Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

Archive

Volume 1 Number 3, December 2000

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Adnabod Nid Gwybod: The Ghost and the Cloud (Perspectives on Performance and Identity) [1]

 

By

 

Lisa Lewis

  

                                      One need not be a Chamber - to be Haunted -

                                      One need not be a House -

                                      The Brain has Corridors - surpassing

                                      Material Place – [2]

 

 

The following is written as a series of statements that follow the experience of devising and performing in a stately home - Newton House, Dinefwr, South Wales. It is an attempt to discuss some of the wider implications of documenting performance - a problem that hovered above the process as we worked.

 

The Feat

 

The perilous feat of documenting and defining a theatre work, after the event, is well known. Indeed, it is practically the central problematic around which our discourses on analysing and documenting performance turn. It is an inevitable fact that a person charting the process of creating a performance has to contend with the closed and finished nature of the event as a past entity. Defining what has gone before is implicitly a subjective endeavour. The theatre event, the performance, leaves hardly any traces of its short-lived existence. The event happens in its own time, and after a brief moment of life it is gone - deceased. The memory and a few appendages - a programme, poster, and recorded documentation - are perhaps the only remnants that we can salvage. And these can offer a veiled glimpse of the work as it was. They are resonant artefacts. But we are helpless in tracing the actuality of the venture, its liveness - its immediate existence in time.

 

The memory of the performance event, for those involved, lingers, and is open to change. It may be re-visited and re-invented in time. Perhaps the most potent evidence in attempting to retrace the performance event is the process of remembrance, albeit a personal, subjective recalling in each case. To remember and ‘adnabod’ (know/be aware) [3] is a remembrance that carries a living awareness of the event’s liveness. And like the event in its primary form (as it happened), this awareness is moving; it is live. Could this awareness in life, of the life of a performance, though highly subjective, be sufficient to sustain a coherent discussion of the piece? Is there reason enough to say that there is a consciousness at work that can absorb a performance event, and by the very knowing of it, discuss its existence? Is there place for the accumulation and dissemination of artistic and aesthetic reactions in the form of memories? To construct a discussion from a faint recollection or awareness a person must move slowly, through a labyrinth of what may seem to be eclectic and disjointed understandings and recordings, fragments of the performance that remain in the mind. Each time the process is accomplished it may begin and end in a different place.

 

The Story

 This documentation must begin with a story. In 1989, I was told the tale of the ghost that haunts Newton House. The tale was remarkable because it was not a Victorian ghost story retold. It appeared as a concurrent story, out of the need to explain a series of peculiar events that had occurred recently, at Newton House.

 

Although Newton House was originally built in the Seventeenth century it has been renovated several times, most recently, in 1992, to its assumed Victorian appearance, by the National Trust. Previously, in 1989, it was the base for a television facilities company, Cwmni’r Dderwen, a widely used and well-known company that provided post-production services to the majority of independent television companies in Wales. Newton House then, was a high tech house, not the atmospheric country house or even dilapidated ruin associated with a haunting.

 

But it is in this context that the story (and the ghost) manifested itself. In the 1980s a series of television editors became ill, one after the other.[4] A coincidence, possibly. There was talk of a peculiar atmosphere in the house. The critical period came when a prominent Welsh film director, and an editor, saw a young and beautiful girl in white walk across the editing room and vanish into a cupboard. I heard many stories subsequently, by people whom I knew. But no matter how extreme the tales became (and some of them as told by visiting psychics became more explicitly fascinating) this particular episode in the editing room remains in my mind, a peculiarly apt merging of haunted images  - the playback of the recorded image on videotape and the apparition (the playback of a memory?). The two things constantly repeated and broadcast, and watched. The White Lady of Newton House manifested herself as a parallel.

 

The Performance

 

In August 1996 a performance piece was devised for Newton House, and performed over a week. The piece itself was an attempt to capture the performers’ feelings and reactions to the house, and in particular the individual rooms. The piece had four inter-weaving aspects - the house, the women, time and sound - that were conveyed by different theatrical means. For the performers Newton House supported all sorts of relationships between our identities and our perception of place. Moreover, during the project itself, the space tended to lead the performative context of the work.

