Beyond Corporeal Feminism: Thinking Performance at the End of the Twentieth Century

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Notes

1. I want to thank the late Hector Maclean for his attentive commentary on an earlier draft of this paper, particularly in relation to the differences between codification and performance.

2. Repertoire was presented at Mass Gallery, Melbourne in September 2000, and Burn Sonata first played at The Performance Space, Sydney in 1999 and then toured to the Adelaide Festival, Theatreworks, Melbourne in May 2000.

3. Nicki Heywood in a Burn Sonata programme note.

4. Body Weather, a physical training system devised by Japanese Butoh artist Min Tanaka, includes intensive body-mind work around images that strengthen and agitate the nervous system. In Australia, this approach to the performer's body has been utilized by several theatre practitioners, most notably Tess de Quincey.

5. There are many theatrical and dance examples of unusual becomings. For me they include Willem Dafoe in the Wooster Group production of Eugene O'Neill's The Hairy Ape, Jack Hale the Tin Man in the 1939 film of The Wizard of Oz and choreographer Bill T. Jones dancing an improvised duet at PS 121 (New York City) in 1998.

6. The critique of subjectivity, conceived on the Oedipal or fascist model, is conducted in all Guattari's writings across the fields of psychoanalysis, linguistics and politics.

7. ‘Artaud wages a struggle against the organs, but at the same time what he is going after, what he has it in for, is the organism’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:158).

8. Instructions to the actors in Burn Sonata. Personal e-mail from Tony Osborne who played the father in this performance.

9. ‘“desiring machines … are not machines for desiring (as washing machines … are machines for washing). They are rather the free functioning of any configuration of linked components, considered as an oriented process or a processing of other configurations which intersects or shares components—as “desiring production”’ (Deleuze 1995:184).

10. Jason Keats, a performer in Repertoire.

11. Sydney Front, an avant-garde performance group, created Don Juan in 1991 and toured with it in Australia and Europe in 1992. Clare Grant was a member of Sydney Front at that time.

12. Instructions from Jude Walton to dancer Shona Innes, 2000.

13. Grosz's arguments on the questions of sexed bodies, creativity and becomings have changed considerably in subsequent publications.

14. Patrick Jones, ‘Duty and Freedom Duelling’, Hepburn Shire Advocate, September 2000, p. 9.

15. Virginia Baxter, ‘The First Five Minutes’, Real Time 24, April–May 1998, p. 4.

16. The writing not written, texture not text comes from Grosz's reading of the inscriptive surface of the Möbius (Grosz 1994:72).

17. Genesi: The Museum of Sleep, Prato, 2001, a theatre production by Societas Raffaello Sanzio premiered in Italy in 2001 and then toured internationally, with its last season at the Melbourne International Festival of the Arts in 2002. Eve was performed by actor Maria Luisa Cantarelli.