Читать книгу Re: Producing Women's Dramatic History - D.A. Hadfield - Страница 12

1. Ric Knowles articulates a slightly different form of what is ultimately this same desire to experience the “reality” of a performance unmediated by historiographic textuality. In his attempt to challenge the hegemonic canonicity of “literary” drama, he suggests including live performances as a necessary part of (Canadian) drama courses. His response to the difficulties posed by historiographic textuality is to eschew the literary mode altogether, “to resist the textual, literary, and universalist biases inherent in the reading of published texts, by considering performances as texts and by taking advantage of opportunities presented by local productions,” (“Voices” 109) where students can presumably (arguably) “read” these performances without the mediating influence of other people’s texts. While this is a potentially useful strategy, it nonetheless maintains the definition of the genre firmly along the text/performance axis, without addressing the representational implications that will still attend the students’ constructions of the “text” of the live performance event.

2. Sometimes, the desire becomes less implicit. In the summer of 1997, The Edge Festival in Toronto premiered a play by Stephen Johnson called Juba, an artistic interpretation of this very impulse to access the “real” of a historical performance (or in this case, performer). Johnson, a tenured academic, admits he “wrote the play, based on my research into this particular figure.. . . It was all quite autobiographical—that is, the protagonist is a contemporary historian trying to get past the documents and to the figure. And failing. The more scholarly approaches have found their ways out in conference papers, and one publication.” Even Johnson’s own informed, scholarly approach to his research couldn’t entirely displace the desire to connect with a past unmediated by text.

3. It is important not to conflate the term “woman” with “feminist.” While I do not consider the two terms entirely interchangeable, they are often made to function as such in the texts that I have examined. Ideally, I would use the term “feminist” to refer to anyone (female or male) who deals self-consciously with issues surrounding the construction and interpellation of “women” at any historical moment, with a view to ending the arbitrary, gender-based subordination of women. In effect, especially in theatre, virtually any woman who achieves a significant historical visibility tends to be immediately labelled as “feminist,” no matter how unself-conscious or un-feminist her work and methods might be. Once attached, the “feminist” label also functions in public discourse to demarcate a certain mode of reading or to imply a certain function that the work may or may not satisfy.

4. Powell explains a loophole in British copyright law that allowed a playwright to “appropriat[e], without compensation or acknowledgement, the plot and characters, even the title of a successful work of fiction” (98). While this loophole could theoretically disadvantage male as well as female authors, women’s greater presence among the ranks of successful novelists, coupled with their relative lack of access to the possibility of theatrical production, effectively meant that this legal peculiarity had a much more deleterious effect on women.