Introduction

John Humphries: You’ve exploited being Tracey Emin.

Tracey Emin: But I am Tracey Emin.
(On the Ropes, BBC R4, 24 July 2001)

The Attraction of Autobiographical Performance

I think it was 1988 when I saw Bobby Baker’s Drawing on a Mother’s
Experience. Then, I was a second year undergraduate student at
the University of Glasgow, studying Theatre, Sociology and English.
Though uneasy about constructing a linear narrative which looks back
from the present and arranges the past into a series of stepping stones
that comfortably leads me to here, to this Introduction, I do consider
Bobby Baker’s performance a ‘beginning’ of some sort. Drawing on
a Mother’s Experience was my first experience of explicitly autobio-
graphical performance, and it is an experience that I have drawn on
ever since.1 Another beginning might be feminism, to which I was also
introduced during my second year at university. Feminism brought
home to me that politics was not something ‘out there’, but rather that
the political was always close, that the macropolitical and micropoliti-
cal were intimately connected. Yet another beginning might be Bertolt
Brecht, whom I encountered around the same time – particularly his
verfremdungseffekt, making the familiar strange so that we can under-
stand it as neither natural nor inevitable, and therefore something that
can be challenged and changed. The final beginning, though chrono-
logically a bit later, might be my becoming a lesbian. Stepping into
that location in the early 1990s the idea of marginal was felt rather
than conceptualised.
Since that first encounter with Bobby Baker’s work in 1988 I have
actively sought autobiographical performances, and I admit from the
outset that I am something of an advocate. I am attracted to them

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2 AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND PERFORMANCE

as ‘performance[s] of possibility’, where, in the words of D. Soyini

Madison, the possible suggests ‘a movement culminating in creation
and change’ (1998, p. 277). This takes for granted that change is neces-
sary, desirable and within reach. Change is also, of course, inevitable,
and its effects always uncertain. But such continuous movement and
prevailing absence of guarantee should make a personal commit-
ment to change even greater. It would, though, be sensible to add
a small rider here: autobiographical performances are possible per-
formances of possibility; even that possibility cannot be taken for
granted.
If pressed to think of the best-known performers in the USA
who consistently use autobiographical material in their perfor-
mances, names most likely to spring to mind might include Rachel
Rosenthal, Laurie Anderson, Deb Margolin, Annie Sprinkle, Holly
Hughes, Lisa Kron, Robbie McCauley, Alina Troyano, Kate Born-
stein, Tim Miller, Ron Athey, Lenora Champagne, Peggy Shaw, Lois
Weaver, Luis Alfaro, Marga Gomez and Spalding Gray. Gray, as the
white, straight male here proves to be the exception.2 From this list
we might deduce that the majority of artists who use autobiography
in their work are marginalised subjects; other names that we might
add include Fred Rochlin, who began performing his personal narra-
tive at the age of 74 – a rare occurrence in the performance world
which seems to valorise youth more than experience (see Lathem,
2005). Solo autobiographical performance in the UK is also well-
recognised as a mode, and performers here include Bobby Baker,
Ursula Martinez, SuAndi, Mem Morrison, Donna Rutherford, Joey
Hateley, Adrian Howells, Marisa Carnesky, Leslie Hill and Helen
Paris. Mirroring their US counterparts, these performers are lesbian,
gay and/or black and/or transgender, and their work also addresses
explicitly their particular location(s) and the experiences that are
inscribed there.
The relationship between marginalised subjects and the appeal of
autobiographical performance is not co-incidental. Autobiographical
performances can capitalise on theatre’s unique temporality, its here
and nowness, and on its ability to respond to and engage with the
present, while always keeping an eye on the future. In particular,
autobiographical performance can engage with the pressing matters
of the present which relate to equality, to justice, to citizenship, to
human rights. Kim Ima’s The Interlude (2004), a performance which
attempts to tell the story of her father’s internment in a camp in
the USA during World War II, is a story also of the present and

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 INTRODUCTION 3

the presence of Guantanamo Bay. Tim Miller’s Glory Box (1999),

a story of the constant threat that hangs over his relationship with
his lover, also speaks of contemporary experiences of wider inequal-
ity and injustice. I want (and need) to believe that performance can
be a transformational act, contributing to a network of political
activity.
As Chapter 1 will explore, located within and arising out of the
second-wave feminist movement, autobiographical performance was
regarded by women as a means to reveal otherwise invisible lives,
to resist marginalisation and objectification and to become, instead,
speaking subjects with self-agency; performance, then, as a way to
bring into being a self. Autobiographical performances provide a way
to talk out, talk back, talk otherwise. Here, the marginalised subject
can literally take centre stage, and whilst visibility, per se, does not
mean political power or equal rights (see Phelan, 1993), this potential
for agency has been acknowledged by many practitioners and theo-
rists of autobiography.3 Elizabeth Bell contends that ‘ “Marginalised
subjectivities”, the catch-phrase for those denied subjecthood in tra-
ditional Western conceptions, move from margin to center (stage)
in performance’ (2003, p. 315). bell hooks, meanwhile, understands
that ‘oppressed people resist by identifying themselves as subject, by
defining their reality, shaping their new identity, naming their his-
tory, telling their story’ (1989, p. 43). For Nellie Y. McKay, ‘the
life story (or portions of it) has been the most effective forum for
defining black selfhood in a racially oppressive world’ (1998, p. 96).
Performer Linda Park-Fuller appreciates her performance of surviving
breast cancer as

an attempt to break out of the prescribed, marginalised role of ‘patient-

victim’, and exercise socio-political agency in the world. That exercise
of agency, in turn, circles back to transform and constitute me as actor-
agent – as survivor. (2003, p. 215)

