Punk-Pop Aesthetic, Devised Rendering, and Material Resistance in Spiderwoman Theatre

The applied, aesthetic components of La Mama Experimental Theatre Club remain crucial to this troupe and its founders, Gloria Miguel and Muriel Miguel, as a rehearsal and financial space that permits this company's explicit and experimental interrogation of Indigenous femininity While histories...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:New England theatre journal 2023-01, Vol.34, p.111-121
Main Author: Sturges, Melissa Lin
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Aesthetics
Audiences
Choreography
Feminism
Popular music
Psychoanalysis
Rhythm
Spectatorship
Theater
Violence
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Summary:The applied, aesthetic components of La Mama Experimental Theatre Club remain crucial to this troupe and its founders, Gloria Miguel and Muriel Miguel, as a rehearsal and financial space that permits this company's explicit and experimental interrogation of Indigenous femininity While histories of this lexicon remain complex, La Mama co-produced Spiderwoman Theatre's and Aanmitaagzi's full-scale production of Material Witness at Trent University in 2017. To borrow the term from Julia Kristeva, as co-opted by Teticia Alvarado, Abjection, as an aesthetic strategy that reverberates in the social realm, emerges from an engagement with the scholarship of feminist and queer theorists who grapple with the legacies of psychoanalysis to reflect on projects of subjectivation as well as critical race scholars and their writing on abjection and specifically racialized minoritarian populations.2 The critical politics of minoritarian abjection press firmly on the analytic of this production, which is to some extent alienated by the restless aloofness of dance and music in its synthesis of a political rhythm. [...]the audience waits with bated breath. With slow, circular movements, Du Tu Kapsus compresses the stage into her central position, and, with keening gesture, she endows the performance space ritually.4 The script articulates this moment with specificity: "(Seated) Blessing with breath: r) Head down, blowing inside circle in the ground from SR to SL 2) Send breath just above ground. 3) Looking out into the audience. 4) To the skyT The reduction of the improvisational to the numerical in the stage directions carries with it a reaffirmation of deliberation.
ISSN:1050-9720