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Counting Her Dresses and other plays

Counting her Dresses and other plays… University of Reading, 8th – 11th December 2010. Lib Taylor: devisor, sound designer, set designer, projection designer. Gertrude Stein’s plays, though rarely performed, are highly significant in the development of the avant-garde, including modernist and postmodernist performance. Developing my ongoing research by practice in performativity, space and identity (e.g., Eden Cinema 2005, Savannah Bay 2007), I worked with two professional performers to focus my staging decisions on the text’s discontinuities and ambivalences, so that performance would intervene in and analyse Stein’s theatre texts. Stein’s essay ‘Plays’, from Lectures in America, was a key reference for the performance and my research process worked to locate a performance style appropriate for Stein’s fractured and ambivalent writings. Counting Her Dresses was a mixed-media performance in which the separation and fragmentation of voice and body, juxtaposing intermedial and live performance, expressed and interrogated Stein’s exploration of writing and self. Five theatre fragments were combined in a performance collage, embodying Stein’s sense of the ‘continuous present’, resonant for theatre performances. The single performer, unspeaking but doubled by dual female voice-overs, moved between activities of writing, dressing, eating, reading, drinking, evoking the leisured yet reflective and self-conscious tone characterising Stein’s critical and creative work. The design and spatial configuration, surrounding the audience and soliciting their participation, alluded to her Paris salon and the experimental art of Picasso, Matisse, Cezanne etc that Stein promoted. The immersive combination of promenade and gallery performance forms juxtaposed a soundcape of voices, live performance, an ‘exhibition’ of paintings and images projected onto and across the space to evoke Stein’s sense of theatre as a place of experience and emotion, not a place of story and action. Performance brought together historical, formal aesthetic and phenomenological approaches in a deconstructive analysis of Stein’s work on inscription and embodiment.