleasure of looking. ! - Building on this concept there is an active male gaze in cinema/ theatre and a passive female approach to watching. The woman is offered as something to be observed and the men as the observers. This bore mainly from Hitchcock films and which areas of the female body was focused upon by the camera. ! - E.G. Hedda. She only appears after the audience has received information about her from the men of the play: forming our views and expectations of her with no relation to her own actions. ! - Locations also can contain gazes e.g. the home and the conventions and norms we expect e.g. women in the kitchen. However theatre can also turn this on it’s head E.G. Dinner. ! Patriarchal Cultural Visions of Women - Seen and adhered to in Theatre and Film. ! ~ Virgin ! ~ Whore ! ~ Madonna ! ~ Bitch ! ~ Fetishised body parts ! ~ Dead woman (causes action) ! ~ Only exist in relation to the male protagonist e.g. Mother or Wife. ! Horror Films ! - Young ! - Naive ! - Violence towards them usual paired with nakedness ! Detective Films ! - Mysterious ! - Unreliable! - Evil ! - Sexual ! Comedy positions the woman not simply as the object of the male gaze, but of the male laugh- not just to be looked at but to be laughed at doubly removed from creativity

Being a Feminist Spectator ! Feminist critics and spectators don’t just buy culture, but pull apart the threads of meaning it produces’ - Jill Dolan, (2014,p.3) ! ~ Moving away from the canon ! ~ Moving away from and interrogating canonical representations. ! ~ To what extent is following traditional practitioners and naturalism (Stanislavsky) reinforcing these traditional gendered norms. ! When watching: not just plot and theme! - Conditions of making ~ who was involved, who had a say in the production of the film, who has the money, casting director, writer and director! - Politics of representation ~ Who gets to be onstage, the majority of dialogue, who is funny, who dies and who lives. ! - Structure and Form ~ A lot of early feminist theatre rejected traditional and expected form and structure. ! Takes on everything that’s happening and doesn’t just repeat or discuss story and aesthetic performance but focuses upon politics. Who has made this stuff and what does that mean. ! E.G. Crazy Ex Girlfriend ~ Disrupting Sterotypes! ~ De-binarising gender roles and assumptions ! ~ Dismantling its own structure/characters! ~ Staying ahead of the audience ! Sexy Getting Ready Song - interrogating women processes of getting ready for a night out. Reframing of the traditional expectations of rapping. ‘Some nasty patriarchal bullshit’ ! ~ Primarily written by women, execs and directors and producers are also women. Suggesting conditions of making are taken into account. Over the casting looking through gender and race has been very open as opposed to token characters, who are fleshed out and full not used as jokes or scapegoats. ! ~ Subverts the traditional Rom Com genre. Theatre and Feminism Looking/Watching/Spectating! 1988-89 watershed for feminist performance with the release of Sue Ellen Case’s Feminism and Theatre as well as Hart’s making a spectacle: Feminist Essays on Contemporary Women’s Theatre, plus Dolan’s The Feminist spectator as Critic. The Drama Review also published landmark essays in the feminist field Phelan’s Feminist Theory, Poststructuralism and Performance, as well as Diamond’s Brechtian Theory/ Feminist Theory: Towards a Gastric feminist criticism. These women began their work by collaborating together on papers and journals as well as coming together to discuss feminist issues at the forefront of the arts industry at events and groups such as Women and Theatre Group (ATHE) as well as being able to watch feminist and more controversial works of theatre at the WOW cafe Manhattan. Practitioners seen here included: Split Breeches, The Five Lesbian Brothers and Holly Hughes). These collaborations show how the 1980s-90s was a hot house for the feminist