 

Newton House has a history laden with matters regarding social status and class, and how they come to bear on cultural and linguistic identity. Dinefwr Castle, not far from Newton House, was the seat of the Rhys family since the ninth century, and as such, is a castle of the descendants of the (original) Princes of Wales. There has been a house at the site of Newton House since the Fifteenth century, close to the ‘New Town’, as opposed to the old settlement surrounding the Castle walls. During the Sixteenth century the Rhys family anglicised their name to Rice, signifying the assimilation of the Welsh aristocracy into the English; Walter Rice, for instance, was knighted by James I in 1603. This was a symptom of the far-reaching Anglicisation of the Welsh as a nation by the English, and the change in social custom brought about by the new social expectations. The present house was not built until the 1660s, by Edward Rice, and was renovated in 1720 by Griffith Rice (the White Lady is dated as a woman from the 1720s).  At present the National Trust have renovated the house to its ‘original’ Victorian state, although some parts, such as the Drawing Room, have been renovated according to the 1660s design, and consequently the house bears the distinctive architectural features of different periods.

 

As with all such spaces, a house dictates the movements and directions of those within. In devising a piece to be performed here, the house naturally enforced the general structure of the piece. The place, in all its permutations - literal, notional and imaginary, leads the performative nature of the piece.

 

The Structure

 

From memory, the structure of the piece proceeded as follows. Entering the wooden hallway through the main entrance, the audience is called into the library to sit and wait. During the waiting a woman in contemporary dress (black suit) sits at the grand piano at the far end of the library. The library has no books, it is filled with chairs facing the piano, and its walls are full of family oil portraits. The woman at the piano is attempting to play/remember a piece of music. She then sets up her sound-recording equipment, and records detailed information about the history of the house and the family lineage that she herself recites, in Welsh. She also walks about the room, recording ‘silent’ time, which when rewound and played back at high volume reveals a soundscape of quiet noises (some barely audible) that increase in volume until a voice is heard reciting English poetry. The noises on tape vary. It is possible to make out the sound of footsteps on a wooden floor, the sound of a grandfather clock, the tinkling of a cup on saucer, a piano being played, and an excessively quiet recording of poetry (‘Remember’ by Christina Rossetti). The recording is not clear, and is designed to be heard as a silence ‘ghosted’ by sounds. This section of the performance is very still: the performer listens intently and stares at the enormous family portraits on the library walls. It appears as an attempt to encounter absence. On hearing the poetry on tape the performer attempts to rewind and replay the sound louder, with greater clarity. But when tampered with, the sound tape appears to yield no noise at all, apart from the hum of recorded silence. It appears that any attempt to record or capture what is ‘present’ here is going to be difficult. There is no immediate understanding of environment here; this is a place of layers, ambiguous and reticent.

 

After a brief moment of disclosure the Library is empty and silent. From here the audience is led, via an adjoining door in the Library wall panelling, to the Italian Drawing Room, which is shuttered and dark. Here the performer from the Library, armed with tape recorder, becomes an Intruder. While the Intruder is entering with the audience, a figure emerges from behind a screen. She is the Lady in Black, and she moves slowly to sit at the farthest end of the room, by the fireplace, and in slow motion pours herself a cup of tea. She reads her book, seemingly oblivious to the Intruder. The Intruder however, moves towards her tentatively, and begins to ask questions in Welsh, recording with her sound equipment. The Lady in Black gives no direct response to the questioning, though she does read aloud from her book of poems in English (verses by Elizabeth Barret-Browning and Emily Dickinson). These may be perceived as answers to the questions posed in Welsh; on the other hand, it may appear that the Lady in Black has no awareness at all of the Intruder’s presence, as she shows no sign of  having ‘seen’ or ‘heard’ the Intruder. The dialogue follows a pattern of question and response:

 

Intruder:                       Pwy ydych chi? (Who are you?)

Lady in Black:                       I’m ceded - I’ve stopped being Theirs -

                                      The name They dropped upon my face

                                      With water, in the country church

                                      Is finished using, now,

                                      And They can put it with my Dolls,

                                      My childhood, and the string of spools,

                                      I’ve finished threading - too – [5]

 

