Rosie Garton

Bio: Rosie Garton is an academic researcher. The author has contributed to research in topics: Dramaturgy & Indigo. The author has an hindex of 2, co-authored 7 publications receiving 8 citations.

No Woman's Land

Abstract: Dr Ildiko Rippel, Zoo Indigo Theatre Company No Woman’s Land (NWL) The practice research project No Woman’s Land NWL(2015-2017) explored the historical performance walk as a methodology to develop a dramaturgy of migration in reference to kinesthetic empathy. The project explored whether the re-tracing of the 220-mile walk taken by Rippel’s grandmother Lucia in 1945 from Brzeźnica Poland to Pulspforde, Germany could produce a change of the performer’s body through an “authentic” physical experience, marked by exhaustion and the somatic memory of endurance. The project was recorded and documented on a daily blog to disseminate the research on a lesser told narrative of World War II through focusing on women’s experiences of traumatic migration. During the walk Rippel interviewed persons who had similar experiences as World War II refugees and questioned experts on the history of Silesian refugees through accessing the archives of the Foundation Flight, Expulsion, Reconciliationin Berlin. In 2016 NWL was developed into a short documentary film, presented in the UK and internationally, and a theatre performance which toured UK arts centres. The aim of NWLwas to undergo a physical endurance, to gain an embodied understanding of a migratory experience, and to develop a dramaturgy to translate this experience into performance. In the theatre performance the performers walk on treadmills, and the audience, through witnessing the exhaustion, also potentially experience a sense of the endurance through kinesthetic empathy. Furthermore spectators have the opportunity to walk on the treadmills themselves to gain empathy with migratory walking. This dramaturgical strategy hopes to produce an authenticity when engaging with historical events. Here kinesthetic empathy potentially provides the ontological ground for historical and political knowledge. The project investigated the historical walk as a methodology to enable a sense of authenticity in the representation of the migrant mother in performance, through the act of walking and the staging of the exhausted female body.

Live Art and Motherhood: A Study Room Guide on Live Art and the Maternal

Abstract: This Study Room Guide on Live Art and Motherhood features fourteen individual artists and two artist collectives working in the mediums of Live Art and performance around the topic of the maternal. Motherhood and the maternal are difficult terms. There is an inherent essentialism and biology is often assumed. For us, motherhood refers to the lived experience of mothering regardless of our route to it, whereas the maternal refers to the study of and representations of motherhood. All of the contributors in this volume are mothers but we hope this volume is of interest to both those who have cared for children and those who have not, after all, we all have direct experience of being m/othered. We are all first of all natals before we are mortals (thank you Hannah Arendt).

No Woman’s Land - Walking as a Dramaturgical Device in Performance of Maternal Migration

Abstract: In 2015 Garton and her collaborator walked 220 miles across Poland and Germany, re-walking the route of a traumatic familial journey as a result of a violent expulsion in 1945. This article discusses the performance walk of ‘No Woman’s Land’ as a methodology towards a dramaturgy of migration, enabling an authentic representation of the migrant mother through the staging of the exhausted female body, the interweaving of documentary footage, and the real act of walking. During the performance, performers (and spectators), walked on treadmills through projections of archival and recent footage of migration. The article argues that through viscerally representing migration, the performance and documentary produced a kinesthetic empathy with the physical demands of escape and in turn provided an ontological ground for disseminating historical and political knowledge of forced maternal migration.

