amongst them rather than separately, or by constantly repositioning your-
self in different parts of the performance space.
GENDER, ETHNICITY, MORPHING IDENTITIES
Performance work, because it emphasises the body and the voice, is a good
medium in which to explore ideas about gender and ethnicity. As soon as
we speak, our gender and ethnicity is revealed in a way it is not when we
write words on the page.
Sometimes simply the presence of gendered or ethnic characteristics
may be highly effective. Ania Walwicz’s texts, many of which deal with
immigration, are made even more forceful in performance by her Polish
accent. But performance can also be a very good forum for challenging
and unfixing ‘normal’ ways of thinking about gender and ethnicity. For
example, a voice can be changed to some degree acoustically, and to a
larger degree technologically, to affect perceptions of gender. So it is pos-
sible to make a male voice sound female, and a female voice sound male:
this is what I have elsewhere called ‘sonic cross-dressing’ (Smith 1999).
Similarly, the way that the body is presented and clothed in a performance
can challenge ideas of gender and sexual identity.
Performance, then, can subvert the ‘performativity’ of gender: the way, as
theorist Judith Butler (1990) has suggested, we continuously and repeatedly
perform gender to conform with certain social norms. If we are female we
play the role of being female through manner, dress, gesture, voice and atti-
tude, and therefore reinforce the idea that we are female. In performance we
can subvert these norms by blurring gender characteristics.
Similarly performance, with the aid of technology, can be a way of chal-
lenging the idea of ethnic identity as other. A western speaking voice, for
example, might be ‘morphed’ into a Chinese or African-American one. In
this way performance and technology can be used in a highly transgressive
and confronting way to undermine comfortable assumptions about identity.
For Exercise 5, create a text which explores the relationship between
performance and gender, and/or performance and ethnicity, using your
voice and body in ways which challenge their normal social construction.
FROM PAGE TO STAGE, PLAYING THE
MICROPHONE
When you are performing in public, you will need to prepare carefully for
your presentation. Even if it’s just a conventional poetry reading, you need
Tongues, talk and technologies 231