The Women’s Project: A Director’s Perspective on Creating a Performance Collage

Abstract

This article details the process of mounting original works created by women, for the NYU Forum for Ethnotheatre and Theatre for Social Justice. Exploring notions of culture and identity, the material represented the female narrative in performance through autoethnographies, spoken word poetry, rants, monologues, and the use of shifting characterization and movement. The director and performers paid critical attention to the body as an instrument through which meaning is generated, representing the power of the solo voice in the context of the ensemble. The performers’ artistic backgrounds, modes of solo performance, and the challenges and triumphs of re-envisioning and re-enacting social and cultural contexts are also discussed.