The questions end, as does the ‘reading’. The Intruder exists the Drawing Room and walks into the formal Victorian garden, which is flanked on three sides by a miniature landscape of rolling hills - the entire panorama designed by Capability-Brown. Two women appear in eighteenth-century aristocratic dress. The audience is pulled towards the natural theatrical arena of the Italian terrace as the women and the Intruder ascend the steps to the reading platform. From here the Intruder attempts to recite poetry in Welsh while the women jostle her form either side, and try to read poetry in English. The stress of the pushing and pulling (the Ladies also jostle with each other for attention) disrupts the performer’s voice and the nature of the reading/recital. When the pushing intensifies and becomes absurd, the Intruder leaves the Italian terrace and turns her focus back towards the façade of the house. In the conservatory window on the first floor, a Lady in White is to be seen vaguely (it is relatively far away and she does not appear immediately before the window). The audience themselves may have noticed the Lady in White for some period of time, or they may not have noticed her replay of gestures at all. They are left with no choice however, as they must follow the Intruder into the main hallway of the house, where the Lady in White is visible descending the grand staircase. The Lady in White has her hand outstretched, as though holding something, she is barefoot, and stares straight ahead. She appears to be mumbling or voicing something quietly under her breath. As she descends, the Intruder asks the audience to listen and follow the Lady in White, who leads them down the inner hall to the servants staircase, which she descends. The audience follows.

 

In the basement the Lady in White is not to be seen. The Intruder enters the Kitchen, where two maids seem to be going through their daily chores. One is dressed as a Victorian chambermaid, the other is dressed in a far more rural costume and appears to be from an earlier period. The two maids are oblivious to each other’s presence, and they cross paths recurrently, without any display of recognition. The effect is a montage of time-spaces, of two different ‘recordings’ one superimposed on the other. This is intensified by the intricate soundscape to be heard in this room, part recorded and part live, composed of conversations, songs (popular folk and hymns), informal chi-chat and colloquial sayings. Their talk is entirely in Welsh. There is no over-riding signifier denoting time in this room, and there is no point of commencement or ending for the events that occur there. The maids appear to be unaware of anything except their actions.

 

Leaving the Kitchen the Intruder walks the basement corridors, and the audience follows. It is dark. The Intruder enters a long cellar, where the Lady in White is to be seen at the furthest end, walking. Here, for the first time, the Intruder and the Lady in White touch. They encounter each other through a physical pattern of falling and holding which begins with the Lady falling (recurrently) and the Intruder holding her. It is accompanied by a vocal score of poetry that is heard in a mixture of English and Welsh. Gradually the pattern of falling becomes one of transformation, as the Intruder begins to fall, and the Lady in White holds her, gradually taking her place. During this, the Intruder’s voice becomes the Lady’s, and they eventually change their clothes, as well as their places. The performer who played the Lady in White leaves the room as the Intruder, wearing a black suit. The new Intruder exits the cellar via a stone spiral staircase that leads to a panel door in the Library. The audience follows her and find themselves where the performance began. There is nothing here, and they wait, look or leave, as they wish.

 

The performance is tenuous and delicate. It depends very much on looking, listening, and catching discrete information, in passing. The vocal texts used throughout - poetry by Elizabeth Barret-Browning, Christina Rossetti, and Emily Dickinson - suggested worlds of nostalgia and melancholic remembering:

 

                                      The curtains were half drawn, the floor was swept

                                                  . . . He did not touch the shroud, or raise the fold

                                                That hid my face . . . [6]

 

                                      I heard a Fly buzz - when I died -

                                      The Stillness in the Room

                                      Was like the Stillness in the Air -

                                      Between the Heaves of Storm – [7]

 

                                      When I was dead, my spirit turned

                                                To seek the much frequented house:

                                      I passed the door, and saw my friends

                                                Feasting beneath the green orange boughs . . . [8]

 

Time

 

The performance was episodic, and each episode displayed an awareness of time in the house as a multi-layered entity. Overlapping of times/layers was displayed by the action, and time was segmented visually - with the use of freeze frame, replaying, forwarding, slow motion and pause of events. The performers attempted to convey a feeling of the performance as a recorded event being replayed.

 

In retrospect the question of documenting the performance has become a problem. The performance piece may or may not have been constructed as the above description suggests. As a performer myself, I am making approximate statements on the nature of the piece in toto, as I was performing in some parts of the house and not others and was therefore unable to assimilate fully the trajectory of the whole piece (as an audience member could). In addition the piece was amorphous, any definable narrative was necessarily subjective, and imposed by the performers themselves. Composed on the basis of succinct, tentative encounters, the piece was created so that the content would recede, would blur at the edges and vanish away, when presented. It was not, by its very nature, a recordable piece. Indeed, the performance itself alluded to the difficulty of recording and documenting moments in time. On a more practical level, it was not possible to photograph or record the work in National Trust property which had been extensively renovated and which housed so many original oil paintings.

