Más allá de los cuerpos dóciles. El teatro de Eve Ensler como proyecto ‘boaliano’

Abstract

In an interview that was published in 2001, U.S-born playwright Eve Ensler stated that her mission as an author and performer was to raise the consciousness of her audience about atrocity and injustice. Most of her plays, including the well-known and often staged The Vagina Monologues (1998), are devoted to the denunciation of atrocity and injustice as they are inscribed on the female body. In Ensler’s production, women and girls are placed at the narrative and dramaturgical centre, and their bodies become the source of anger and rage, but also of self-knowledge, rebellion, pleasure, and sisterhood. Within a potentially Boalian framework which intends to transform the audience, encouraging it to assume the role of an agent, Ensler articulates proposals that give voice to the female body as sexed cultural matter, in the line of The Good Body (2001), Fur Is Back (2007), and I Am an Emotional Creature (2010). My objective here will be to try and prove that Ensler’s theatrical praxis has a place within Augusto Boal’s (1931- 2009) universe of the Theatre of the Oppressed, and that her work is also developed around the aim of overcoming the Foucaultian concept of a ‘docile body’, urging girls and women to empower themselves precisely from a locus that the dominant culture has tried to objectify and control through its discursive practices: their body.