Toward Unmediated Performance: Jane Wagner and Lily Tomlin's The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe
Thea Fitz-James
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THEA FITZ-JAMES is part academic and part theatre practitioner. She is a PhD candidate in Performance Studies at York University, looking at textiles in feminist activism and performance. Thea has presented papers with Canadian Association for Theatre Research, Theatre Library Association, Association for Theatre of Higher Education, Hemispheric Institute’s Graduate Student Institute, and has been published in Canadian Theatre Review and Feminist Frontiers. She co-organized a Graduate Student Symposium on Performative Archives titled “Performing the Accidental Archive” in 2015, and a panel on Performing Nasty Feminism for CATR in 2018.
Thea is an avid fringe performer and performance artist. She has curated performance festivals for the Cucalorus Festival, performed with FADO and Summerworks, and is the current co-Artistic Director for hub14. She is the co-creater and curator of the queer cabaret, Dark Day Monday. Her solo performance piece, NAKED LADIES, made international news when it was banned in Singapore in 2017, and her artistic work has been discussed in TRiC and CTR. Thea Fitz-James identifies as part of the queer community (as a pan/bi sexual), and part of the ‘mad’ community, as manic, and is a white, cis female settler. |
Abstract
In her project A Woman's Work Is Never Done, artist Eliza Bennett offers an explicit critique of the performance of the feminized hand, and female body, and historical embroidery. A photograph created in 2012, and a film made in 2014, A Woman's Work Is Never Done is an evocative, painful, and historically rich meeting of object and body. Using her hand as canvas, Bennett embroiders into her skin. This piece invokes a performative and phenomenological experience, not only between Bennett and her object, but between the image of Bennett’s hand and our own. This paper explores the performance of ‘woman’s work’ and the domestic through Bennet’s A Woman’s Work is Never Done. Combining a historical look at embroidery, along with a performance studies and material culture studies reading of Bennet’s intervention, this paper will explore how craft and the female body come to disrupt concepts of the domestic sphere. Bennett’s piece “challenge[s] the pre-conceived notion that 'women's work' is light and easy. She aims to represent “the effects of hard work arising from employment in low paid 'ancillary' jobs, such as cleaning, caring and catering, all traditionally considered to be ‘women's work’” (Bennett “Needle and Thread” 20). All these tensions meet at/in the moment the needle meets the hand, and in piercing, evokes the pain of women’s work, of historical embroidery, and the subjugated feminized body.
In her project A Woman's Work Is Never Done, artist Eliza Bennett offers an explicit critique of the performance of the feminized hand, and female body, and historical embroidery. A photograph created in 2012, and a film made in 2014, A Woman's Work Is Never Done is an evocative, painful, and historically rich meeting of object and body. Using her hand as canvas, Bennett embroiders into her skin. This piece invokes a performative and phenomenological experience, not only between Bennett and her object, but between the image of Bennett’s hand and our own. This paper explores the performance of ‘woman’s work’ and the domestic through Bennet’s A Woman’s Work is Never Done. Combining a historical look at embroidery, along with a performance studies and material culture studies reading of Bennet’s intervention, this paper will explore how craft and the female body come to disrupt concepts of the domestic sphere. Bennett’s piece “challenge[s] the pre-conceived notion that 'women's work' is light and easy. She aims to represent “the effects of hard work arising from employment in low paid 'ancillary' jobs, such as cleaning, caring and catering, all traditionally considered to be ‘women's work’” (Bennett “Needle and Thread” 20). All these tensions meet at/in the moment the needle meets the hand, and in piercing, evokes the pain of women’s work, of historical embroidery, and the subjugated feminized body.
| etudesdec2019fitzjames.pdf |