 

The true artefacts for documenting a performance are remnants in the mind, and are highly subjective. To make these remnants dependable the researcher is tempted to inquire about the nature of the mind, and of memory as a bona fide tool for analysis. Francis Crick in his book on the nature of consciousness has addressed the precarious nature of remembering:

 

Recalling a memory, as we all know, is not a straightforward process.  Usually some clue is needed to address the memory, and even then the memory may be elusive. Some memories become weak, and need stronger clues to evoke them. Others appear to die until they are completely lost. A related memory may intrude and block access to the one you want, and so on. [9]

 

As a performer I remember a vague pattern of physical and vocal levels interweaving, and creating links that were charged with personal relevance. However, it is not possible to reach the kernel of any level, as they manifest themselves in different ways at different times of recalling them. All the memories recalled are necessarily and inevitably mine. In addition, the aesthetic experience contains elements that cannot be controlled or encompassed, such as spectators’ expectations and feelings. The aesthetic content of a performance is not quantifiable, and when the performance has ended it is no longer present. In the same way it cannot be present before a performance commences. This content cannot be recorded in any way. It exists in the process of exposing the theatrical NOW; it is an experience that dwells in the air of the room for a fleeting second before it vanishes. It is a dawning awareness. But, its traces continue in the experience of the witnesses present, and the feelings and impressions received during this experience can be recalled, despite the fact that a person may or may not be able to recall why they were stimulated by anything.

 

Moreover, the impressions had by all are never-ending in terms of content, and consequently it is understood that any given retelling of a performance is a personal narrative. The documentation of the performance is always reduced to the singular point of view, each and every time it is retold - verbally or photographically. At best it is a confluence of these points of view, in an attempt to provide an overview. But even this can never be more than a fractured retelling of an ephemeral whole, with its absolute condition - its liveness - absent.

 

Is our constant preoccupation with the process of documentation a concession to the scientific model we inadvertently adopt in an attempt to be appropriately analytical? According to Patrick Harpur we are troubled by our ‘literal-minded world-view’, which makes us ‘demand that objects have only a single identity or meaning. We are educated to see with the eye only, in single vision’. [10] We are bombarded by what Harpur calls the ‘real’, ‘factual’, and ‘true’ in the literal sense, rather than extending the meaning of the words to understand our experience of life more fully:

 

If it is good enough (we might say, if it is art), we feel that we are watching a revelation of some deeper reality, normally concealed in the muddle of our mundane lives. Even if it is not great art, we still - astonishingly - suffer all the emotions of suspense, joy, pity and terror as if the drama were real [. . . ] We are seized because the drama is real - not literally real but imaginatively real. We stumble out of the theatre, rubbing our eyes as if we had just seen a ‘big dream’ or vision; we look about us at the ordinary world that now seems curiously unreal compared to the drama. [11]

 

If I was to offer a model for documentation that utilises the imagination as a basis it might be seen as foolish, or indeed, it might be refused outright by those possessed by the urge to explain all things indefinitely. If we take the theatrical event, we see that the audience are willing participants. They are open to the metaphorical as well as the literal, and hey do not seek to discover an overriding logic behind the event. They are using their imaginative faculties.

 

The imagination is excluded from the realm of scientific analysis, despite the fact that science has its own imaginative processes. Since the splitting of the atom scientists have been discussing the properties of the proton, electron and neutron, and more recently, the quark, a smaller unit, of which there were originally four basic types, named Upness, Downness, Strangeness, and Charm. There are now at least forty quarks, and the nuclear scientist’s unit of measure is getting smaller all the time, as they keep adding to the number of dimensions (of which there are at least ten). The nuclear scientist discusses the concept of internal space that is characterized by particles that are ‘there but not there’. This is expounded by Werner Heisenberg in his Uncertainty Principle, according to which we cannot know these sub-atomic particles in themselves, only by their traces, because these are particles without matter. There has been much debate concerning the content of such statements - are they literal or metaphoric? On what level do we accept them?

