GRiT - Clau Di Gianfrancesco & Jessi Lee Clayton
When:
—
Venue:
Online
Graduate Research in Theatre is a seminar series run by the Birkbeck Centre for Contemporary Theatre.
Dr Jessi Lee Clayton -- Lesbians on Land: Towards Decolonial Eco-Performance Writing and Rural Belonging through Representation.
My own experience of ‘coming out’ or of arriving at myself, as I prefer to think of it, was in part due to a lack of visibility of lesbian and queer women in culture and media. It was also due to a deeply rooted perception in the US and UK of non-urban spaces as inhospitable to any subjectivities which do not conform to normative society. I was taught, by church and US countryside cultural norms, that lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer people did not naturally belong outside innately immoral cities – as the book of Sodom and Gomorrah taught us in Southern Baptist bible study. This presentation challenges those childhood understandings of lesbian and queer women subjects and their relationship to rural lands. This research seeks to offer an alternative way of relating to landscape and understanding belonging on land in creative performance texts. It is an offering to the theatre and performance sector on how to approach its relationship to the climate and nature.
The Texan landscape I was raised in has long been victim to the results of White European settlers disregarding Indigenous knowledge resulting in environmental catastrophes such as the Dust Bowl. One of the largest failings of our society regarding the climate and outdoor spaces is environmental racism and the unequal burden of the climate crisis on women and communities of colour. So, to think differently about the climate crisis we must reconsider our gendered relationship to land ownership, land usage, and types of belonging on land outside of a Western patriarchal and colonial perspective. This paper looks to my previous work on 60s and 70s feminist lesbian eco-identities, lesbian separatism, and decolonial solutions to the climate crisis in order to question how performance writing might serve as an intervention to ways of knowing landscape and rurality.
Dr Jessi Lee Clayton (she/her/any) is a prison/working-class, care-experienced, lesbian, and neurodivergent screenwriter, playwright, dramaturg, and researcher from the part of North Texas where Tornado Alley meets the Bible Belt. She focuses on women-centred stories for screen and stage, particularly those exploring the intersections of sexuality, rurality, class, race, and experiences with addiction and the prison/care systems. They have worked (and continue to work) various customer service roles such as barista, bartender, and waitress due to the precarity of the Higher Education and Performance industries and their respective lack of support for marginalised artists and researchers.
Jessi has also worked as a dramaturg, researcher, and writer at Gate Theatre, Oxford Playhouse, University College Oxford, and Camden People’s Theatre. She has been awarded Arts Council DYCP funding for her eco-creative writing practice and is currently co-writing a Queer Western supported by Farnham Malting’s Working-Class Artist Initiative. Additionally, she has edited a feature film script optioned by 3 Arts Entertainment, worked as a Writers Room Runner for Various Artists Limited, and is developing an eco-sci-fi TV Pilot for UK-based production companies.
Clau Di Gianfrancesco -- Behind the Shadow: Light - Theatre of the Oppressed and Shadow Theatre, a case study
With this paper, I aim to present one of the case studies part of my thesis. This case study focuses on the Beyond the Shadows: Light (BSL) Theatre of Oppressed (TO) and Shadow Theatre lab that took place in Ostia (Rome, Italy) in January 2023. Focusing on questions of origin/transmission, visibility/invisibility, telling/knowing I consider how, by coming together with TO techniques, shadows offer aesthetic possibilities of troubling clear-cut dichotomies present in more traditional TO theory and practice (e.g., Boal’s denotation-connotation, therapy/politics divisions, oppressed/oppressor). Shadows and TO work will also be discussed, considering the issues with which the theatre lab is set to work, i.e., gender-based violence (GBV). Turning to Jack Halberstam’s shadow feminism, I expand the examples given in his book, The Queer Art of Failure, and consider the works of Travis Alabanza, Elena Ferrante, and finally, that realised as part of the BSL as possible examples of refusal, unknowing, resistance, and worldmaking. Looking closely at some of the exchanges and scenes developed during the BSL lab, I consider the role shadows play in a TO work concerned with questions of GBV.
Clau Di Gianfrancesco (they/she) is a PhD candidate in Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck, University of London, UK. Since 2016, Clau has worked and trained with Theatre of the Oppressed companies in the UK and internationally. Their research examines the potential of theatrical practice to enact social change, especially in relation to gender and sexuality.
Contact name:
Martin Young