In this, Park-Fuller shares insights with Tami Spry, who similarly

claims that performative autobiography is

a site of narrative authority, offering me the power to reclaim and rename

my voice and body privately and in rehearsal, and then publicly in per-
formance. The process enables me to speak the personally political in
public, which has been liberating and excruciating, but always in some
way enabling. (2003, p. 169)

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4 AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND PERFORMANCE

The transformative potential of autobiographical performance refers,

then, partly to the performing subject, the ‘story-ing’ of our lives (Rou-
verol, 2005, p. 23). Suzette Henke’s insistence on the agency afforded
by writing one’s own story translates well into the performance realm:

Because the author can instantiate the alienated or marginal self into the
pliable body of a protean text, the newly revised subject, emerging as the
semifictive protagonist of an enabling counternarrative, is free to rebel
against the values and practices of a dominant culture and to assume an
empowered position of political agency in the world. (2000, pp. xv–xvi)

Henke’s reference here to the ‘revised subject’ and their ‘semifictive’

status should be borne in mind when we turn our attention to the
subject of autobiography and the relationship between a lived life
and its representation. Whilst the importance of agency in the act
of autobiographical performance is marked, nevertheless the con-
nections between self and identity, identity and representation and
representation and politics need to be carefully navigated.
The fact that a ‘self’ appears to lie at the centre of autobiography
too easily raises the spectre of self-indulgence for many critics, such
as John Howell who, focusing on solo work, proposes that it

is as often an ego show as a revelation; the virus of the ‘I-Did-It-My-

Way-/I-Gotta-Be-Me’ strain afflicts the larger number of such acts, partic-
ularly in the performance art arena which presents amateurish staging
techniques and mini-personalities as often as original methods and
subjects. (1979/80, p. 158)

Richard Layzell, however, understands that this dominant concep-

tion of autobiographical performance – its supposed self-indulgence –
is nothing but a stereotype with which we are stuck until a shift in
understanding dislodges it (Ayers and Butler, 1991, p. 49). I very much
hope that this book contributes to that shift. Though the charges of
egotistical, solipsistic and narcissistic are thrown at the ‘self’ of autobi-
ographical performance, as we shall see this ‘self’ is contested terrain.
Given the historical link between women and autobiographical per-
formance, it might not be too cynical to suggest that the predominantly
negative responses to the autobiographical form belie deeper preju-
dices. This is certainly Irene Gammel’s view when she considers the
specific danger of confessional forms for women, a danger indivis-
ible from wider cultural and historical conceptions of (appropriate)

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 INTRODUCTION 5

knowledge and its (‘disembodied’) production. Gammel notes that

when personal experiences are expressed via the female voice, they
are perceived as being informal and lacking in authority, belonging
to the realm of parole rather than the more abstract langue, and
as such are dismissed as being of less concern (1999, p. 4). Leslie
Satin and Judith Jerome reach a similar conclusion when they relate
that although ‘historically, autobiography has been a primarily male
province [    ] autobiography in its less socially elevated form [    ]
has long been identified as a woman’s genre’ (1999, p. 12). Feminised,
such autobiographical practices are then trivialised by the description
‘(merely) autobiographical’ (ibid.).
In my experience, the vast majority of autobiographical perfor-
mances work hard to challenge the notion that there is anything ‘mere’
to autobiography. The slur of ‘(merely) autobiographical’ resonates
with assumptions regarding the narrow reference of ‘the personal’, or
even of ‘women’. As I hope to show, although autobiographical per-
formances look, in form, monologic, the public context of their work
and the performers’ aspirations to communicate with their spectators
transform those works into dialogues. Live autobiographical perfor-
mance takes place not only in shared time, but also in shared space.
These performances are made with a spectator in mind. For performer
Lisa Kron, ‘the goal of autobiographical work should not be to tell
stories about yourself but, instead, to use the details of your own
life to illuminate or explore something more universal’ (2001, p. xi).4
Tim Miller similarly wants to use his individual experience in order to
find ‘a window for’ the audience (1991/2, p. 140). Most performers
create a mode of address that acknowledges the spectator’s presence
(alongside the theatrical context). If autobiographical performance is
a potentially powerful tool of resistance, intervention and/or reinven-
tion, then it must be so for the spectator as much as for the performer.
As Della Pollock comments,

performance is a promissory act. Not because it can only promise possi-

ble change but because it catches its participants – often by surprise –
in a contract with possibility: with imagining what might be, could be,
should be. (2005, p. 2)

