Staging Body Politics in Tomson Highway’s The Rez Sisters (1986) and Brian Friel’s Dancing At Lughnasa (1990)

Alkhayat, Marwa Essam Eldin; Alkhayat, Marwa Essam Eldin

doi:10.21608/tjhss.2023.215507.1194

Staging Body Politics in Tomson Highway’s The Rez Sisters (1986) and Brian Friel’s Dancing At Lughnasa (1990)

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

Ahram Canadian University

10.21608/tjhss.2023.215507.1194

Abstract

The present paper examines Tomson Highway’s The Rez Sisters and Brian Friel’s Dancing At Lughnasa within the paradigm of Performance Studies to dramatize an emotional rapture in an exasperated choreographic show. My interest in the performing body is pivotal to interrogate stage oral histories as performances in which the Native abject body appears as a signifying practice since the female performing body in question has no faith in a rationally unified subject. The Cree and Irish women’s dance performances exhibit a patent example of bodies that materializes gender within the legacies of colonial histories. The native women’s titanic power is reflected in a fast-moving structure full of frenetic moments to destabilize the monolithic logical and orderly structures escaping teleological assumptions of the linear time through the deployment of a physical lyricism, a rhythmical movement and a theatrical rapture. The Bingo Game and the Festival of Lughnasa give rise to the seductive abject body that hovers at the periphery of the indigenous women’s consciousness. Therefore, performance – as a dynamic practice – is grotesque, fluid and ephemeral echoing the instability of the inward/outward border of the abject body.

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