22

Feminist Performance and Utopia:

A Manifesto
Jill Dolan

[W]e ourselves are imbued with urgency, yet the message of our
society is that there is no viable alternative to the present. …
[T]he pervading feeling [is] that there simply are no alterna-
tives, that our times have witnessed the exhaustion not only
of Utopias, but of any new departures as well. … Doubt has
replaced hopefulness – and men [sic] act out a defeatism that
is labelled realistic. The decline of utopia and hope is in fact
one of the defining features of social life today.
(Port Huron Statement, Students for a Democratic Society,
15 June 1962)

For me, both personally and politically, feminist performance’s ability

to point us towards a better world remains an intractable principle of
faith. As a lesbian feminist now in her middle age, I still need to
believe that it is possible to change the world. I need to see, to write
about and to teach performance with the hope that transformation is
possible. How could I face my work otherwise? What would move me
to attend performance, if not the hope that I’ll find, among a group of
strangers and intimates, some tangible if fleeting moment of genuine
community feeling that might model for me how the world would be
better if these experiences were sustained in other realms of social life?
What else would persuade me that it’s worthwhile to put my body and
soul in the sightlines of performers who need to see me listening to
their stories, to know that I’m witnessing their vulnerabilities and their
wish-laden prophecies?
For me, feminist performance continues to hold potential for trans-
formation because it’s always been a laboratory of critique and poss-
ibility. From the agitprop performances that delivered the didactic

212
E. Aston et al. (eds.), Staging International Feminisms
© Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 2007
 Feminist Performance and Utopia 213

rhetoric of 1970s feminism, to the melding of gender politics and dra-

maturgy of feminist playwrighting in the 1980s, to the avant-garde
practices of feminist solo and ensemble performance in the 1990s, to
the diversity of work now produced under feminist performance’s
banner in the 2000s, our work in theory and practice has continued
to hone a critique. The nomenclature remains important. We need to
mark the different contributions artists and critics offer to utopian
visions under the rubric of explicitly feminist performance, so that all
three terms – feminism, performance, utopia – might be reinvigorated
as rallying calls for the twenty-first century. As the queer activist
Amber Hollibaugh says, ‘What we want is to create a new world . …
Why not commit to changing the world totally?’1
In my work on utopia in performance, I’ve been inspired by twentieth-
century Marxist philosophers like Ernst Bloch and Herbert Marcuse,
who believed that art provides a stage for the experiment we conduct
in living.2 I’ve also been inspired by the Jewish theologian Martin
Buber, who sees utopian possibility in ‘fantasy pictures’ that infiltrate
the real as a ‘wish’ for the future of human community, and by Rabbi
Abraham Joshua Heschel, who suggests that we see the present
through the lens of ‘radical amazement’ to help propel us to a better
future.3 Both believe that art helps us imagine new worlds.
In my book Utopia in Performance (2005), I discuss solo performances
by Peggy Shaw, Holly Hughes, Deb Margolin and Ann Carlson; multi-
character solo performances by Anna Deavere Smith, Lily Tomlin and
Danny Hoch; full-scale productions directed by Mary Zimmerman,
Deborah Warner and Moisés Kaufman; and an evening-length, multi-
racial and multi-ethnic slam poetry event created for Broadway, all of
which bear the trademarks of feminist performance. They address gender
as a constituent issue, not only in their content, but in their forms of
address; they mark identity as a formation that gives or denies people
voice; they link perspectives derived not just from gender, but from
sexuality, race, class, ethnicity and other identity-markers that overlap
and intersect to make us similar to and different from one another; and
they gesture towards a community that arcs over identity politics into a
more capacious, even humanist, political coalition. These performances,
in all their radical liveness, give me hope, poised as they are in that
ineffable moment between living and dying, presence and absence, fear
and consequence in which the present vibrates with anticipation for
the future. I commit my teaching, writing and activism to proliferat-
ing and preserving performance moments of such exquisite possibility, of
collective belonging to a vital, active, vocal public sphere.
214 Jill Dolan

I encourage my students to write manifestos that spell out their

beliefs as citizen/artist/scholars, because the manifesto remains, for me,
one of the best forms for delivering values and articles of faith with
unalloyed passion and ideological idealism.4 My own manifesto is an
exhortation to stave off the easy cynicism of contemporary politics and
public life, and to continue to develop feminist performance as an
avenue toward fluid, ever-changing, never fixed, but constantly avail-
able utopias, better worlds that remain ‘no place’ (the literal meaning
of ‘utopia’). I imagine the ‘we’ in this manifesto as people who practice
feminism however their national and local political circumstances
allow, and who believe, as I do, that performance inspires us to social
change.

