Feminist Futures?
Theatre, Performance, Theory
Geraldine Harris and Elaine Aston

Isbn: 1403945322

Published in hardback – April 2006 by Palgrave Macmillan as part of the Performance Interventions series

Feminist Futures?: Theatre, Performance, Theory makes a timely contribution to the debates regarding future possibilities for feminism, theatre and performance. An excellent, cross-generational mix of theatre scholars (Sue-Ellen Case, Dee Heddon, Meenakshi Ponnuswami, Janelle Reinelt, Joanne Tompkins) and practitioners (Anna Furse, Leslie Hill and Helen Paris, SuAndi) engage in lively, cutting edge critical debates on topics that include citizenship, autobiography, cultural heritage and political agency as circulating in contemporary feminism and performance. Essential reading for students and scholars in Theatre and Performance Studies as well as Women/Gender Studies.

Reviews

'a resolutely interrogatory body of essays... Feminist Futures? is an admirable inquiry, one question mark that inevitably raises many more.'

Laura Baggaley, Times Literary Supplement

Performance Practice and Process:

Contemporary [Women] Practitioners

Geraldine Harris and Elaine Aston

Monograph arising from the practice- research events connected with this project with chapters on Bobby Baker, Curious, SuAndi, Sarah Daniels, Split Britches, Rebecca Prichard, Vayu Naidu, Jenny Eclair)

Also published by Palgrave Macmillan (expected 2007)

Performing Words

Film documentation of a four-day workshop with Gilly Adams and Geddy Aniksdal

(Lancaster University, March 29 – April 2 2004)

This film provides an insight into the methods used in the Performing Words practice based research event run by Gilly Adams and Geddy Aniksdal at Lancaster University in spring 2004. The workshop explores the connection between the language of the body and spoken language in drama, providing strategies for generating performance text out of physical action.

The film follows the participants' progress as they move through the various stages of the workshop:

•  Warming up

•  Introducing the framework

•  Characters and physical scores

•  Finding a voice

•  Writing characters

•  Structured Improvisations

•  Presentations.

Gilly Adams is a director, workshop leader and dramatist who specialises in working with writers. She was the Artistic Director of the new writing company, Made in Wales, for more than a decade and is currently the director of BBC Wales' Writers' Unit and a radio drama producer. She is also an associate artist of the celebratory arts company Welfare State International.

Geddy Aniksdal has been with Grenland Friteater, Norway's independent theatre company, since 1981 and has participated as an actor in all the theatre's main productions. She also works as a director and pedagogue and has given numerous workshops on actor training. She has toured her solo performance Blue is the Smoke of War internationally.

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Split Britches

Film documentation of a four-day workshop with Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver

(Lancaster University, January 12 – January 15 2006)

This film records a four-day workshop run by Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver of Split Britches at Lancaster University in January 2006. Lois and Peggy lead the participants through exercises and processes that they use in making work. The workshop is structured through a series of categories that summarise their approach:

•  Questions and Obsessions

•  Creative Truth

•  Surprise and Impulse

•  Fantasy and Layering

The DVD also includes interviews with Peggy and Lois

Lois Weaver and Peggy Shaw are two of the co-founders of Split Britches, a Lesbian Feminist Theatre Company that since 1981 has edified and wildly entertained everyone with their vaudevillian satirical gender-bending performances. They describe their work in this way:
'Our work is rooted in popular culture, but positioned against it.... It is about a community of outsiders, queers, eccentrics. It is feminist because it encourages the imaginative potential in everyone and lesbian because it takes the presence of lesbian on stage as a given.'

Since 1980 Split Britches meaningfully extended the post-1960s political theatre mandate of combining art and life; they rip apart theatrical “convention” exposing it to the bone and creating a new aesthetic combining the trash street aesthetic and drag of Hot Peaches, the story-weaving of Spiderwoman, and the live-art Brechtian exposure of what is real now, never letting you forget they are performing as themselves. They explore butch-femme stylistics and, in every piece, women's rage, desire, poverty, hope and love.

(Laurie Stone, New York City Village Voice)

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