 

The White Lady

 

‘Ghosts . . . are explicitly disembodied signifiers’, writes Rebecca Schneider, ‘They are also particularly postmodern entities. Within the ruins of the modernist myth of originality, every act, public and private, is ghosted by precedence.  Form is ruin, ghosted by content, and content is ghosted by the historical trajectory of its forms’. [12] The performance at Newton House, the haunted house, explored questions of identity, not only in terms of language and nationhood, but also in terms of gender. The women’s story was retold, not through documentary history, and without a primary, consistent voice, but by structuring a symbolic and imaginary space in which suggestions and references were made about women, and by women. The house, as seat of the Rhys/Rice name, and historic site of the lineage of the princes of Wales, is a place loaded with references to men as inheritors of property, as rulers and princes, and visually, as main focus of the portraits adorning the walls. There are reminders everywhere - this is not a female site, and yet it is haunted by a White Lady. She has been writing herself into the site for nearly three centuries (if she is dated as coming from the 1720s). The lady in question at Newton House is purported to be Eleanor Cavendish from Matlock, first cousin to the then Lady of the House. She is a historical figure, for whom there is documentary evidence pertaining to her existence (birth certificate, genealogical evidence), although there is no death certificate, and no grave. It is thought that she might have been murdered at Newton House.

 

The White Lady is a public apparition, and is usually associated with a place rather than a person (although there is much to suggest an association with both in this instance). She is the most commonly occurring ghost, and seen by young women more than any other group of people, although she can be seen by anybody. In mythological terms, the White Lady represents a great event such as a murder or crime of passion; she may be the memory of a jilted girl, an abandoned wife, or murdered woman, woven into the fabric of the site. She is fated to walk the very place that is painful to her, compelling a constant relationship between herself as a historical figure and her past. She serves as a reminder. She does not speak, but her presence alludes to something mysterious beyond herself, as Patrick Harpur has stated, ‘Their silence is eloquent. Their appearance is itself the message: enigmatic, often sinister, pointing towards the unknown.’ [13] As a phenomenon the White Lady belongs to the end of the eighteenth century onwards - the period when the European began to experience the past as a place different to the present. One way of keeping hold of the past was by association with place  - an association fuelled and sustained by the concept of haunting. In every haunting there is a tension between the seen and not seen, between the material and the immaterial, between being and not being.

 

Similarly, in the theatrical event, there is a tension between the performer and the performed. This tension houses the different representations of woman that may be displayed during a performance. Peggy Phelan has written of this problematic, extolling a perspective based on not seeing, or in her terms - ‘blindness’. If the only way a woman can escape the historical preconceptions of herself is by not being female, then the spectator should not ‘see’ her at all, she should pass ‘from visibility as a woman’. [14] Even if the female performer is not representing a character, by completing simple actions the female performer is representing a woman. For her body is representational. From the point of view of feminist semiotics a woman as sign is not a priori a natural entity, but a ‘fictional construct, a distillate from diverse but congruent discourses dominant in Western cultures.’ [15]. The sign ‘woman’ is produced; it is made up of various social and cultural associations that are portrayed or represented through precise and relatively immovable theatrical conventions in the act of ‘performing’.

 

The social and representational limits of the ‘female’ can be isolated, and highlighted. The sign ‘woman’ may be constructed, but it is not beyond the limits of performance to interrogate this construction. A female performer can examine the relationship between herself as performer and the action she is fulfilling, in time. Presenting an episodic performance piece may assist in this, as it is a form apt to questioning the process of cause and effect. In Newton House, the episodic structure of the piece, the travelling through the house, room to room, enabled an investigation into the role and the meanings of the different women inhabiting the house - as performers and created representational signs.

 

The term used to describe the fragmentary and shifting organizational device to be found in women’s writing is ‘contiguity’. It is a process of creating a form ‘which is constantly in the process of weaving itself, at the same time ceaselessly embracing words and yet casting them off to avoid becoming fixed, immobilized. For when ‘she’ says something, it is already no longer identical to what she means. Moreover, her statements are never identical to anything. Their distinguishing feature is one of contiguity. They touch (upon).’ [16] Sue-Ellen Case calls this process contiguity, that ‘exists within the text and at its borders: the feminine form seems to be without a sense of formal closure - in fact, it operates as an anti-closure.’ Without closure the traditional principles of composition do not apply, and the work ‘abandons the hierarchical organizing principles of traditional form that served to elide women from discourse.' Because of this the work may be ‘elliptical rather than illustrative, fragmentary rather than whole, ambiguous rather than clear, and interrupted rather than complete.’ [17]

 

