Miss Piggy and Brechtian feminism

Alongside this research project, financial necessity has meant that I have continued my professional theatre practice as a director and movement director. There have been some useful threads of thought to gather from bringing more disciplined noticing into my professional practice. I had planned to reflect on some of this work within my thesis, but in the end chose not to- a choice led partly by a desire to keep my focus on the processual act of teaching, but also because I ran out of time and words!

I wrote much of the following in my more formal academic voice, intending it for the thesis. While it didn't quite make the cut, there are some interesting ideas that I felt were worth sharing, not least because they allow me to pay homage to a most iconic Muppet...

In my first year of research I directed two productions for young audiences, that I have reflected on in other blogs: 
 

• Little Red Riding Hood by Sarah Middleton – a family Christmas show for Nottingham Playhouse, running in their Neville Studio and then touring to primary schools (see ‘Ha ha, you’re an idiot’ and ‘Stepping in as Wulfrick’) 
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• Mark and the Marked, originally conceived by Kimberly Sykes, with text by Michael Wicherek – a clown theatre piece for Box Clever Theatre, touring to primary schools (see Bonding, Needs and Boss Clowns) 

At the end of my first year of research, as I unpicked some gendered assumptions in traditional clown pedagogy, I began to wonder how feminist thinking and politics may have almost subconsciously influenced my performance-making practice and tastes. As I explored further in my reading around feminism in performance, in pedagogy and in discourse on social justice, what I felt was recognition. I was finding ideas to guide my practice more knowingly, but also theory to explain and identify approaches and tastes already long established within my theatrical work. 
 
Some key realisations were:
 

• A tendency within my work towards using heightened performance personas, developed with the performer, rather than naturalistic characters. 

 

• I always include the audience, but try to do so on their terms, without shaming them or demanding that they take on the role of performers. This is particularly true in my work for children, as I have explored in an earlier blog.

 

• My work takes the form of ‘honest lying’- there is no requirement for the audience to suspend their disbelief, and the performers are always playing a game, rather than playing a role. Where I use masks or puppets, I make no attempt to hide the performer or puppeteer, but invite the audience to join in the game of the character’s aliveness.

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These are all, in many ways, clownlike attributes. However, they also speak to a desire not to simply recreate reality onstage, when the reality we live in is so profoundly flawed, particularly when it comes to the objectification of women and female-presenting people. The beginning of this understanding of my work in this light came from my exploration of the work of unfairly overlooked comedy pracademic Athene Seyler (see Bubbling with Pleasure).

Figure One: The cast of Mark and the Marked in rehearsals. Photo by Pip Thurlow

One of Athene Seyler’s key assertions is that in order to play comedy successfully, the performer needs to stand slightly outside the role, to ‘create a delicate thread of understanding of the character you are portraying between yourself and your spectator, so that, in a way, you jointly throw light upon it’ (Seyler and Haggard, 2013, p. 4). She goes on to apologise for this unfashionable opinion, writing, as she was, when Stanislavskian naturalism was at its height in British mainstream theatre, but looking from a contemporary perspective her ideas seem ahead of their time.

There two resonant principles here; the idea of the performer not being fully immersed in the character, and the breaking of the fourth wall in order to acknowledge the role of the audience as co-creators of meaning. Both of these are ideas referred to by Kim Solga in her brief history of feminist performance criticism (Solga, 2016). She writes about the hothouse of early feminist theatre criticism, and singles out an essay by Elin Diamond as a watershed moment. Diamond’s essay makes the case that ‘feminist theatre and Brechtian theatre need to be read intertextually’ (Diamond, 1988, p. 82) to explore their shared territory of conscious representation and the critique of social structures. Solga picks up this thread and discusses how many twentieth century feminist theatre scholars embraced Brecht’s ‘socially activist dramaturgy’ (Solga, 2016, p. 34), and how dramatists like Caryl Churchill worked with a female body viewed non-literally, non mimetically, to deflect and critique the patriarchal gaze of naturalistic theatre that reinforces female archetypes through repetition. This is what Judith Butler’s central argument for gender performativity rests on; the idea that gender is socially constructed by being performed, both onstage and in daily life (Butler, 1999). 

