Abstract
In this chapter, I explore the links among gender, space, and labour at the modern theatre (roughly 1880 to the present). Following cultural geographers Henri Lefebvre and Doreen Massey, I argue that we need to recognise the work done at the theatre as the social, cultural, and political work of making space (both at and beyond the theatre), and that we need to recognise that labour as gendered. Reorienting our understanding of theatrical labour to account more fully for this work of ‘spacing’ affects how we understand what kinds of bodies have been given the right to occupy the places of theatrical representation, and of theatrical creation, and to what ends. This reorientation will also, in turn, make the routine, often disregarded work of spectatorship visible as a spatial orientation with material and ideological implications, particularly for women.
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Notes
- 1.
For more on woman-as-‘ground’ and the idea of the ‘world picture’ in the context of theatre and performance making and criticism, see Levin. For more on the long-standing historical relationship between women and architectural decoration (and men as building’s ideal geometry), see Anderson.
- 2.
Jill Dolan’s Feminist Spectator as Critic explains spectatorship as one pole of representation’s ideological labour, and theorises the feminist spectator as a figure capable of demystifying the work of spectatorship even when the apparatus of representation would naturalise it. See Dolan pp. 1–18.
- 3.
For more on what I mean by the ‘performed, social construction of identity’ in relation to gender, see Butler, Gender Trouble and Undoing Gender.
- 4.
Benjamin’s flaneurie is one of the hallmarks of his unfinished magnum opus, The Arcades Project. The concept of the flaneur is not his, however; he develops the figure from Baudelaire.
- 5.
See Solga, Theory for Theatre Studies: Space (pp. 48–53) for some of the ways in which the extra-theatrical spaces of theatres both modern and early modern subtly influence how we are cued to understand what happens on stage. For more on how class and social rank have historically mediated the experience of entering theatrical spaces, see Carlson 142–9; for more on how philosophical thinking through the Enlightenment helped to orient theatregoers visually and intellectually towards the stage, and thereby to mobilise what Peggy Phelan calls ‘the performative quality of all seeing,’ see Gobert, pp. 121–62.
- 6.
‘Stage’ realism and naturalism differ somewhat from realism and naturalism in the traditions of painting and music, for example. For more, see Rebellato and Solga.
- 7.
I explore the history of the feminist critique of stage realism in detail in Theatre & Feminism. See also Diamond.
- 8.
This production is available to stream on Digital Theatre Plus; I recommend watching the final scene before reading further, if you have access.
- 9.
Mitchell’s work, in both Live Cinema and classical naturalism, has been extensively documented and analysed by Fowler.
- 10.
I discuss settler colonialism in relation to this production in section three of Theory for Theatre Studies: Space. For more on the term and its significance, see Snelgrove et al.
- 11.
Read more about Frankland’s Galatea project at beforeshakespeare.com.
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Solga, K. (2022). Gender and the Aesthetics of Occupation: Making Room for Women’s Labour at the Theatre. In: Halferty, J.P., Leeney, C. (eds) Analysing Gender in Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85574-1_13
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