Re: Producing Women's Dramatic History. D.A. Hadfield
staging must remain flexible enough to adapt quickly to different spaces, and the performers must remain flexible enough to adapt quickly to the potentially infinite diversity in performance dynamics.
Nonetheless, whether or not a theatre company is grounded in a sense of place, it is inevitably grounded, overtly or covertly, in a political ideology. This ideological position anchors a complex network of factors that can be “read” in the study of a past production, starting with the types of theatre practitioners the company attracts, as well as the types of audiences it constitutes. Subsequently, the politics of those present can have a profound effect on both the quantity and quality of the textual remainders. These textual residues remain, their presences and absences casting light on some of the systemic restrictions and possibilities that shaped the development of a work, and some of the audience expectations or assumptions that a production did (or did not) fulfil. For example: What impact did the rehearsal process have on the final work? What sorts of changes (if any) were made to appease actors, directors, or designers? What type of audience was constituted or targeted by the marketing and advertising campaigns? What assumptions did reviewers bring to the performance? If there were any interpretive guides offered to the audience (e.g. programme notes), what sorts of interpretation did they encourage or endorse? And finally, ending at the point where much dramatic study begins: Was a “script” ever published? What status does such a script have in relation to a production? How might the format of publication affect its reading? These are important questions to consider, keeping in mind that such choices, whether they are artistic, aesthetic, or arbitrary, are also profoundly political, and can have a tremendous influence on a play’s or a production’s place in the historical narrative of Canadian theatre.
In attempting to answer these questions, I am acutely aware of the dangers inherent in the act of historiography this study will itself become. I am sympathetic to Peggy Phelan’s argument about the shortcomings of an unquestioning endorsement of a strategy that removes the cloak of censorship to allow women’s histories to (re)materialize. In her critique of the “ideology of the visible,” which she later applies specifically to feminist performance practices, Phelan notes:
There is real power in remaining unmarked; and there are serious limitations to visual representation as a political goal.
Visibility is a trap . . . ; it summons surveillance and the law, it provokes voyeurism, fetishism, the colonial/imperial appetite for possession. Yet it retains a certain political appeal. Visibility politics have practical consequences; a line can be drawn between a practice (getting something seen or read) and a theory (if you are seen it is harder for “them” to ignore you, to construct a punitive canon); the two can be reproductive. While there is a deeply ethical appeal in the desire for a more inclusive representational landscape and certainly under-represented communities can be empowered by an enhanced visibility, the terms of this visibility often enervate the putative power of these identities. (6–7)
There is a real danger that in creating another (re)presentation of these feminist productions, they will move one step closer to a visibility that will normalize them, co-opt them into mainstream discourse and neutralize the political edge that originally gave birth to them. Much of the power these productions derive comes from their status as sites of resistance to a society that defines its members fundamentally on the basis of gender, a resistance carried out, in many cases, by collapsing the distance between actor and audience and encouraging each to experience, rather than merely witness, alternatives ways of seeing, of ordering reality. Yet, by writing about a production like This Is for You, Anna in an academic context, it is necessary to somehow objectify and analyze the very subjective process necessary for any reading of this extraordinary text.
At the same time, there is also a real danger in not putting (re)presentations of these productions into circulation. Without at least some sense of history or tradition, as Powell points out, women’s voices may remain too isolated or timid to speak strongly, and can never effectively pose a challenge to the discourse of monolithic authority that has historically relegated us to the margins. Women need to “see” other women working in both artistic and administrative capacities to know that alternatives are possible, and writings are an important part of that seeing. Lynn Fernie articulates just such a need in the conclusion to her study of director Svetlana Zylin, a woman whose life has largely been left blank by the Canadian theatre industry to which she has contributed so much:
In terms of women’s activity in theatre, I’m left feeling, after a glimpse at a decade of one woman’s history, that we desperately need documentation. Without even a partial documentation of work, events, strategies and their reception in various communities, it is impossible to understand the ways our work affects or is ignored by the larger culture; and it is impossible for us to formulate new models and strategies to counteract the marginalization of women. We need published documentation covering significant periods of time, even given the problems of selectivity, framing and the tendency towards closure of created history. If we remain an oral culture with only hazy memories of isolated events, it is inevitable that each decade of women will continue to believe the myth that excellence or hard work alone will be rewarded regardless of gender. (70)
In Fernie’s experience, activity without history is ultimately not very helpful. Even acknowledging the difficulties and imperfections in the writing of history, the benefits outweigh the risks.
Tracy Davis articulates a position that seems to take into consideration Fernie’s concern with the need to create some type of historical record with Phelan’s very valid concerns about the politics of visibility when she proposes that the “feminist historian’s task is to address the censoring impulse, to validate the experience, and to connect the woman with the work and the work with the world at large” (66). Somehow, women’s histories must be allowed to take place, without simply inscribing them into male-dictated modes of representation, where they can be comfortably absorbed.
Like feminist theatre which needs to dismantle monologic culture without replacing it with one of its own, a feminist theatre history like this one should not try to create a single, definitive historical narrative structure within which all the accessible textual remainders of these productions can be “accounted for.” The current exigencies of historiography virtually demand that study must begin with a product, a textual artefact that can be read, yet many of these productions function at a level that explicitly privileges process over final product. This study must interrogate these historiographic limits, to examine different types of texts for evidence that there may be, in fact, a way to create a historiographical “product” that preserves the interest and dynamics of the process, while at the same time itself resisting the academic impulse towards definitive closure and commodification of knowledge. This book should be positioned within the same network of historiographic texts as the productions it studies, like Derrida’s analogy of the set theory of discourse, not a work “dominating the ensemble of this field and stating the truth about it,” but one of the “elements of that ensemble, parts of an open corpus, examples of events” (Derrida, Limited 39). Such a strategy is possible because the residual texts that remain after a production or performance event has passed can never fully re-present the reality of the event itself: “[T]he remainder, although indispensible, is never that of a full or fulfilling presence: it is a differential structure. . .” (Derrida, Limited 53). The price of remaining (iterability) is irreducible difference, mirrored in the gaps within and between texts, the (no) places where excess takes (no) place. Indeed, it is at the sites of these excesses that Peggy Phelan situates the possibility of writing feminist performance history:
In writing the unmarked I mark it, inevitably. In seeing it I am marked by it. But because what I do not see and do not write is so much more vast than what I do it is impossible to “ruin” the unmarked.. . .
This particular cultural moment exerts an urgent pressure to account for what cannot be reproduced. As those artists who have dedicated themselves to performance continually disappear . . . it becomes increasingly imperative to find a way to remember the undocumental, unreproducible art they made. (27, 31)
In writing the text of these texts, I will examine the gaps into which the unspeakable disappears, thereby inevitably opening more gaps. It is in the opening of these