Fetishization of the female body by a male-coded gaze is part of the language of meaning-making that Western performance dance has inherited from ballet, ‘a legacy of sex and gender images in which heterosexual chivalrous relationships create a romantic illusion that validates, idealizes, and veils male dominance’ (Hanna, 1988, p. 179). Contemporary dance has moved away from ballet’s tradition of performers playing authored roles, in favour of something much closer to the idea of a constructed performance persona. Jennifer Roche terms this the ‘moving identity’ (Roche, 2015, p. 16) which crystalises for each work in the interaction between a dancer’s training and movement heritage and the choreographer’s specific movement vocabulary. Nevertheless, Western performance dance is still underpinned by dancers training in ballet, a highly gender performative technique. Time and again this has surfaced in Clowndance workshops; the frustration of dancers who feel that their movement identity contains elements of gendered social codes that they find repressive. It has been the invitation to play, and explore comedy in their bodies, that has unlocked some of this unconscious bodily patterning.
 
Writing specifically on women in comedy, Kathleen Rowe Karlyn goes further on the Brechtian concept of the female performer’s body as a non-mimetic representation, where the performer is ‘returning the male gaze’ (Rowe Karlyn, 1995, p. 12). The two major case studies in her 1995 book Unruly Women sit at either end of a scale of distancing; one is the onscreen persona of the comedian Roseanne Barr, an exaggerated version of the performer’s own identity, using her own name. The other is a puppet; The Muppets’ Miss Piggy. She says of the latter ‘for her, femininity is a masquerade, a costume like any other, which she can relish- or wallow in, if you will- but discard in an instant’ (Rowe Karlyn, 1995, p. 30). The power of the puppet lies in her mockery of the performance of femininity, rather than mockery of actual women (as she is not portrayed by a human performer), and her comic appeal lies in her violence and excess. I love how seriously Rowe Karlyn discusses Miss Piggy; she invites the reader to share in the game of Piggy as an autonomous being, without mentioning the performer behind the persona (originally the wonderful Frank Oz).

Figure Two- Miss Piggy (puppet designed by Jim Henson and built by Bonnie Erickson).

​This reminded me of my realisation in an earlier blog about the enjoyable sensation I find in clowning or dancing when it feels as if I am puppeteering my own body. For dancers, there is perhaps always this slight dislocation between private self and dancing body. Dance academia tends to refer to ‘the body’ as if it is something apart from the self (as in Helen Thomas's The Body, Dance and Cultural Theory (2003), Choreographing Difference: The Body and Identity in Contemporary Dance (1997) by Ann Cooper Albright, and a host of other well-known titles). Viewing this convention through a feminist Brechtian lens allows me to make peace with the separation between dancing body and felt self, if that distance gives the performer a place from which to return the male gaze. And if through clowning, dancers can feel that puppeteering our bodies is a game that we are choosing to play, not something done out of emotional self-preservation, then that can bring a sense of empowerment and pleasure.
 
Reflecting on my theatre making practice has been a welcome parallel process to the pedagogic explorations of this research project. In my next blog, I will explore how I took the feminist threads that lay submerged in my work and brought them to the fore in another performance making project, The Capitalist Self-Care Club.


Figure One: The cast of Mark and the Marked in rehearsals. Photo by Pip Thurlow, 2022​
Figure Two: Miss Piggy puppet, National Museum of American History, photograph by Jaclyn Nash. From https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/nmah_1884379  

Bibliography
Butler, J. (1999) Gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity. New York: Routledge.
Cooper Albright, A. (1997) Choreographing difference: The body and identity in contemporary dance. Middletown, Conn: Wesleyan University Press.
Diamond, E. (1988) ‘Brechtian Theory/ Feminist Theory: Toward a Gestic Feminist Criticism’, TDR (1988-), 32(1), p. 82. Available at: https://doi.org/10.2307/1145871.
Hanna, J.L. (1988) Dance, sex and gender: signs of identity, dominance, defiance, and desire. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Roche, J. (2015) Multiplicity, Embodiment and The Contemporary Dancer: Moving Identities. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Rowe Karlyn, K. (1995) The unruly woman: gender and the genres of laughter. 1st ed. Austin, Tex: University of Texas Press.
Seyler, A. and Haggard, S. (2013) The Craft of Comedy. 21st Century Edition. Edited by R. Barton. London, New York: Routledge.
Solga, K. (2016) Theatre & feminism. London ; New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan (Theatre &).
Thomas, H. (2003) The body, dance and cultural theory. London: Bloomsbury
 

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