Body Doubles, Babel\u27s Voices: Katie Mitchell\u27s \u3cem\u3eIphigenia at Aulis\u3c/em\u3e and the Theatre of Sacrifice

What happens to a body when circumstance demands it enact its own forgetting? What reaction in turn does a body in the process of violent self-erasure prompt in its spectators? These and related questions propel my investigation of Katie Mitchell\u27s 2004 National Theatre production of Euripedes\u27 Iphigenia at Aulis. Mitchell\u27s chilling representation of Iphigenia\u27s final moments, during which the young girl speaks with apparently patriotic fervour her willingness to be murdered for her nation\u27s sake, embeds the very loss that such a performance of sacrifice typically elides. The result: two bodies collide on stage before our eyes - the compliant, self-effacing body sacrifice demands, and the physically and emotionally overwhelmed body sacrifice denies. Mitchell\u27s practice of \u27radical naturalism\u27, an acting technique that straddles Stanislavsky and Brecht and infects her stage with an uncanny critique of realism even as it inhabits the genre with clockwork precision, works together with innovative staging techniques in this production in order to force an uncomfortable proximity between audiences, actors and characters. The overwhelming affect performed by Hattie Morahan as Iphigenia, combined with the uncanny echo of its amplification via an onstage microphone that appears to give Morahan\u27s voice a body of its own, stage Mitchell\u27s challenge to contemporary spectators: can we reassess the codes and attitudes by which we recognize and receive realist performance? More importantly, can we re-imagine what it might mean, at the theatre, to bear witness to a body captured in the moment of its most profound loss

What Feminists Do When Things Get Ruff

This past spring I wrote a post for my teaching blog about learning to live with failure – to experience what it means to mess up, or to be messed up, without needing desperately to get outside of that feeling, to move quickly on and away from the terror of what seems in the moment like a shattering personal disaster.1 This is a skill that artists and students especially need: getting back on the proverbial horse after corpsing on stage, or after failing that crucial term paper, can be utterly gut-wrenching, madness-inducing stuff. Then, literally a few days after publishing that post, I received an extraordinary object lesson in what living with failure, with personal disaster, and moving slowly and publicly (and spectacularly, and hilariously) through that experience can look like

\u3cem\u3eBlasted\u3c/em\u3e’s Hysteria: Rape, Realism, and the Thresholds of the Visible

A curious blind spot remains in the critical response to Sarah Kane’s Blasted : the rape of Cate by Ian. In a play famous for its onstage violence, why is this rape, one of its pivotal moments of brutality, left unstaged? My article seeks to worry this lacuna by exploring the theoretical and historical dimensions of the ‘‘missing’’ in Kane’s play. I argue that Kane’s representation of Cate’s rape as missing signals both her engagement with the history of rape’s representation – an elusive, evasive history rather than an outrageous, in-yer-face one – as well as a deft understanding of how the ‘‘missing’’ operates as realism’s menace, the ghost of what realist representations must garrison away in order to instantiate their truth-claims. I frame my reading of Kane’s critique of both genre and history by exploring how Blasted charges us, as contemporary spectators of realism, to recognize the schism between knowledge and the eye, the limits of our powers of sight

Artifacting an Intercultural Nation: Theatre Replacement\u27s \u3cem\u3eBIOBOXES\u3c/em\u3e

At first, BIOBOXES, by Vancouver\u27s Theatre Replacement, seems like straightforward multiculti fare—theatre celebrating Canada\u27s cultural mosaic. But then you step inside the tiny boxes and find yourself a spectator to your own investments in multicultural performance

The Line, the Crack, and the Possibility of Architecture: Figure, Ground, Feminist Performance

How and where do architecture and performance collide? Theatre studies has been, over the course of the last decade, increasingly interested in the relationship between stage and space; that inter- est, however, has primarily been figured by marrying theories of human geography with studies of theatrical performance. “The Line, the Crack, and the Possibility of Architecture” asks what it might mean to explore the spaces of performance through the lens of another plastic art—the art of building—and investigates what the discourses of architecture theory, both classical and (post)modern, might have to say to those of us who study the vicissitudes of feminist performance. The article tracks a figure I call the guerrilla actress-architect; she uses her performing body to reshape the plastic spaces of her world and asks us to consider the possibility that feminist performance may, in fact, be a kind of living architectural practice