Sister, Mother, Lover

Abstract

Through reflecting on and contextualizing the process of creating “Yours Now”, my final work on MA DOT, this thesis decodes the physical language of the performance and expands on its literary and aesthetic references. By conducting a close reading of the two versions of the solo performance, the thesis considers how the eroticism of grief is comparable to how desire works in a staged encounter and how this dynamic is expressed through the choreography of the piece as well as its relationship to the audience. Looking at strategies of artifice and remove, as well as methods of narrative fragmentation and nonlinear temporality, I develop a movement language that translates between text, speech and the body through an engagement with the absent and invisible. Doubt, unease and distrust are identified as generative states for a consideration of more general questions concerning theatrical time, queer time, visibility and truth, and the position of a performer on stage.