Performing Women

Argues that critics have misunderstood the relationship between male playwrights and women's roles because they have neglected the interpretive skills of the actresses playing those roles. Analyzes hypothetical as well as historical performances to demonstrate how women have invented acting styles to portray women created by playwrights from Ibsen to Beckett. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Examines the 10 key characteristics of today's winning leaders. Includes the voices of experience, some 70 women who have participated in the Judy Project, a leadership program run by the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto that has trained 400 women for future leadership positions. These women tell compelling, first-person stories about ambition, courage, and the hard choices they've made to manage their personal and professional lives in the real world of business.--Book jacket.

Some feminists criticize male playwrights for misrepresenting and thereby victimizing women through patriarchal narratives; other feminists applaud selected male playwrights as creators of "universal" women's roles. In this bold and imaginative book, Gay Gibson Cima delineates previously unacknowledged complexities in the relationship between male playwrights and female characters in the modern theatre. That relationship has been misinterpreted, she maintains, because the contributions of female actors and the variations in their actual performance conditions and styles are too often ignored. Taking into account hypothetical as well as historical performances of works by representative male playwrights from Ibsen to Beckett, Cima sheds important new light on the acting styles invented by women to create female characters on stage. Changes in performance style, Cima observes, may alter conventional modes of viewing and disrupt behavioral codes generated by a patriarchal cultural system. Performing Women is essential reading for theatre critics and historians, feminist theorists, theatre professionals and amateurs, and others interested in film and the stage.

Alison Oddey's interviews with prominent performing women span generations, cultures, perspectives, practice and the best part of the twentieth century, telling various stories collectively. Stand-ups, 'classic' actresses, film and television personalities, experimental and 'alternative' practitioners discuss why they want to perform, what motivates them, and how their personal history has contributed to their desires to perform. Oddey's critical introductory and concluding chapters analyse both historical and cultural contexts and explore themes arising from interviews. These include sense of identity, acting as playing (recapturing and revisiting childhood), displacement of roots, performing, motherhood and 'being', performing comedy, differences between theatre, film and television performance, attitudes towards and relationships with audiences, and working with directors. The prominent subtext of motherhood reveals a consciousness of split subjectivities with and beyond performance.

This book takes on a key problem in the history of drama: the ‘exceptional’ staging of the life of Catherine of Siena by a female actor and a female patron in 1468 Metz. Exploring the lives and performances of these previously anonymous women, the book brings the elusive figure of the female performer to centre stage. It integrates new approaches to drama, gender and patronage with a performance methodology to explore how the women of fifteenth-century Metz enacted varied kinds of performance that extended beyond the theatre. For example, decades before the 1468 play, Joan of Arc returned from the grave in the form of an impersonator named Claude. Offering a new paradigm of female performance that positions women at the core of public culture, Performing women is essential reading for scholars of pre-modern women and drama, and is also relevant to lecturers and students of late-medieval performance, religion and memory.

Women have always been the muses who inspire the creativity of men, but how do women become the creators of art themselves? This was the challenge faced by Latin American women who aspired to write in the 1920s and 1930s. Though women's roles were opening up during this time, women writers were not automatically welcomed by the Latin American literary avant-gardes, whose male members viewed women's participation in tertulias (literary gatherings) and publications as uncommon and even forbidding. How did Latin American women writers, celebrated by male writers as the "New Eve" but distrusted as fellow creators, find their intellectual homes and fashion their artistic missions? In this innovative book, Vicky Unruh explores how women writers of the vanguard period often gained access to literary life as public performers. Using a novel, interdisciplinary synthesis of performance theory, she shows how Latin American women's work in theatre, poetry declamation, song, dance, oration, witty display, and bold journalistic self-portraiture helped them craft their public personas as writers and shaped their singular forms of analytical thought, cultural critique, and literary style. Concentrating on eleven writers from Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela, Unruh demonstrates that, as these women identified themselves as instigators of change rather than as passive muses, they unleashed penetrating critiques of projects for social and artistic modernization in Latin America.

Performing Female Blackness examines race, gender, and nation in Black life using critical race, feminist and performance studies methodologies. This book examines what private and public performances of female blackness reveal about race, gender, and nation and considers how the land widely known as Canada shapes these performances. By exploring Black expressive culture in familial, literary, and performance settings, Naila Keleta-Mae theorizes that “perpetual performance” forces people who are read as female and Black to always be figuratively on stage regardless of cultural, political, or historical contexts. Written in poetry, prose, and journal form and drawing from the author’s own life and artistic works, Performing Female Blackness is ideal not only for scholars, educators, and students of the humanities, social sciences, and fine arts but also for artists and the general public too.

Women in Performance: Repurposing Failure charts the renewed popularity of intersectional feminism, gender, race and identity politics in contemporary Western experimental theatre, comedy and performance through the featured artists’ ability to strategically repurpose failure. Failure has provided a popular frame through which to theorise recent avantgarde performance, even though the work rarely acknowledges stakes tend to be higher for women than men. This book analyses the imperative work of a number of female, non-binary and trans* practitioners who resist the postmodern doctrine of ‘post-identity’ and attempt to foster a sense of agency on stage. By using feminism as a critical lens, Gorman interrogates received ideas about performance failure and negotiates contradictions between contemporary white feminism, intersectional feminism, gender and sexuality. Women in Performance: Repurposing Failure reveals how performance has the power to both observe and reject contemporary feminist and postmodern theory, rendering this text an invaluable resource for theatre and performance studies students and those grappling with the disciplinary tensions between feminism, gender, queer and trans* studies.

This book explores the shifting identity of the female performer in India, starting from the late 19th century to the early years of independence, through the study of autobiographies and memoirs. It attempts to make visible the actress figure by entering the history of performance, guided by the voice of the female performer. The discussion on performing woman in this book spans across the performing traditions of the tawaif, actresses in public theatre, early Indian film actresses, and actresses in the Indian People’s Theatre and the Prithvi Theatre.