Radical (Self-) Direction and the Body: Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan’s Performance Art

In the traditional hierarchy of theatrical production, the director functions as a medium through which the textual body comes to exist on and by the physical body of the performer. As “the afterimage of processes set in motion” during rehearsal, performance includes the invisible presence of the director (Letzler Cole 2).1 It is also the apparatus which affords real, live – that is, visibly present – bodies (the audience) the privilege to gaze at the embodied text, to read, decode, and judge its possible meanings. Wherever we might locate ourselves (our bodies) in this creative process, we are almost certainly unable to control all its bodies or all its meanings (actual and potential). But, as Susan Bordo reminds us, the body is “a medium of culture” (13) and cultures insist, in protection of their own vested interests, that, as such, the body – with its very particular powers to mean – be monitored and controlled. As Michel Foucault has persuasively argued, control is produced by a discipline which “increases the forces of the body (in economic terms of utility) and diminishes these same forces (in political terms of obedience)” (History of Sexuality 138). Since the act of performance is also an act of desire (for, among other things, a willing and collective body identified as audience), cultures have, throughout history, been vigilant as to how such desire can be staged and how its performing bodies might be contained within a matrix of economic utility and political obedience. The traditional hierarchy of theatrical production is one such manoeuvre and the director has, in the twentieth century at least, been afforded the authority of surveillance. What Foucault calls the “panoptic modality of power” operates in the discipline/production of theatre as the director’s prerogative (Discipline and Punish 221).