Integral to the here-and-nowness of autobiographical performance

is the visible presence of the performing subject – their here and
nowness too. Though the notion of ‘presence’ or ‘aura’ that adheres to
performance and performers might have been thoroughly challenged

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6 AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND PERFORMANCE

following Derrida (the performer is not, cannot be, ‘authentic’ or

unmediated, even if they are ‘there’), nevertheless, the fact that the
performer is in this space with me might well have an impact on
my reception of his/her autobiographical stories. That relationship
between performer and spectator does set this mediation of experience
apart from other modes. Though it is no less mediated, its different
form of mediation enables a potentially different impact that can be
capitalised upon strategically.
Many critics have proposed that performance, as a medium, is par-
ticularly suited to a political agenda because it is capable of staging a
direct and immediate address to the spectator. Peggy Phelan claims, for
example, that it ‘remove[s] the metaphorical structure of art’ (2001,
p. 29). The space of live performance is also considered important
since, although gathered in this ‘space apart’, we are nevertheless and
inevitably also gathered together (see Dolan, 2001, p. 473, p. 459).
Performance might inspire an audience to feel, at least momentarily,
part of a community, since to be part of an audience is potentially
to be allied with others (see Dolan, 2005). For Tim Miller, ‘The real-
time heat of live performing is an especially handy crucible for raising
awareness and provoking people to action’ (2000, p. 89).5 The fact
that Tim Miller himself is standing in front of me sharing stories about
Tim Miller makes his fear of the future somehow palpable; I could
touch it and am touched by it. Moreover, his appeal that I must ‘do
something’ is spoken directly to me. Though all performances must
reckon with the act of communication, the relationship that auto-
biographical performances (performances that are ostensibly at least
about some ‘self’) attempt to forge with the spectator (some other
‘self’) seems to be particularly crucial, and this relationship is one that
will occupy much of our attention throughout Autobiography and
Performance.
Focusing on the ‘potential’ of autobiographical performance,
I recognise its potential to also do harm or to fail in its politically
aspirational or transformational objectives. This is precisely the limi-
nal quality heralded by the word ‘potential’ – it can always go both
ways. Some performances might well ‘fail’ to communicate, or ‘fail’
to move us, teach us, inspire us, challenge us. Some might prescribe
to essentialist notions of self and identity, thereby further repressing
or constraining us. Some might speak ‘for’, rather than ‘as’, while
others might be appropriated in unexpected ways or might appro-
priate other’s stories in inappropriate way. Some performances might
use the politics of the personal in a less sincere way, recognising that

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 INTRODUCTION 7

‘the personal’ functions as a useful marketing tool in today’s culture

where the personal is a popular and cheaply manufactured commod-
ity. In acknowledging the potential of autobiographical performance,
we need also to acknowledge the dangers. Though I am an advocate,
I am not a naïve one.

Autobiographical Performance?
In her autobiographical text, ‘Count the I’s, or, The Autobiographical
Nature of Everything’, writer and performer Deb Margolin shares
with the reader the stark realisation, experienced during her senior
year of college, that everything is autobiographical. Her course in
psychophysics facilitated an epiphany:

This was the most dramatic, simple, stupid realization! [    ] It meant,

firstly and lastly, that what I see is a direct product of my ability to see,
both physiologically and intellectually, and therefore, every sunset, every
tree, everything I see is firstly and lastly about me. (1999, p. 24)

Margolin, with her witty and engaging prose, makes an easy job of
refashioning one of the central concerns of contemporary feminist
theorists – the inevitability of the ‘self’ that lies in all acts of produc-
tion, both creative and theoretical (see Anderson, 2001, pp. 125–7).
Against any presumed ‘objectivity’ in relation to the production of
knowledge, feminists have long argued that the self is implicated in all
epistemological endeavours, from the concerns that interest us (and
similarly those that do not), to the discourses that we choose (or not)
to press into service in our research and explorations, to the critical
voices that we assume in our rendering of these. Such unavoidable
subjectivity of knowledge is now largely accepted.
That all creative production is similarly infused with the personal
is not at all contentious. Margolin’s conviction that ‘we have noth-
ing but ourselves from which to work and about which to speak’ is
commonplace (1999, p. 25). Jeanette Winterson captures the same
idea in her preface to Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit: ‘Is Oranges
an autobiographical novel? No not at all and yes of course’ (1985,
p. xiv). Creative practices are always informed by who we are, as
subjects embodied in time and space, with our own cultures and his-
tories (although it is nevertheless to be noted that some endeavours

