Personal Theatre

Abstract

Since women have generally been confined to the domestic domain and denied admittance to the public arena, their performance space has often been within their houses. Their focus has been directed to the personal networks of family and friends, creating kinds of experience which did not lend themselves to articulation in the public figures of rhetoric and oratory. For this reason, some women have developed a different tradition of dialogue from that of men. These women have excelled in the personal forms of dialogue: letters, in the sphere of written communication, and conversation, in that of oral. This personal dialogue is created by partners in production rather than by an absent author who designs it for production in front of a reading or listening audience. It is a dialogue built on mutuality and intersubjectivity, eliminating any sense of formal distance or representation. Personal dialogue is not removed from life, so it operates not by mimesis but by enactment. It is an engaged dialogue, rooted in everyday life, rather than a mimetic dialogue, aimed at lasting repetition. This is the dialogue of present time, caught up in the movement of history and development without the secure fourth wall of formal closure.