Editorial

I am trying to think, to write, and my body keeps getting in my way. It is too cold in here. My shoes are new and they chafe. I have a hangnail. I can’t find my glasses. With all due respect to Descartes, my body is more than a neutral container for my mind. In opposition to Cartesian dualism, which proposes a separation between mind and body, contemporary thinking supported by advances in cognitive neuroscience now tells us that consciousness is embodied, that is, the physical characteristics of my biological self as well as my material environmental context have a direct effect on what I think and how I feel. For example, a recent study suggests that intentionally strong action can impel intentionally strong cognitive function, in this case empathy. Participants who grasped a pen firmly in their hands, strongly engaging the muscles, were more generous in writing cheques for charity than those who dangled a pen lightly in their fingers (Hung and Labroo). Similar correlations between body engagement and conscious thought manifest through seeing or hearing others perform related actions even if my own body is passive. Mirror neurons excite corresponding areas of the viewer’s brain that match the active brain areas of the actor (Thomas). Linking the action of staged bodies to the understanding of audience bodies in these ways, theatre presents a profound opportunity to explore the interrelated experiences of bodies in the world.

As Susan Bordo writes, “The body—what we eat, how we dress, the daily rituals through which we attend to the body—is a medium of culture” (165). The body is a surface “on which the central rules, hierarchies, and even metaphysical commitments of culture are inscribed and thus reinforced through the concrete language of the body” (Bordo 165). It is through the body, through its appearance, habits, gestures, posture, movement, and adornment, that we enact sociopolitical self-projections. For each of the performers and performances reviewed here, the staged body as a locus of social power and control is the object of consideration of the work. Rather than establishing an indirect representational relationship between the performer’s body and some other fictional body elsewhere as the vehicle of artistic communication, the actual bodies appearing (or in one case significantly not appearing) are themselves in a direct way what the performance is about.

In our first piece, Heather Fitzsimmons Frey mimics the episodic faux documentary style of the cabaret performance Miss Toronto Acts Back created by the DitchWitch Brigade, directed by Antje Budde. Spanning more than six decades, the history of the Miss Toronto beauty pageant provides the material used by the group to humorously and subversively skewer socially imposed roles for women over this period. In her review, Fitzsimmons Frey reflects self-consciously on her discomfort and her laughter dually positioned both as culpable audience voyeur and invaded subject of the reversed gaze.

Conventional ideals of beauty, specifically the otherworldly golden hair of fairytale princess Rapunzel, also attract the attention of visual artist and performer Chika Modum. In her performance identity: borrowed, enlarged, projected, traced and modified at the University of Calgary, Modum literally rewrites the story of Rapunzel/Chika, tracing and mischievously changing the words, first on a white wall and then on her own white dress, both of which she ultimately abandons. Reviewer RICHard SMOLinski considers the physical struggle of the performer to complete these tasks and, by extension, the challenge of effecting an escape from the invasive and restricting identity values superscribed on bodies by language.

White Rabbit, Red Rabbit by Nassim Soleimanpour is premised on the fact that at the moment of performance the playwright, unable to travel having been denied a passport by the Iranian government, uses the play to travel virtually. Casting the solo actor as “Nassim,” the essentially absent playwright-body becomes present each night through a trick of theatrical possession. A popular global phenomenon, White Rabbit, Red Rabbit saw many productions from its premiere in the summer of 2011 to the present; however, when Soleimanpour was granted a passport and attended his own production in February 2013, the play experienced a radical sea change that shakes the performance to...