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8 AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND PERFORMANCE

are unproblematically taken to be more universal – less personal –

than others).
Acknowledging the ‘autobiographical nature’ of everything, I nev-
ertheless practically need to mark some limits. In this text, then, I am
using ‘autobiographical performance’ to refer to work which fore-
grounds some aspect of a life-story, a bio. We might then assume
that the ‘auto’ signals the sameness of the subject and object of that
story: that is, the ‘author’ and ‘performer’ collapse into each other
as the performing ‘I’ is also the represented ‘I’. This is certainly
the ‘autobiographical pact’ that Philippe Lejeune (1989) identified
between the producer and consumer of autobiography. However, one
aim of this study is to challenge our assumptions about the ‘genre’
of autobiography since in practice autobiography typically becomes
auto/biography, while the ‘I’ that performs and is performed is often
strategically complex and layered.6 Given the collaborative nature of
performance, this is perhaps unavoidable. The Wooster Group’s early
work, directed by Liz LeCompte, offers useful illustration. In the tril-
ogy Three Places in Rhode Island, company members drew upon,
interacted with and responded to autobiographical material relating
to Spalding Gray’s life, and the performance was collectively devised
and performed. Whilst the source material for the pieces was Gray’s
bio, and Gray himself performed this, Theodore Shank notes in rela-
tion to Rumstick Road (1977) that ‘the play is a collective work
resulting from “group associations around facts in my life” ’ (Gray
cited Shank, 1982, p. 174). In addition to the collaboration of the
actors, LeCompte also played an important part in structuring these
‘autobiographical’ pieces, and Gray’s own performance within them.
She reflects that

Spalding sits for a portrait that I paint. [    ] There is a dialog between

the sitter and the painter. The portrait, the persona that emerges is an
amalgam of the sitter’s image of himself and the vision of him [    ] that
the painter sees and constructs. When the painter and the one painted
both recognize themselves in the final portrait, it is a perfect kind of col-
laboration. The persona named Spalding Gray is made from this kind of
collaboration. (Bierman, 1979, pp. 13–14)7

LeCompte recognises the different Spalding Grays in operation here,

with the performed Gray being understood as a ‘persona’. However,
she also raises the possibility that existing inside Gray’s performance is

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 INTRODUCTION 9

the autobiography of LeCompte – alongside LeCompte’s biographical

rendering of Gray.
Although Three Places in Rhode Island was a group effort, in fact
most theatrical events, including solo performances, involve some
form of collaboration. The vast majority of performers work with
producers, directors, designers and production managers. Many also
show their work to spectators (invited or public) during the process of
its making, using feedback to revise and develop it. The performance
of autobiographical material, then, is typically a collective affair which
will have an impact on the representation of that autobiography or
the re-presentation of the ‘self’. The ‘self’ in performance is plural
in many ways then, beyond the psychoanalytic understanding of the
divided self.
Admitting that autobiography is also often biography, or auto/
biography, insisting even on the explicit presence of the bio in
auto/biographical performance is not without its problems. The ref-
erential status of that bio is open to question and one task of this
study is to theorise the relation between ‘a life’ and its performed
representation. I do not want to assume any easy or transparent rela-
tionship between a lived life and its portrayal. All autobiographical
productions involve processes of selection, scripting, editing, revis-
ing, etc. However, neither do I want to erase completely the bio, for
in all of the performances that I explore here that bio is politically
significant and is the reason for the performance. Autobiographical
performances strategically work with life experiences, but rather than
rendering them self-evident the political task is to discern the subtext
(Madison, 2005, p. 150).
Ultimately, of course, one can never be totally sure that the mate-
rial in a performance is auto/biographical. For some years I have cited
Claire Dowie’s insightful Why Is John Lennon Wearing a Skirt? (1996)
as a good example of an autobiographical work. Dowie employs cer-
tain strategies which prompt this reading, including performing solo,
speaking in an intimate mode of address while using ‘I’ throughout,
dealing with what appears to be congruent content and portray-
ing a character who could very easily be the performer. Indeed,
Gabriele Griffin has written of Dowie’s work in a collection enti-
tled Auto/Biography and Identity: Women, Theatre and Performance
(2004) and, like me, acknowledges that Dowie uses devices that pro-
pose the work as being ‘(auto)biographical’ (2004, p. 154). However,
Griffin also warns us of the complexity of self-representation:

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10 AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND PERFORMANCE

Performance is, of course, always citation, and as such instantly troubles

the I-dentity of character and performer. If I perform me performing me,
we are in the world of deconstructionist traces where there is no self-
sameness, only the infinity of the split, endlessly (re)enacted in a Sisyphian
attempt to approximate the self. (ibid., p. 155)

Dowie, when explicitly asked, evades the question of the autobio-

graphical status of her work, insisting instead on the power of fiction.8
Her strategic evasion of categories does not mean that her work is not
autobiographical though; in fact, given that Dowie’s work is precisely
about refusing the application of labels her skirting here is entirely
appropriate to the politics inscribed within her performances. What
is also revealed, though, is that the binary between fictional/real is
notoriously unstable in all autobiographical performance. Autobi-
ographical productions are always that. Moreover, stories that are
ostensibly ‘fictional’ nevertheless have an impact on the ‘real’ sense of
self. Applied theatre practitioner Helen Nicholson captures this inter-
relationship well: ‘fictionalised narratives found in myth and legend
are integral to narratives of selfhood and community’ (2005, p. 66).
In the last instance, of course, the decision of whether a work is con-
sidered autobiographical must lie with the spectator. This, perhaps,
begs the question of whether the autobiographical ‘status’ of a work
matters. That I believe something has happened (or will happen or will
happen again) does place my experience of the theatrical event into
a different emotional register. The ‘real’, even if intellectually under-
stood as contingent, nevertheless retains its pull – and so it should,
given that its impacts are often painfully tangible.
Retaining the real as a reference point, many performers never-
theless also strategically create ambivalence about the status of their
autobiographical work in order to prompt questions about the sup-
posedly given, as well as the mode of autobiography and its potential
power. In many instances, as we shall see, engagements with autobi-
ography are doubled: both knowingly playful with and challenging of
the form, whilst still utilising its rhetorical function for political effect.

