Love's Labors Lost: Where the Ladies Are

June 9, 2009

Where the Ladies Are

I can't believe I missed this!

Anyway, I should just get down to it and answer some of GreyZelda's questions there.

I've noticed, as of late, that it seems like only men get into the exchanges on a lot of the theatre discussions, particularly. Why is that? Why are we women backing off lately?. . . Where have all the lady bloggers and commenters gone? I know they're out there reading but they're staying mum and I'm not sure why. Any ideas?

I hadn't noticed, but that may be because theatre blogosphere comes off as a bit of a boys' club anyway. So I sort of expect mostly men to be the voices being heard. Not like I agree or think it's a good thing. As for why I'm backing off, read on.

I can only speak for myself but I've definitely backed off from getting into philosophical discussions with the guys online. I realized it was making me emotionally weary and, at the same time, bored and irritated . . . I was still reading the theatre blogs, but I didn't want to join in the discussions anymore. . . . I realized that my comments didn't seem to aid the discussion. The talks appeared to retread the same issues and, to be quite honest, started to reek of a lot of hot air and wind. . . . I wanted to focus on my family and my life.

This is it in a nutshell for me too.

I touched on this in a previous post as well.

Now my circumstances are such that I want to devote more energy to activities that reward me, so I'm devoting more time to Playsmiths, the big copywriting gig I'm working on, and doing more to prepare myself for a bat mitzvah.

Contrary to Scott's accusation that I don't want real interaction, I do enjoy genuine exchange. But the interactions I enjoy is not the kind that it seems people are interested in - at least not interested enough to actually engage in me with it. I'm introspective by nature. I'm most comfortable with focused, personal discussion that digs beneath our surface personas. I require a certain intimacy to feel deeply satisfied by interacting with others. Otherwise I just feel drained. From my experience, it's very difficult to get depth of discourse in theatre blogosphere. It's sort of like I explained in Beyond Religion 101:

I frankly think the way Isaac presents his post (particularly the part quoted above) is kind of a set-up. It presumes a lot about my reasons for calling myself a person of faith or the role religion plays in my life. It also presumes a lot about how I experience God, especially how it undermines the depth and complexity of that experience to one or two cliche variables. And from there, I'm forced to engage with the discussion on those limited grounds (limitations that don't necessarily apply to the people involved) or not engage at all. So, even without meaning to, the way he frames this discussion excludes and marginalizes the very people who could enrich it.

Now, in theatre blogosphere terms, I could easily say the same thing (albeit slightly edited):

I frankly think the way theatre blogosphere discusses things is kind of a setup. 'The talks appear to retread the same issues' (quoted from GreyZelda). And from there, I'm forced to engage with the discussion on those limited grounds (limitations that don't necessarily apply to the people involved) or not engage at all. So, without even meaning to, the way theatre blogsphere frams discussions excludes and marginalizes the very people who could enrich it.

Let's be frank: theatre blogosphere is not exactly a safe space for divergent perspectives. And by this I don't mean simple differences of opinion. I mean different ways of being - different ways of experiencing and understanding the world.

And before people start setting up false dichotomies, it's not that I want Don or Scott or Isaac to shut the fuck up. That's not it at all. But it would be nice to discuss smaller, more personal things a hell of a lot more often.

The fucked up thing is that this has been brought up before: by me (here and here), Laura (there and there), Adam, Mac, DevilVet, and Nick.

But, as always seems the case (especially in discussions about how gender, race, and class intersect with our day-to-day interactions), it gets mentioned but shit never changes.

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Words, Words, Words

. . . a lot of it [fostering rather than smothering students' playwriting] has to do with finding a way to construct a dialogue about ongoing work that empowers the writer. A lot of it has to do with making sure there's a diversity of voices around you. A lot of it has to do with thinking of the writing program as a brain trust for writers, not as some infantilization in which the dramaturg gets the power. And basically trying to find a place where everyone's aesthetic in the room grows larger rather than smaller. There are many ways to do that. It's really not a hard thing to do.
--Paula Vogel, interview with Ann Linden in The Playwright's Muse

Here is what seems to me an elementary truth that must precede any other: namely, that the theater, an independent and autonomous art, must, in order to revive or simply to live, realize what differentiates it from text, pure speech, literature, and all other fixed and written means.
--Antonin Artaud, letter, 9/15/1931

I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all I need for an act of theatre to be engaged.
--Peter Brook, The Empty Space

My work is characterized by one thing above all --- invention. In theatre we imagine the world, we do not record it, we are not documentary makers. I hold all social realism and journalistic theatre in contempt. It is a sordid habit. And the social realists have the impertinence to pretend they are 'telling the truth…'
--Howard Barker, interview

Women and writers of color are still seen as threats because, in essence, when a woman or writer of color is defining a play world, there's another definition of what our society is, and that's very threatening.
--Paula Vogel, interview with Ann Linden in The Playwright's Muse

Through this experience [working on " . . . and last week it was a mountain"] I learned the importance of the life and the dynamics under the words, and began to see the power of working from the silent space within - the emotions, the images, the experience and the feelings - rather than relying on the words.
--Sande Shurin, Transformational Acting: A Step Beyond

How does it happen that . . . the Occidental theater does not see theater under any other aspect than as a theater of dialogue?
--Antonin Artaud, Theater and Its Double

All conventions are imaginable, but they depend on the absence of rigid forms.
--Peter Brook, The Open Door

I never 'say' anything in my work. I invent a world. Let others decide what is being 'said'. Nor do I claim to tell the truth or enlighten people. We are suffocated by writers who want to enlighten us with their truths. For me, the theatre is beautiful because it is a secret, and secrets seduce us, we all want to share secrets. That is also its politics, if it has any politics at all. And modern democracies hate secrets, they want everything transparent. Obviously the critics collaborate in this desire to expose everything to the light of day, they are the police force, after all.
--Howard Barker, interview

I think that form is content . . . I've always been more interested . . . in the formal devices and the structure rather than in the subject matter . . . I really am a follower of Viktor Shklovsky, who said that in some ways the subject matter doesn't even matter. It's whether or not we see the subject matter anew that matters.
--Paula Vogel, interview with Ann Linden in The Playwright's Muse

I am well aware that the language of gestures and postures, dance and music, is less capable of analyzing a character, revealing a man's thoughts, or elucidating states of consciousness clearly and precisely, than is verbal language, but who ever said the theater was created to analyze a character, to resolve conflicts of love and duty, to wrestle with all the problems of a typical and psychological nature that monopolize our contemporary stage?
--Antonin Artaud, Theater and Its Double

The mediocre artist prefers not to take risks, which is why he is conventional.
--Peter Brook, The Open Door

"Transcendence became my life theme. I wanted to be lifted beyond everyday circumstances and everyday reality."
--Sande Shurin, Transformational Acting: A Step Beyond

I actually think of writing for the stage as not writing . . . It's about structuring, about gaps between the language that are really filled in by the collaborators and the process. It's all about indirection rather than a direct statement . . . It's like a three-dimensional chess game in a way. If I say this, will the director go in this direction? If I say this, will the actor respond? And one of the delights of the process is actually not having your intention fulfilled, but finding out at times that other people's interpretation or intention is actually more interesting than you originally thought of.
--Paula Vogel, interview with Ann Linden in The Playwright's Muse

The person who has an idea of what this language is will be able to understand us. We write only for him. --Antonin Artaud, letter, 9/28/1932