“Knowledge and taste go together”: Postdramatic Theatre, Écriture Féminine, and Feminist Politics

Abstract

This article contributes to the emerging field of feminist approaches to postdramatic theatre. Through documenting and discussing my practice-as-research performance Rings, I suggest that there is an analogous relationship between postdramatic poetics and Helene Cixous’s ecriture feminine in regard to how both reformulate masculine-coded paradigms of knowledge. Rings is the result of a practical research process that adapted Cixous’s articulations on prose writing into theatre. The source material for this was her turn towards thingness and Heideggerian phenomenology following her experience of Clarice Lispector’s work in 1978. The outcomes of the practical research indicate that through producing an experience of an object’s thingness or being-in-the-world, theatre, like Cixous’s prose, is able to envision an alternative, feminine epistemological approach. By testing the practical findings against theories of the postdramatic, I go on to propose that postdramatic practices too have the potential to produce this kind of knowing. As such, this article argues that postdramatic theatre might have a particular appeal for feminist theatre makers and scholars, while also demonstrating that Cixous’s theories are of continuing relevance to feminist theatre studies.