Autobiography and Performance (Deirdre Heddon, 2008)

Introduction P.1 - 19

• P.1 [Example of work, Drawing on a Mother's Experience, Bobby Baker; verfremdungseffekt, Bertolt Brecht]
• P.2 If pressed to think of the best-known performers in the USA who consistently use autobiographical material in their performances, 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 Bornstein, Tim Miller, Ron Athey, Lenora Champagne, Peggy Shaw, Lois Weaver, Luis Alfaro, Marga Gomez and Spalding Gray...From this list we might deduce that the majority of artists who use autobiography in their work are marginalised subjects.
• Solo Autobiographical performance in the UK is also well-recognized 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. Many of these performers are lesbian, gay and/or blank and/or transgender, and their work also addresses explicitly their particular location(s) and the experiences that are inscribed there.
• P.3 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 performance. 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) [Spry, T. (2003) Illustrated Woman: Autoperformance in 'skins: A daughter's (Re)construction of Cancer' and 'Tattoo Stories: A postscript to 'Skins'. In L.C. Miller, J. Taylor & M.H. Carver, eds. Voices Made Flesh: Performing Women's Autobiography. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, pp. 167-91]
• P.5 As I hope to show, although autobiographical performances look, in form, monologic, the public context of their work and the performer's aspirations to communicate with their spectators transform those works into dialogues. Live autobiographical performance takes place not only in shared time, but also in shared space. These performances are made with a spectator in mind.
  

Heddon, D. (2008). Autobiography and Performance. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.