Reflective Practitioner

Been thinking about what I need from my performers and what having 3 women will do to the work conceptually and theoretically.....

‘Gender is an act…which is open to splitting, self parody, self-criticism, and those hyperbolic exhibitions of “the natural” that, in their very exaggeration, reveal its fundamentally phantasmic status’. (Butler 1990)

Butler asserts that gender is performative and is socially constructed; it is not natural behaviour or instinct but is learned and modified behaviour. This also falls in line with the postmodern view that the body is not natural but that it is modified, encoded and constructed through social and cultural norms. If we are to accept this point of view and look at it in terms of my performance, then the actual sex of the performers becomes irrelevant (theoretically). We should be able to explore and examine the notion of woman and trauma by looking at the ways those in which these ideas are constructed and performed; not just in the case of representing woman but also in representing man-or at least our western understanding of what constitutes those bodies and ideas. We (my cast and myself), need to ask ourselves, what is ‘woman’, what is trauma, or more specifically ‘her’ trauma but also what is man and what is his relationship to the construction of ‘woman’ and trauma? How can we represent and challenge these complex constructions? Our challenge in the process will be to address these questions-and the sex of the performers is the subject but not an issue.

Jane, M. Usser takes up this argument in her seminal text of 1997: Fantasies of Femininity: Reframing the Boundaries of Sex.

‘In the course of examining how women manage to reconcile contradictions in becoming ‘woman’ I have interviewed many women over the last five years, asking them how they feel about being ‘woman’ and how they negotiate the boundaries of ‘sex’. I have also interviewed men. It is a point of some controversy, but I would argue that to understand what it is to be ‘woman’ we also have to look at what it is to be ‘man’, at men’s fantasies, fears and desires in relation to women, and at their own (mythical) phallic sexuality. This is not purely to include men or argue that any theoretical or empirical analysis is incomplete if it focuses solely on women. It is to argue that femininity is irrevocably situated in relation to the psychic and mythical forces that determine what it is to be ‘man’, sited in relation to the fictions and fantasies that underlie so much of what is dominant and positioned as truth in the phallocentric sphere’. (Usser 1997: 5)

This is very interesting in terms of the themes of Siren Song, as well as the dilemma of performers. It validates my initial creative desire for a male perfomer to be included, as it provides the other by which to explore the notions of woman and trauma. We in the western world have a deep rooted phallocentrically constructed notion of gender and so it is my desire that a male presence be included in Siren Song in order to rigorously explore the notion of gender construction and its relationship with trauma. I will keep trying to find male performers but if I am unable to secure one, I am concerned that it will eschew my creative intentions for the work.