In Newton House the performers’ experiences interwove and changed frequently, almost as soon as a new room was entered, or a new woman was encountered. This process of encountering was not composed of direct exposition; it was based on looking and talking indirectly, though not obliquely. It was composed through questions, short (not always complete) statements, and pieces of poetry. In this way we were able to encounter that which is known and felt, but which is not knowable in the sense of fact or information (adnabod nid gwybod). The piece was entitled ‘Cadw Ty Mewn Cwmwl Tystion’ (Keeping House In a Cloud of Witnesses), based on a line from the poem ‘Beth yw dyn?’ (What is man?), by the Welsh poet Waldo Williams. Although the concept of cloud of witnesses has Biblical (Hebrew) roots, it was adopted by Williams to represent the sense of being surrounded by witnesses to memory and the past - witnesses to who we are. J. R. Jones, the Welsh philosopher describes it as:

 

Living and working in the vanished present, as though under the sight of the endless past; the idea that this generation has not been left unconnected and without witness; but that an eye from the past is looking at it [. . .] Witnesses to what in People are the generations of the past? Are they not witnesses to who they are as People - witnesses to their nationhood? Here the past is working as a kind of memory. [18]

 

The ability to recall, and interrogate the past, and the freedom to clothe ourselves in it, or discard it if we so wish is a powerful tool. To many, this past is rooted in our remembered space and time (remembered in the sense that is a past behind us that may be remembered literally as part of our lives, or/and a historical a past that may be kept, supported, and adapted to make meaning in the present). As women, walking, sitting, talking, we were actively recalling the passive history of the women of Newton House, whilst refusing to become prescriptive about a women’s history. During the act of performing we are ‘keeping house’ in a ‘cloud of witnesses’ literally and metaphorically. The witnesses of the past - memories, ghosts and hauntings, and the witnesses to the present - the performers and spectators. We are bound together in an attempt to meet - a meeting between our ‘selves’ and our memories, as well as between the spectators and ourselves. Out of this meeting comes the ability to discuss our own actions and creations, although that may not be done explicitly or with ease.

 

References

 

1. The difference between ‘adnabod’ and ‘gwybod’ is untranslatable into English. In French it could be translated as ‘connaitre pas savoir’. That is, to know as a person/to recognise and acknowledge, rather than to know a fact or possess knowledge.

2. From A Choice of Emily Dickinson’s Verse (London: Faber & Faber, 1993), p. 27.

3. Adnabod: knowledge of a person or thing (be aware of it).

4. This is documented in the Welsh-language programme Troeon (Ffilmiau Elidyr, 1990).

5. From Emily Dickinson: The Complete Poems, ed. by Thomas H. Johnson, (London: Faber & Faber, 1975), p. 247 (no. 508).

6. From A Choice of Christina Rossetti’s Verse (London: Faber & Faber, 1970), p. 37.

7. From A Choice of Emily Dickinson’s Verse, p.17.

8. From ‘At Home’, A Choice of Christina Rossetti’s Verse, p. 30.

9. Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis (London: Simon & Schuster, 1994), p. 68.

10. Patrick Harpur, Daimonic Reality (London: Penguin Arkana, 1995), p. 93.

11. Op.Cit., p. 94.

12. Rebecca Schneider, ‘After us the Savage Goddess, Feminist Performance Art of the explicit body staged, uneasily, across modernist dreamscapes’, in Elin Diamond (ed.), Performance and Cultural Politics (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 155-176 (p. 155).

13. Harpur, p. 112.

14. Peggy Phelan quoted by Rebecca Schneider, ‘After us the Savage Goddess’, in Elin Diamond (ed.), Performance and Cultural Politics, p. 157.

15. Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics and Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), p. 5. Quoted by Sue-Ellen Case in ‘Towards a New Poetics’, in Lizbeth Goodman, ed., The Routledge Reader in Gender and Performance (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 145.

16. Luce Irigaray, ‘The Sex Which Is Not One’, in Elaine Marks & Isabelle de Courtivron, eds., New French Feminisms: An Anthology (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1981), p. 103.

17. Sue-Ellen Case, ‘Towards a New Poetics’, in Lizbeth Goodman, ed., The Routledge Reader in Gender and Performance, p. 147.

18. J. R. Jones, Ac Onide (Llandybïe: Llyfrau’r Dryw, 1970), p. 138 (my translation). In Welsh the phrase hunaniaeth genedligol is used where I have placed ‘nationhood’. In Welsh cenedligol, from cenedl, can mean pertaining to nation, race, kind, or gender. The verb cenhedlu (from cenedl) means to beget. In the context of this quotation I have read hunaniaeth genedligol as identity pertaining to a person’s place of origin, and have used the word ‘nationhood’.