theatrical movement and criticism and how via these connections women writing were sustained and began to be seen professionally. ! It was through Case’s connections and position as editor at the TJ that an anthology of feminist literature got published in 1990 Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre, containing 20 essays from the most prominent feminist critics (mentioned above) as well as starting a push to actively include more feminist writings within the TJ itself. ! 1993 ~ Liz Goodmen in the UK published Contemporary Feminist Theatre: To each Her Own - shows the inclusion and surge of feminist writing in this country as well as America, while confirming the significance of feminist criticism in the arts. Plus it’s status as being theoretically rigorous, disciplined as well as an ideological political force was seen especially in the UK. ! Theorising the Feminist Spectator: Laura Mulvey and Jill Dolan! Cultural Materialism ~ Study of Social, Economic and Political Conditions that shape the choices made by individuals in real world contexts, which are therefore reflected by characters onstage (Marxist). ! Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic Theory ~ Examine how humans become subjects by observing, seeing, copying and desiring what they see. ! The combination of these theories within the feminist writings of mainly these two authors forms the core of the gendered nature of the spectators gaze at the theatre as well as society as a whole. This gaze reflects the views unconscious biases of shared social and cultural expectations of how men and women should appear, interact and behave onstage. Foucault argues in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of Prison that we as a race police our own social behaviours to maintain the status quo, therefore reinforcing gender stereotypes and punishing acts that challenge or confront them. ! It is through this that Dolan writes and claims theatre adheres to these gender norms through being directed primarily for the male gaze allowing male spectators to identify with the heroic male lead, consequently objectifying female characters as trophies, damsels in distress or temptresses. This theory is derived from the earlier work of Mulvey within her work Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (Screen 1975). This work evaluates how Hollywood invites male views to view women as erotic objects of desire confirming the male viewers masculinity. This gaze for Mulvey is created through camera angles and the focus on certain areas of the female characters bodies, areas that are ignored or irrelevant in the filming of their male counterparts. ! As in theatre the audience is free to view any part of the stage at one given moment this theory is adapted for live performances, this time through the manipulation and placement of dialogue, entrances and exits that shape how we view and place female characters. For example, Hedda Gabler is mainly spoken about for the first act, with the other characters discussing her presenting a pre determined presentation of her character as a cold calculating and cruel woman before she has entered the stage. This is similar to the sordid history we hear of Blanche DuBios in A Street car Named Desire which acts as an explanation for her behaviour rendering her emotional distress an illness of her own making.

The ideological assumptions that always lie behind the shaping of stage images - whether through text, set design, actors’ work on characters, lighting, direction and more inevitable guide our eyes and focus our perceptual facilities. Where and how may females view the theatre and use this ‘male gaze’ to confront and expose these subliminal ideological workings for the benefit of both genders? This question is one that writers such as Dolan, Mulvey and other feminists in this period focused upon. ! Active Vanishing: Peggy Phelan ! Unmarked: The Politics of Performance follows on from Mulvey’s work and extends the use of Freudian ideas, creating its own theory of radical invisibility. ! Man sees, Woman is seen. Thus Phelan concludes that visibility is a trap for women. However her theory was highly contested as during this time of protest in America it was a view largely held that protest and visibility was the only way to make progress through demonstrations as we see historically within the largest movements of the time: antiwar, feminist and racial equality. However Phelan argues it is not being seen but how you are seen that matters, and until we change how women are seen and focus on work behind the camera any visibility may be detrimental as it will reflect some form of stereotype or cause negative connotations by breaking the socially acceptable stereotype. ! Active Vanishing ~ Actively marked as not seen or present! ~ forces the viewer to recognise that seeking self-affirmation through ! observing and objectifying another is always ethically flawed and ! dehumanising. ! Phelan’s unmarked feminist performer aims to undo a viewers expectation of what her appearance means, while confronting that viewer with the potential consequences being seen through these expectations can hold. ! Gestic feminist criticism: Elin Diamond ! Unlike Phelan and Dolan, Diamond focuses completely on the more Marxist theory of Cultural Materialism as opposed to the Freudian theorem. Through taking Brechtain ideas of gesture she intends to refract the male gaze, returning it with a difference and therefore dismantle it. ! Classical Mimesis ~ model of theatrical imitation in which the real world is presented onstage with characters who appear fixed into culturally and ideologically determined positions. ! Diamond argues that this classical mimesis prevents an audience from viewing a production in multiple ways, leaving them ill-equipped to identify the cultural inequalities or prejudices at work. Brecht employs a subtle oppression of classical mimesis through a dialectal dramaturgy, in which linear plots give way to episodes, actors play characters as separate to themselves but as figures whose social circumstances allow for debate and discussion. Therefore Diamond argues utilising this technique to bring women’s issues that are usually glossed over to the forefront creating discussion of them within the audiences and company alike. !

Bechdel Test ! The Bechdel test is a method for evaluating the portrayal of women in fiction. It asks whether a work features at least two women (preferably named) who talk to each other about something other than a man. Only around 50% of all films meet these requirements. The test is used as an indicator for the active presence of women in films, theatre and other fiction, and to call attention to gender inequality in the media and arts. The test first appeared, in 1985. Bechdel credited the idea to a friend, Liz Wallace, and to the writings of Virginia Woolf with the test being called to attention more post 2000.

- Two women (with names) - Talking to each other not just the male characters. - Two women talking to each other about a subject other than a man. Some films that pass the test… ~ Avengers: Infinity War ~ Black Panther ~ The Greatest Showman ~ The Post Some that failed… ~ Baywatch ~ Kingsman Golden Circle ~ Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales. ~ Babydriver ~ The Darkest Hour...