A Manifesto

1. For feminist performance to change the world, we must write

about it, teach it, and circulate it as an idea, a commodity, and a
practice of faith and belief
When American feminist performance scholars began writing about
the lesbian and feminist performances at the WOW Café in the early
1980s, few people outside of the Lower East Side of Manhattan in New
York City had heard of the venue or its now notorious performers. Sue-
Ellen Case, Kate Davy, Alisa Solomon and I, among other American
feminist performance scholars and critics who began publishing in the
early 1980s, wrote in newspapers, academic journals, anthologies and
books to popularise and publicise this innovative work beyond the
confines of its original local audiences.5 While WOW began as a social
haven and theatre primarily populated by white lesbians, it flourished
over the years as a provocative entertainment venue for straight spec-
tators as well as gay men and genderqueers, and for people of colour as
well as the white community.
Inviting Peggy Shaw, Lois Weaver, Holly Hughes, Deb Margolin, Lisa
Kron and many other performers to attend the Women and Theatre
Programme’s annual conferences helped academics and critics across
the US see their work. Because feminist academics invited WOW’s
performers for guest residencies at our colleges and universities, we
introduced many generations of students to other ways of producing
their art and of dreaming themselves as artists as well as citizens and
scholars. Through the academy–community synergy that is one of
the hallmarks of American feminism, this work circulated beyond its
immediate subculture. Academics and critics writing about feminist
 Feminist Performance and Utopia 215

performance flourished alongside the performers, making complemen-

tary claims for how we might widen our understandings of gender and
its meanings, of sexuality and its pleasures.
Those of us who work in academic institutions need to maintain and
continually strengthen our ties with feminist performance artists, play-
wrights and directors, since the mainstream theatre community restricts
their resources for developing, circulating and producing their work.
We need to use the comparative power of our positions and the rela-
tively flush budgets we sometimes command to enable feminist theatre
artists to continue their experiments with performance forms and con-
tents and the ideological and political meanings they generate. Those
of us who write about this work should publish not only in academic
venues, but in trade publications, local newspapers, the internet and
blogs, spreading widely the word that feminism and performance
united provide a powerful, pleasurable force for social change.

2. For feminist performance to change the world, we must not be

afraid to proselytise, or to preach to the converted, about its
utopian possibilities
Proselytising has long been a dirty word in politics, and claiming femi-
nist performance ‘preaches to the converted’ has been an easy critical
route to its dismissal. We must ignore these derogations and persuade
people that feminist performance brings a better world ever closer, and
remains, in a cynical age, the best vehicle for sustaining hope and faith
in social change. As committed spectators, artists and scholars, we
must serve on our local arts councils; ingratiate ourselves with granting
organisations, so that we can become evaluators for their arts appli-
cants; serve on peer review committees; and generally insinuate
ourselves into positions from which we can advocate for feminist per-
formance that would otherwise be overlooked or dismissed as ‘too
political’.
We must argue for the value of performance that addresses social
justice, and write and speak out to counter the charge that ‘preaching
to the converted’ makes feminist performance insular and irrelevant.
We must dispel the myth that ‘the converted’ don’t need forums for
their concerns or, as Holly Hughes has said, that ‘the converted’ don’t
need to have their faith occasionally reassured by what they see at the
theatre. We must speak about feminist performance with passion and
conviction; we must move people by explaining the faith feminist
performance brings us in the possibility for a better future. We must
describe what it feels like to experience the potential for transforma-
216 Jill Dolan

tion during those magical moments in the theatre. We must encourage

people to buy tickets to local feminist performances and find under-
writers to support the attendance of those who can’t otherwise afford
to come. We must actively convert people to feminist causes, however
we define them, and educate people away from stereotypes about who
feminists are, what feminists do and what feminism means.

