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Reviews of the ehildren in the play lining up according to the color of their skin, lightest to darkest). She also discusses another play that appears in a previous chapter, Vb" and the Truth Commission, which is a key text in Marcia Blumberg 's essay. While that essay was primarily coneerned with the questions of testimony and truth-telling in the context of South Africa, Gilbert asks how students may experience this play in another country. Beeause the play uses puppets for the witnesses, Gilbert argues that by finding various ways for students to re-present the scene, either with their own bodies as puppet-bodies or with makeshift puppets, the teacher might evoke "a sensory, embodied experience of aherity that helps to establish the distance between the words and the actor who now voices them as a cultural gap. In this manner, difference is maintained in the proeess of engagement" (335). This essay is a fitting culmination for this important new book. Following Gayatri Spivak's injunction in The Post-Colonial Critic for people to do their homework and then enter into the cultural arena rather than sit out because of fear to offend, Gilbert offers a way to respond to the stimulating challenge of this book's essays. In offering to pass on these ideas in our classrooms, she ruels Maufort and Bellarsi's goal: the ongoing discourse and redefinition or Anglophone drama and theatre. PETA TAIT, ed. Body Shawls: Australian Viewings of Live Perjimmllll'C'. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000. Pp. xi + 248, illustrated. $64.00 (Hb); $24.00 (Ph). Reviewed by HelenG Crehan, Murdoch University Body Show/s: Australian Viewings ofLive Pel!ormauce is an excellent collection of essays on the physical body in live perrormance. The introduction by Peta Tait sets out the challenges of the volume, addressing the need ror academic work that focuses on the ways in which "intellectual ideas can be embodied" (I). Tail's view is that "theoretical analysis of live performance remains underdeveloped" (2), and she sees this volume as beginning to redress this problem. The contested issue of Iiveness is discussed in some detail and the tensions between the written and the live body are problematised . As Tait contends, "Live perfonnance ofrers an insubstantial materiality. a visually tacti Ie condition of unpredictable dynamic potentialities" (4). These "dynamic potentialities" are beautirully played oul in the eighteen essays that make up the volume. The collection is divided into three sections: "Citings," "Sighlings," and "Sitings." In the opening section, "Citings," there are four essays, the first of which, by Jane Goodall, asks us to reconsider the ways in which we rcod exhibited bodies in the nineteenth-century circus. Goodall points out that. REVIEWS although contemporary audiences may see these performers as potential victims without agency, the act of performing "the savage" (20) required the adoption of a range of "performance skills [involving[ sophisticated communication strategies" and that opportunities for agency were "created by the very fact that their audiences assumed savages to be incapable of such strategies " (24), While Goodall does not discredit the contemporary reading of these events, she does suggest that the power relationships at play were complex and that we need to remember this fact in order to avoid fetishising the past based on our own "shame" (26). As Goodall points out, "By performing liveness in the way they did, show people created a feral element inside the cultures of colonialism" (27). Thus, Goodall's provocative essay challenges us to think through the limits of our own subject positions as observers of a once-live experience. In another engaging essay, "Performing Colonial Bodies and (as) Work," Bill Dunstone talks about the ways in which "social and cultural meanings were produced in theatre and in circus performances 1....1 in colonial Western Australia" (29). Considering the role of young performers, particularly "Young Blondin, the Australian wonder" (29), Dunstone analyses the ways in which such performers worked within the colony. In doing so, he addresses the ambiguities and perils of their labour and argues that not all of their perfonnances celebrated imperialist culture. Rather, "professional and amateur companies functioned in their different ways as cultural texts which generally promoted, but sometimes questioned, imperial...

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