The Performance of Autobiography

As the various chapters of this book reveal, there are a multiplicity of
ways in which the auto/bio of the ‘self’ is represented in performance.
I have deliberately chosen to keep my frame of reference open, rather

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 INTRODUCTION 11

than drawing neat boundaries around different practices. Conversa-

tions are usefully staged across different ‘genres’ allowing us to learn
from different applications, and anyway the boundaries are porous.
‘Autobiographical performance’, then, is adopted in this text as a
broad term which encompasses examples of solo autobiographical
work, community and applied drama, oral narrative and oral his-
tory performance, verbatim drama, documentary drama, testimonial
performance, performance art and instances of site-specific and time-
based practice. The risk is that the field is deemed too large to be
useful; however, the limits are set by a strict focus on the auto and bio.
Since the 1980s, spurred on first by feminist studies, but also by
black, queer, postcolonial and more generally poststructuralist and
postmodern discourses, the practice of autobiography has received
mounting interest from across disciplines.9 Primarily, such critiques
have tended to take written autobiography (the graphed auto) as
their ground but, in the past decade, the study of autobiography
has extended beyond the literary sphere and into other disciplines,
including psychology, geography, criminology, history, philosophy
and sports science. In the field of performance, a number of early
writings engaged with autobiographical practice including Moira
Roth’s ‘Autobiography, Theater, Mysticism and Politics: Women’s
Performance Art in Southern California’ (1980) and The Amazing
Decade (1983), Jeannie Forte’s ‘Women’s Performance Art: Femi-
nism and Postmodernism’ (1988) and Lenora Champagne’s collection
of performance texts, Out from Under (1990), which includes a
still useful introduction. However, it is really from the late 1990s
onwards that there has been a coherent critical engagement with
autobiographical performance as a complex ‘genre’. Numerous col-
lections of performance scripts began to appear at this time, including
Mark Russell’s Out of Character (1997), Holly Hughes and David
Román’s O Solo Homo (1998) and Jo Bonney’s Extreme Exposure
(2000). Critical analysis has also gathered pace. In October 1997
and January 2000, Text and Performance Quarterly published two
special editions on autobiography and performance, while in 1999,
Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory published a
double issue under the title Performing Autobiography. A spate of
more recent anthologies bears testimony to the endurance of auto-
biographical performance practice and to the continuing diversity of
that. Recent edited collections include Sidonie Smith and Julia Wat-
son’s Interfaces: Women/Autobiography/Image/Performance (2002),
Lynn C. Miller, Jacqueline Taylor and M. Heather Carver’s Voices

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12 AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND PERFORMANCE

Made Flesh: Performing Women’s Autobiography (2003) and Mag-

gie Gale and Viv Gardner’s Auto/Biography and Identity: Women,
Theatre and Performance (2004). Two other texts which share some
of my concerns were published just as I was completing Auto-
biography and Performance – Jill Dolan’s Utopia in Performance
(2005) and, Theatre and AutoBiography (2006), a collection edited
by Sherrill Grace and Jerry Wasserman. There are also publica-
tions which intersect with these enquiries, such as Della Pollock’s
thoughtful anthology, Remembering: Oral History Performance.
Finally, there are numerous publications by solo autobiographi-
cal performers, including Alina Troyano’s I, Carmelita Tropicana
(2000), Rachel Rosenthal’s Rachel’s Brain (2001), Lisa Kron’s
2.5 Minute Ride and 101 Humiliating Stories (2001) and Well
(2006), Tim Miller’s Body Blows (2002) and Denise Uyehara’s
Maps of City & Body (2003).
This increased range and diversity of materials is necessary and
welcome. However, as a teacher in higher education I nevertheless
sense that a consolidated overview of autobiographical performance
practice, and the various concerns engaged and raised by it, is missing.
Having taught the subject for seven years, I have been prompted to
write Autobiography and Performance, keeping in my mind’s eye my
own impassioned, enquiring students. The fact that this is only one
book necessarily implies limitations. The archive of autobiographical
performance is rich and varied, and I certainly do not propose this
as the definitive study of that history and practice; its aims are more
modest – simply to introduce the reader to some of what I consider the
key concerns implicated in performances that take personal material
as their primary source.
My research is also limited to performers located in either the UK
or the USA, since these are the works to which I have had access.
This is a serious limitation, since the study of other cultural render-
ings of autobiographical performance might expose the very extent
to which the idea of ‘identity’ and its practice in daily life is a
Western rather than universal concept. Other practitioners, teach-
ers, researchers and students (and I variously inhabit each of these
locations) might well have chosen different key concerns and different
cultures. This text, then, stages only one encounter with a broad prac-
tice. It also does not propose to offer any sort of comparative study
between the UK and the USA, although I would remind the reader that
the specific context of every performance event has an impact on its
reception.