3. For feminist performance to change the world, we must be

spectators and artists, scholars and citizens at once, creating
performance that hazards a glimpse of utopia
One of feminist performance’s lasting contributions is its refusal to
submit to the conventional hierarchies of theatre production and
reception. The WOW Café and other feminist incubators remain
radical because they define artistic roles fluidly, encouraging spectators
to become artists; scholars to participate in the making of art; and
artists to speak with historical, critical and theoretical insights about
their work, all under the rubric of active, participatory citizenship.
Artists once viewed scholars with suspicion; I recall too many confer-
ence panels at which artists looked ill-at-ease, certain that their creativ-
ity and their ideas were being exploited by academics who wanted to
make careers by ‘explaining’ their performances. But over the last
decade or so, I believe such mistrust has turned closer to mutual appre-
ciation, as we all understand how much we help each other achieve
common social and theatrical goals.
The theory/practice bogey that hounds so much American theatre
discourse has begun to fade in feminist performance, defanged by the
understanding that we need each other to advance a cause in which we
have the luxury of believing together. The public record now docu-
ments our collaborations: feminist scholars have edited, introduced
and published play collections by feminist and queer performers.6 The
pages of academic journals are sprinkled with interviews feminist
scholars conduct with feminist artists, who speak with insight and ele-
gance about their work and its social and political context.
Likewise, the performance workshops that artists present during
their guest residencies on university and college campuses are often
filled with students and teachers and community members who want
to learn how to make their own art, or who want to understand how
feminist performance is generated from the inside out. I’ve taken per-
formance workshops with Shaw, Weaver, Margolin and Hughes, and
Carmelita Tropicana (Alina Troyano) and Marga Gomez. Each time, my
students, my colleagues, my friends and I were encouraged to see the
 Feminist Performance and Utopia 217

artistry in our own critical perspectives, to meld our analytical skills

with our talents for telling stories and creating images and narratives.
We embodied moments of impersonation and fantasy, feeling the
emotions of the moment as a conduit to thoughtful reflection.
These workshops freed us to see ourselves as artists as well as critics
and historians, scholars as well as spectators, and to draw from the
marrow of creativity and invention. They moved us closer to commu-
nity with each other and with our guest artists, even if just for an after-
noon or a morning, letting us reveal parts of ourselves that might
otherwise have remained cloaked. They helped us reassess the bound-
aries between public and private, the personal and the political, and
joined us in a conversation based in theory and practice, all grounded
in the politics of the now and of the future, practising the ‘what if’ as a
hopeful extension or reimagining of the ‘as is’.7

4. For feminist performance to change the world, we must find

resources with which to create, produce, write about and publish
the work
In the US, the Fund for Women Artists is a useful source of advocacy
and resources, as well as for establishing tours to theatres and academic
campuses. The National Performance Network brings socially-con-
scious work into communities by cost-sharing with local non-profit
organisations. Private organisations like Creative Capital and the Doris
Duke Foundation pick up the slack left by the federal abandonment of
arts funding.8 Many universities and colleges have funds for guest
artists and speakers, all of which can be productively plundered
to bring in feminist theatre people for lecture/demo gigs or longer
residencies.
To trumpet their importance, we must suggest that feminist plays be
part of the season at our local repertory and community theatres, as
well as in our college and university syllabuses. We must call attention
to the work, educating people who make decisions about where and
how to spend resources. We too often bemoan the state of funding
without proposing specific plans for how it might be ameliorated. The
creativity we bring to our artistry and criticism should also be brought
to resource generation and distribution.

5. For feminist performance to change the world, we must instil

utopian longings in new generations of students and artists
At the university where I teach, since students mostly train as ‘method’
actors preparing to work in conventional production processes and
218 Jill Dolan

hierarchies, they are stunned and thrilled to be taught other ways of

thinking of themselves as citizen/artist/scholars. Our feminist faculty,
committed to performance as a public practice, encourages performers
to create their own material, rather than waiting for casting calls at
which they’ll be slotted into roles according to their looks or their
‘type’.9 We are stealth teachers, insinuating alternatives into the other-
wise standard BA acting major or MFA curricula. Many women gradu-
ate students produce solo performances from their personal narratives.
Often, these pieces become the centre of their creative lives, projects to
which they return after forays into professional theatre, film and televi-
sion, where agents and casting directors ask them to lose weight, cap
their teeth or undergo plastic surgery to correct their physical imper-
fections. Rather than waiting to become another cog in the commodity
wheel of commercial culture, these students commit themselves to
their art as a public practice that speaks from the heart about the possi-
bility of belief in self and others. We must challenge students to claim
their agency by creating their own work and forming companies with
which to reimagine their relationship to performance and what it
might mean to the social world.

