Performing Lives

Abstract

In autobiographical performance, the self is source and the body speaks; situated at a threshold (as a discourse of remembering and becoming) autobiographical performance is a means of articulating, exploring and interrogating identities and subjectivities through strategies which use the visual, physical and kinaesthetic to stage experiences and perspectives that have struggled to find voice through other forms (Heddon, 2008; Phelan, 1993). Since the 1960s experimental performance and feminism have engaged in productive dialogue, developing new vocabularies to articulate hidden histories and gendered experiences as the personal became political and public. Carolee Schneeman’s 1975 performance, Interior Scroll, involved her pulling a roll of text from her vagina, a powerful intervention and a statement and materialization of Hélène Cixous’s declaration that women should ‘write the body’ (1976). A wide range of performance artists use autobiographical material in their work, finding an appropriate form for personal content: Laurie Anderson, Annie Sprinkle, Holly Hughes, Rachel Rosenthal, Lenora Champagne, Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver, to name but a few. In the United Kingdom, similarly, performers such as Bobby Baker, Leslie Hill and Helen Paris use solo performance to stage their experiences as women, while others use autobiographical performance to explore marginalized sexuality or race, such as Robbie McCauley, Tim Miller, Ron Athey and Adrian Howells.