Voices Made Flesh: Performing Women'S Autobiography / Edition 1

by Lynn C. Miller, Jacqueline Taylor, M. Heather Carver

Overview

Fourteen bold, dynamic, and daring women take the stage in this collection of women's lives and stories. Individually and collectively, these writers and performers speak the unspoken and perform the heretofore unperformed.

The first section includes scripts and essays about performances of the lives of Gertrude Stein, Georgia O'Keeffe, Mary Church Terrell, Charlotte Cushman, Anaïs Nin, Calamity Jane, and Mary Martin. The essays consider intriguing interpretive issues that arise when a woman performer represents another woman's life. In the second section, seven performers—Tami Spry, Jacqueline Taylor, Linda Park-Fuller, Joni Jones, Terri Galloway, Linda M. Montano, and Laila Farah—tell their own stories. Ranging from narrrative lectures (sometimes aided by slides and props) to theatrical performances, their works wrest comic and dramatic meaning from a world too often chaotic and painful. Their performances engage issues of sexual orientation, ethnicity, race, loss of parent, disability, life and death, and war and peace. The volume as a whole highlights issues of representation, identity, and staging in autobiographical performance. It examines the links among theory and criticism of women's autobiography, feminist performance theory, and performance practice.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780299184247
Publisher:	University of Wisconsin Press
Publication date:	09/10/2003
Series:	Wisconsin Studies in Autobiography
Edition description:	1
Pages:	344
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Lynn C. Miller is associate professor in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of Texas at Austin. Jacqueline Taylor is professor of Communication at DePaul University. M. Heather Carver is assistant professor of Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Missouri, Columbia.

Editorial Reviews

"Voices Made Flesh does a better job of evoking the performed script than does any other collection of dramatic or performance art scripts I have seen."—Michael Bowman, Louisiana State University

From the Publisher