6. For feminist performance to change the world, we must monitor

and comment on the progress of culture – including film and
television, magazines and newspapers, as well as theatre and
performance – from a feminist perspective
Feminism is a practice of social critique and renewal. In addition to the
wealth of meaning, feeling and vision fostered in feminist perfor-
mance, feminist criticism is a powerful method for remarking the
excesses and inadequacies of mainstream culture and for demanding
change. Even though dominant culture tries to neutralise it as a politi-
cal movement, feminism hasn’t lost its power as social critique. New
publications in the US, like Bust, Bitch, Curve and others, including
many on-line sites, provide trenchant critiques of popular culture from
an aggressively feminist perspective.10 We must read these publications
and visit these sites, encourage our students and other interlocutors to
look at them, and use them as examples of a thriving subculture of
feminist commentary.
I write a bi-monthly blog called ‘The Feminist Spectator’, finding it a
vital outlet for writing that would otherwise be only private.11 As a
‘blogger’, I don’t have to seek an editor’s approval to publish my
thoughts, nor must I water down the vehemence of my feminist cri-
tique. I write as much or as little as I want and I invite comments from
 Feminist Performance and Utopia 219

readers. We must also write letters to editors to press a feminist per-

spective into the forefront of public debate about cultural and political
representation.12 We must be gadflies on the livestock of mainstream
commentary, always present, always buzzing, impossible not to hear
and acknowledge.

7. For feminist performance to change the world, we need to be

loyal audiences, attending performances, subscribing to theatres
that regularly present feminist work, spreading word of mouth,
and encouraging friends, students and strangers to develop the
habit of spectatorship
Performance is perhaps symbolic and fleeting, but I believe that the
practice of spectating and performing establishes a lasting habit of par-
ticipation in public life. By attending feminist performance we demon-
strate our willingness to gather in community, to listen together to
people’s stories, ideas, polemics, and often to discuss, afterwards, their
meanings and implications. We accrue great affective value from being
in the presence of others, experiencing narratives and images and emo-
tions simultaneously, even if our responses and interpretations differed
widely. In those moments of performance, we hear and feel each other
react. We are addressed together by actors gesturing through the over-
hanging cloud of their own mortality in a shared, irreplaceable instant
of time, unmediated by the temporal manipulations of technology.
Our presence matters to a larger collective sense of belonging – as the
anthropologist Victor Turner suggested in his notion of communitas –
to something both of ourselves and larger than ourselves.13 In those
moments of performance, I reaffirm my precarious faith in something
once called ‘fellowship’ (or ‘sisterhood’) and feel a resurgence of
personal hope for the possibility of a better future.

8. For feminist performance to change the world, we must continue

to dream that it can change for the better, that utopia, as a tangible
force for wishful thinking – not in a naïve, idealist sense but in
a fiercely pragmatic political fashion – can fuel our passion to
imagine the world as it might be, rather than acquiescing to the
world as it is
When did we allow ourselves to stop dreaming of utopia? When did
we relent and stop calling ourselves feminist scholars, performers,
artists, activists? When did the radical possibilities of the practices of
feminism, joined to the practices of performance, stop predicting a
powerful, critical, polemical experience? It’s not important to pinpoint
220 Jill Dolan

this decline; it’s much more important to reverse course, to wield our
feminism as a forceful portent of worlds to come, to see feminism and
performance as meaningful utopian practices, ones we urgently need
to restore our faith, to shore our resolve, to inspire us imaginatively
and ideologically toward new ways of being in the world together.