Maternal Ruptures/Raptures: Leakages of the real

Abstract: Julia Kristeva describes the hallucinatory state between the real and the symbolic as rapture: “The rapture of the hallucination originates in the absence of boundaries between pleasure and reality, between truth and falsehood” (Kristeva, in Oliver 2002: 207). The real can only be accessed through this hallucinatory rapture: Floating in isolation, this vision of an unnamed real rejects all nomination and any possible narrative. Instead it remains enigmatic, setting the field of speech ablaze only to reduce it to cold ashes, fixing in this way a hallucinatory and untouchable jouissance. (Kristeva 1986: 227) The symbolic order of language is described by Kristeva as ‘cold ashes’, a mere residue of the flames of the real. The real according to Kristeva remains untouchable, a notion similar to Lacan’s “encounter with the real”, which is always “a missed encounter” (Lacan 2004 [1977]: 55). The 2,000 word provocation proposed for Performance Research will argue that the maternal in performance has the capacity to set representation ablaze, to rupture the symbolic and to infuse performance with the rapturous sparks of the real. The provocation will utilise Zoo Indigo’s PaR performances Under the Covers (2009), which presents the performers’ babies via live video link, and Blueprint (2012), featuring the performers’ real-life mothers on SKYPE video call, as case studies to argue that the non-performance of motherhood can enable the emergence of the real in theatre. Kristeva depicts motherhood as the maternal time, “the slow, difficult and delightful apprenticeship in attentiveness, gentleness, forgetting oneself” (Kristeva 1981: 31). Lisa Baraitser describes these interruptions as “breaches, tears or puncturings to the mother’s durational experiences bringing her back “again and again” into the realm of the immediate, the present, the here-and-now of the child or infant’s demand” (Baraitser 2009: 110). This immediacy responding to the corporeal urges of the child render the maternal encounter real. This provocation aims to argue that the maternal encounter in Zoo Indigo’s performances causes a transcendence towards the real, with reference to psychoanalysis, specifically the writings by Julia Kristeva and Lisa Baraitser. Kristeva notes: “Milk and tears […] are the metaphors of nonspeech, of a ‘semiotics’ that linguistic communication does not account for” (Kristeva, in Oliver 2002: 322). The release of breast milk is beyond the symbolic order, it transports us to Kristeva’s semiotic, the non-symbolic, the real. The provocation will analyse the leakage of breast milk in Under the Covers, when performers experienced the let-down reflex and release of milk when seeing their babies on screen, and the leakage of tears in Blueprint, in the moments when mothers and daughters returned to a maternal encounter beyond the symbolic. The provocation will argue that real mother-child relationships in performance remain unperformed and beyond representation, and that the maternal fluids of blood, milk and tears erupting in Zoo Indigo’s work cause a momentary leakage of the real into the symbolic framework of theatre.

Deconstructing the 1947 Partition: The Effect of the Central Recovery Operation through a Gendered Lens in India and Pakistan

Abstract: The partition and subsequent creation of India and Pakistan in 1947 continues to mark a watershed moment in my life, as I am an Indian student of Punjabi descent. The dominant history of the partition remains rooted in patriarchal constructions of honor situated on women’s bodies. Though Pakistan was created a Muslim state, and India as a seemingly secular state, the Indian state fashioned Bharat Mata, Mother India, to justify its dominant Hindu practices and its overall existence. The Indian nation was created as a motherland, on a goddesses’ body. The states of India and Pakistan continued to articulate its borders on women’s bodies, specifically abducted women. Through the Inter-dominion Treaty and the Central Recovery Operation, the patriarchal state, community, and family communicated with each other by controlling women’s bodies, sexualities, and lives. Women were not considered autonomous beings with full citizenship in the nation building project. By focusing on women’s testimonies, I document and analyze their lived experiences in order to question and challenge the linear narrative of recovery put forward by the state. I honor women’s diverse testimonies in my aim to speak the truth, reinvestigate, and retell, reconstruct history to become herstory.

Dalit women life-narratives and literature as experience

Abstract: Jacques Ranciere (2011, p. 53) observes that rather than create works of art, contemporary artists want to get out of the museum "(...) and induce alterations in the space of everyday life, generating new forms of relations". In this context, the aim of this paper is to discuss the power of literature to turn experience into life-narratives that will eventually give rise to a differentiated kind of social experience (SMITH; WATSON, 2010), through the reading of the novel Sangati (1994) by the Indian Dalit writer Bama. In order to make visible the experiences of the Dalit women, Bama rewrites the genre autobiography, as understood in the West, since in her narrative the voice of the community imposes itself upon the voice of the individual. In so doing, she changes the quality and style of canonical narratives considered as literary so that they will accommodate the stories of silenced people articulated through a differentiated kind of aesthetics.

The Mother of All Wombs: Tracing the labour of maternal effacement in visual and theatrical cultures of motherhood

Abstract: This article traces a lineage across historical and contemporary performative cultures of motherhood: 19th century infant portraiture, contemporary viral news media and prenatal technology associat...