Distributed for Intellect Ltd
Languages of Theatre Shaped by Women
The authors explore a range of different approaches to the languages of theatre, including translation and interpretation of the art form, along with languages, performance work, body language and gesture. Considered alongside the related social issues of race, class and dialect, the following questions emerge:
• What is the role of language in theatre today?
• Whose language is English; what other languages do women making theatre use?
• What does it mean to write about, photograph and video live performance?
• What is the future for women’s theatre in an international context increasingly united by new technologies but divided by new issues of cultural diversity?
Goodman and de Gay analysis covers issues that are central to current courses in Theatre and Performance and Women’s Studies. They assess the forms which women as theatre-makers have chosen to explore in the age of new technology, and look at some of the different definitions of ’theory’ offered by theatre-makers and critics including Caryl Churchill, Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigiray and Julia Kristeva.
• What is the role of language in theatre today?
• Whose language is English; what other languages do women making theatre use?
• What does it mean to write about, photograph and video live performance?
• What is the future for women’s theatre in an international context increasingly united by new technologies but divided by new issues of cultural diversity?
Goodman and de Gay analysis covers issues that are central to current courses in Theatre and Performance and Women’s Studies. They assess the forms which women as theatre-makers have chosen to explore in the age of new technology, and look at some of the different definitions of ’theory’ offered by theatre-makers and critics including Caryl Churchill, Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigiray and Julia Kristeva.
Table of 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
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