Notes
1. Amber Hollibaugh, in Feminism: Controversies, Challenges, Actions, a film by
Rebecca Haimowitz, The Scholar & the Feminist Online 3.3/4.1, http://www.
barnard.edu/sfonline.sfxxx/film.htm.
2. Jill Dolan, Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theatre (Ann Arbor, MI:
University of Michigan Press, 2005). Bloch’s ‘anticipatory illumination’
suggests that ‘theatre [is a] rehearsal for the example … a laboratory of
the right theory-praxis in the form of a play … [which] might provide the
experimental experience for the serious case’. Ernst Bloch, The Utopian
Function of Art and Literature, trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), p. 227. Marcuse says, ‘Art cannot
change the world, but it can contribute to changing the consciousness and
drives of the men and women who could change the world’. Herbert
Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics
(Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1978), p. 33.
3. See Martin Buber, Paths in Utopia, trans. R. F. C. Hull, (Boston, MA: Beacon
Press, [1949], 1958); and Abraham Joshua Heschel, Man Is Not Alone: A
Philosophy of Religion (New York: Jewish Publication Society of America,
1951). See also José Estaban Muñoz, ‘Queers, Punks, and the Utopian
Performative’, in D. Soyini Madison and Judith Hamera, eds, The SAGE
Handbook of Performance Studies (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications,
2006), pp. 9–20, for more on utopia in performance.
4. On the ‘citizen/artist/scholar’, see Carol Becker, ‘The Artist as Intellectual’,
in Gigi Bradford, Michael Gary and Glenn Wallach, eds, The Politics of
Culture (New York: The New Press, 2000), pp. 236–46. For the quintessential
feminist manifesto, see Valerie Solanas, S.C.U.M. Manifesto, http://www.
womynkind.org/scum.htm.
5. See for only several examples of early feminist performance criticism Kate
Davy, ‘Constructing the Spectator: Reception, Context, and Address in
Lesbian Performance’, Performing Arts Journal 10.2 (1986): 43–52; Sue-Ellen
Case, ‘From Split Subject to Split Britches’, in Enoch Brater, ed., Feminine
Focus: The New Women Playwrights (New York: Oxford University Press,
1989); Sue-Ellen Case, Feminism and Theatre (New York: Methuen, 1988);
Alisa Solomon, ‘The WOW Café’, The Drama Review 29.1 (Spring 1985):
92–10; Jill Dolan, ‘The Dynamics of Desire: Sexuality and Gender in
Performance and Pornography’, Theatre Journal 39.2 (May 1987): 156–74;
Jill Dolan, The Feminist Spectator as Critic (Ann Arbor, MI: University of
Michigan Press, [1988] 1991).
6. See, for example, Sue-Ellen Case, ed., Split Britches: Lesbian Practice/Feminist
Performance (London: Routledge, 1996); Lynda Hart, ed., Of All the Nerve:
 Feminist Performance and Utopia 221

Deb Margolin Solo (London: Cassell, 1999); and Jill Dolan and Jaclyn Pryor,
eds, You Wanna Piece of Me? Peggy Shaw’s Magnificent Masculinity (Ann
Arbor, MI: University of Michigan, forthcoming).
7. For insightful work on the ‘as is’, see Maurya Wickstrom, ‘Wonder in the
Heart of Empire: Deborah Warner’s Medea and The Angel Project’, Modern
Drama 47.2 (Summer 2004): 177–99. The summer 2004 Modern Drama is a
special issue on ‘utopian performatives’.
8. See The Fund for Women Artists at http://www.womenarts.org/; the
National Performance Network at http://www.npnweb.org/; the Creative
Capital Foundation at http://www.creative-capital.org/; and the Doris Duke
Charitable Foundation at http://www.ddcf.org/.
9. ‘Performance as public practice’ is a term coined by the MA/PhD
programme in the Theatre and Dance Department at the University of
Texas at Austin. The programme explores the widest possible parameters
of performance in its relationship to historical and contemporary global
culture and local communities, applying the skills of performance theory
and practice to expand the civic and academic dialogue prompted by
citizen/artist/scholars. See http://www.finearts.utexas.edu/tad/degree_pro-
grams/theatre_history_criticism/phd_theatre_history_criticism/index.cfm.
10. See http://www.bitchmagazine.com/; http://www.bust.com/; and http://
www.curvemag.com/.
11. See Jill Dolan, ‘The Feminist Spectator’, www.feministspectator.blogspot.com.
12. See Jill Dolan, ‘Gender and Advertising’, American Theatre 23.7 (September
2006): 6.
13. On communitas, see Victor Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic
Action in Human Society (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974); and
From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York: Performing
Arts Journal Publications, 1982).