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 INTRODUCTION 13

This work has been organised into four chapters. My intention

has been to provide an introduction to key thematic areas, as these
relate to autobiographical performance, namely ‘Politics’, ‘History’,
‘Place’ and ‘Ethics’. The devising of such broad categories is partly
pragmatic, offering a way to ‘read’ the diverse range of autobiograph-
ical performances that are available. However, it is also intended to
be theoretically useful, since each of these broad categories enables
me to introduce various important critical concerns that circulate
around autobiographical performance practice, including the status
of and relationship between the self, identity, memory, truth and
representation in performance.
Given my commitment to uncovering the forward looking – or
hopeful gestures – of autobiographical performance, I begin this text
by focusing on the political aspirations resident in much of the work.
Chapter 1, ‘Politics (of Self): The Subject of Autobiography’, traces
the intersection of the second-wave feminist movement of the 1960s
with the practice of autobiographical performance, specifically the
politicisation of the personal in the public domain. Arguing that these
performances strategically deployed a variety of tactics depending on
the context and perceived political needs, I also propose that essen-
tialist gestures were as strategic as others. Like more contemporary
performance examples, second-wave feminist performance practition-
ers walked a consciously fine line between using performance to
uncover and forge an identity (‘identity’ then functions as one of
our key focuses in Chapter 1). This dual necessity to work with, but
simultaneously to make problematic, experience and identity remains
pertinent and is subsequently explored through more recent works
including mct’s Fingerlicks – a ‘community autobiography’ – and
Bobby Baker’s and Tim Miller’s solo work. In Baker’s case she both ‘is’
and ‘is not’ Bobby Baker, rendering her subjectivity, and our encounter
with it, uncertain. Tim Miller, meanwhile, with his focus on gay rights,
blends the auto with the explicitly fictional, using autofiction as a
strategy through which to conjure a future that is yet to take place
(and which might, then, be avoided). In all of these examples the
lived experience that pertains to a certain identity position provides
the foundation for the autobiographical act, but at the same time
that foundation is strategically (and politically) unsettled through the
autobiographical act. The term ‘politics’ in the chapter heading refers,
then, not only to the challenges made by performers to their oppres-
sive social environments, but also to how performed practices of the
‘self’ are related to political praxis.

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14 AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND PERFORMANCE

The context for Chapter 2, ‘History: Testimonial Times’, is the

testimonial culture of the late twentieth and early twenty-first cen-
turies. The autobiographical performances explored in this chapter
engage with public, ‘cataclysmic’ historical events, but read these
through personal histories, or local narratives which serve to bring
the grand narratives closer to home. Live performance is explored
as a response to trauma that not only shares some of the effects of
psychoanalysis, but which might also be usefully differentiated from
this strategy given that performance is public rather than private.
Robbie McCauley’s Sally’s Rape (1989) is exemplary of a perfor-
mance practice that repeats the narratives of trauma in order that
a ‘beginning’ might be activated, rather than a ‘closure’ assumed.10
The rape of McCauley’s great-great-grandmother belongs as much to
the present as to the past, and her autobiography is one example of
auto/biography, where her story is indivisible from her ancestors’, but
also where my story is indivisible from her story, and her story, then,
is also my responsibility that calls forth for some response from me
(Oliver, 2001). Kim Ima’s The Interlude (2004), a performance that
structurally performs trauma, also testifies to the impossibility of that
performance. Attempting to tell the story of her father, interned in
a camp in the USA during World War II, Ima in fact testifies to her
father’s silence, a symptom of his trauma. However, Ima understands
that silence nevertheless speaks and does not then require to be spo-
ken. Refusing to appropriate her father’s voice, or coerce him into
speaking, the gaps in this family story reflect the gaps in national
history. These cannot simply be filled. Chapter 2 closes with Lisa
Kron’s 2.5 Minute Ride (1996), a performance that pays testimony
to the impossibility of being a ‘secondary witness’, and of recounting
the ‘life-story’ of another, in this case her father. Acutely aware of
the cultural context in which the ‘Holocaust’ is the signifier par excel-
lence for ‘trauma’, Kron’s challenge is to find a way to pay homage
to her father, a survivor of the Holocaust, without reducing him to
a cliché.
Chapter 3 moves from history to place, specifically ‘the place of
self’. A ‘self’ is inseparable from a ‘place’. As philosopher Edward S.
Casey puts it: ‘just as we are always with a body, so, being bodily, we
are always within a place as well. Thanks to our body, we are in that
place and part of it’ (1997, p. 214). Bodies are, though, raced and gen-
dered (and differently abled, and variously aged    ) and some bodies
will find that they are out of place. However, place is as conditional as

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 INTRODUCTION 15

self and they are intimately related. In Chapter 3 I explore this interre-
lation between place and autobiography, specifically the mechanisms
through which place performs self and self performs place (sometimes
differently), understanding both as mutual sites that are equally open
to contingent and shifting narratives. Again to quote Casey,

The body, or more exactly my own body, is unique in bringing together

here and there in a manner that resists the allure of simple location,
according to which the ‘here’ is merely the pinpointed position of my body
regarded as an indifferent thing and the ‘there’ the equally pinpointed spot
of the contemporary object opposite me. Instead, the ‘there’ ingresses into
the ‘here,’ and vice versa. (ibid., pp. 214–15)

As feminists have taught us, there is nothing ‘indifferent’ to the body.

The body is also a place.
My deployment of the term ‘autotopography’ renders the self of
place, and the place of self, transparent. In Bubbling Tom (2000),
Mike Pearson devises a tour for his childhood locale, the village of
Hibaldstow, Lincolnshire. Staged to mark his fiftieth birthday, which
happened to coincide also with the millennium, the self and place
that Pearson performs for us are multifaceted and literally open to
rewriting since Pearson’s walking tour leaves space for other walkers
to tell the tale differently. Phil Smith’s The Crab Walks (2004), again
a walking performance, similarly returns to the place of childhood,
this time the seascape of Devon. Like the crab, Smith’s perambulatory
methodology is the sideways scuttle which avoids the obvious con-
nections seeking instead the unexpected and the unusual. In place of a
nostalgic search for a lost self, Smith’s performance enables an extro-
verted, outward-lookingness, where the local is rendered global and
the potential networks in space are infinite; walking like a feminist,
Smith renders place as a meeting-place of potentiality (Massey, 2005).
The experience of place is variable. Some people are out of place
and some places are out of bounds to some people. Boundaries are
usually built around particular bodies. Providing a contrast to the
outside, perambulatory performances of Pearson and Smith, Chapter
3 closes by introducing two ‘domestic’, contained performances where
private space is nevertheless publicised. Though ‘home’ might most
often be considered a safe environment, Bobby Baker’s Kitchen Show
(1991) and Curious’ On the Scent (2003) show this site as being as
layered, significant and political as that of the outside world. Indeed,
the ‘inside’ is always also the ‘outside’. Performing in her kitchen,

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16 AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND PERFORMANCE

Baker reveals it as a place of both frustration and aesthetic possibility.

Curious, meanwhile, conjures smells that transport us home. Resisting
the pull of ‘homesickness’, and putting a different spin on that term,
they propose that the home is often a place of sickness.
If Chapters 1, 2 and 3 have focused on the political potential of
autobiographical performance, the final chapter of Autobiography
and Performance shifts attention to the politics of process. Starting
from the premise that every ‘self’ is relational (since no person is
an island), Chapter 4 raises questions about the responsibility that
performers bear to the ‘others’ that both wittingly and unwittingly
appear in their work. Taking seriously Paul John Eakin’s insistence
that ‘Because our own lives never stand free of the lives of others, we
are faced with our responsibility to those others whenever we write
[perform] about ourselves’ (1999, p. 159), I ask what such a respon-
sibility might mean in the field of autobiographical performance and
how it might be deployed. This enquiry into ethical practice begins
with a survey of ‘verbatim drama’, where the experiences of others
are appropriated in what might be considered an act of ventriloquism.
The dangers of verbatim drama, a form explicit in its biographi-
cal gestures, usefully illuminate some of the general problematics of
auto/biographical performance. These ‘impersonal’ performances are
then contrasted with two which perform the biographies of signifi-
cant or intimate others, Spalding Gray’s Rumstick Road (1977) and
Lisa Kron’s Well (2004). Rumstick Road takes as its primary event
Spalding Gray’s mother’s mental illness and her suicide, while Well
ostensibly focuses on Lisa Kron’s mother’s physical health. G. Thomas
Couser has proposed that, in intimate life writing, the degree of vul-
nerability is greater as is the degree of potential betrayal (2004, p.
xii). Whilst Gray’s performance might be read as a betrayal of his
family, it could also be considered as a means of using performance
to gain some agency over the past, a way of structuring his mother’s
death even if not of understanding it. Finally, though, Rumstick Road
exposes theatre as an unavoidable act of betrayal to life and people, an
insight that resonates with Well which confronts the process by which
an other becomes ‘storied’. Whilst Well asks whether one has the right
to perform the ‘other’, it also suggests that Kron, in her negotiation
with her mother, was acutely aware of her responsibility to her and
her mother’s past and future, a future being written/performed in the
very process of that collaboration.
Though arranged in four chapters, each of these inevitably overlaps.
There is, for example, a politics implicit in the practice of testimony,

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 INTRODUCTION 17

place is always acutely political, while politics and ethics are never
far apart. Questions pertaining to ethics, then, might as easily have
been addressed in Chapters 1 and 2, whilst questions relating to pol-
itics might have easily been addressed in Chapters 3 and 4. These
connections are, I think, self-evident.
The Conclusion seeks to locate autobiographical performance
within the context of its production and reception, including the
wider context of the contemporary glut of mass-mediated confes-
sional opportunities – ‘reality tv’ shows, chat shows, internet chat
rooms, blogs, etc. In spite (or because) of this mass-mediation of ‘auto-
biography’, autobiographical performance remains a popular mode.
This begs the questions of whether, and how, it can remain politically
urgent and useful. When and where is the personal political?
The continuing appeal of autobiographical performances in the pro-
fessional world is matched by the devising of autobiographical, often
solo, performances by students in university and college departments
of Drama, Theatre, Performance and Communications Studies. The
reasons for this ‘turn’ to, or embrace of, the autobiographical in higher
education are multiple. First, as this book will map out, autobio-
graphical performance necessarily intersects with many of the critical
concerns currently engaged in many university curricula, including
issues relating to identity and subjectivity (via postmodern, postcolo-
nial and poststructuralist theory), historiography, feminist and queer
theory, the status of memory, truth/fiction, ethnography and rights
and ethics, to name just a few. The study and practice of auto-
biographical performance enables an engagement with the various
discourses with which such performances are in dialogue. Second, the
practice of autobiographical performance facilitates the inhabiting of
a critical stance in relation to some of the dominant or common-
sense assumptions students might hold about their immediate worlds.
The self-reflection required in the making of autobiographical perfor-
mances demands the taking of a certain distance from what seems
all too obvious. Refracting one’s experiences through discourses that
might include feminist and queer theory often undoes the fixed, stable
and ‘given’ (Heddon, 2001; see also Aston, 1999, 2000b). Devising
autobiographical performances, then, provides a means for the crit-
ical analysis and questioning of our immediate social environments
and their impact on everyday practices. Third, and matching one rea-
son for the initial ‘turn’ to autobiography in the 1960s, given that
the only essential resource for such performances is the performer,

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18 AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND PERFORMANCE

autobiographical performance is, potentially at least, extremely eco-

nomical, a feature which makes it attractive to cash-strapped and
often resource limited educational institutions. The fact that women
predominantly fill drama and performance courses in the HE sector is
also pertinent, particularly given the continuing shortage of roles for
women in more traditional theatre. Creating a solo autobiographical
show means literally creating a part for yourself. Finally, drawing on
and engaging with the matter of everyday life, autobiographical per-
formance potentially matters. I would suspect that I am not alone in
sharing Jill Dolan’s pedagogic aspirations:

I want to train my students to use performance as a tool for making the

world better, to use performance to incite people to profound responses
that shake their consciousness of themselves in the world. (2001,
p. 456)

My hope for this book is that it helps with that training, contributing
to the informed practice of practice by foregrounding questions and
issues that pertain to autobiographical performance.
Whilst I do not want to curtail creative exploration by proposing
tried and tested models of ‘good’ autobiographical practice (such mod-
els, in their familiarity, might rather be considered ‘bad’), I do want
to explore various performances as a way to impress some of the key
issues that attach to this mode of performance. If the works discussed
here are ‘exemplary’, it is because they render visible the various possi-
bilities, alongside the associated and always present dangers, afforded
by autobiographical performance practices. My selections have, there-
fore, been motivated by a number of considerations; first, each of the
performances considered in any depth are performances which I feel
engage with or illuminate the particular issues being explored. In this
sense, I would consider them to be exemplary within the specific con-
text of this book. Second, I have deliberately attempted to embrace a
range of practices, taken from across time, and from the well-known
to the little-known. Though performances such as Robbie McCauley’s
Sally’s Rape and Bobby Baker’s Drawing on a Mother’s Experience
have already received extensive coverage, it is precisely this ubiquity
and their considerable influence that recommend they take their place
in Autobiography and Performance. To leave them out would seem
to be an oversight. I am also sensitive to the fact that most people will
not be able to access the autobiographical performances that I dis-
cuss (either because they are no longer toured or because they only

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 INTRODUCTION 19

tour to large, urban centres). Whilst there is no substitute for the

live performance experience, and liveness is a property I often stress
here, I nevertheless do think that access to a published script of a
performance, or to a documentational recording of it, remains useful.
It allows certain engagements and analyses to be undertaken or sig-
nificant questions to be posed – at least about the experiences offered
by those other texts, if not by the live experience. Some of the more
well-known performances can be read as performance scripts, whilst
others can be viewed as video or DVD recordings, and this may at
least allow and encourage some debate and dialogue.11 I also hope
that this book extends the knowledge and understanding that readers
might already have about certain performers and performances, whilst
introducing them to significant works that are little known outside of
the local communities in which they were performed, particularly
those that are community- and site-specific and which therefore do
not easily tour. The questions and concerns raised, in relation to all of
the performances, can be applied to, further develop or be challenged
by the vast numbers of performances that are not included here, but
which you, the reader, will want to address. Finally, and perhaps
most importantly, all of the work discussed in Autobiography and
Performance is work that has personally mattered to me because it
has engaged me, bothered me and motivated me. Is Autobiography
and Performance an autobiographical text? No not at all and yes of
course.

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