Title: Embodying Love: Mother Meets Daughter in Theatre for Cultural Exchange
Abstract: This work was supported by the Korea Research Foundation Grant (KRF-2003-042-G00016) ANNA: [really angry] You have no right to tell me I have no feelings. You don't know. BILLIE: Show me. ANNA: I can't display feelings on demand.1 The two characters in Australian Joanna Murray-Smith's play Love Child are discussing their emotional feelings.2 After this denial, Anna subsequently proceeds to theatrically deliver, and speak about, emotions that a reader/spectator might interpret as painful anguish, in what might conventionally be described as dramatic catharsis. A character's personal revelation in combination with an explicit emotional display has long been the substance of realist drama. Since this play belongs within late twentiethcentury Australian realism, it is fairly predictable that the character of Anna will expunge the requisite emotional feelings despite her claim to the contrary. Although Anna, as a character, claims that she cannot show emotional feelings on request, actors are expected to perform them. In this article, the play and two productions of it are discussed in order to consider social configurations of emotions and emotional feelings. A presumption that overt demonstrations of emotions make effective drama has, thankfully, been challenged since early twentieth-century interpretations of Chekhovian realism. An assumption that the social identity of characters determines the extent of their emotional display and its theatrical purpose, however, remains comparatively unquestioned. Who is expected to embody particular emotions in realist theatre, and to what extent do these reinforce socially conventional beliefs about emotional feelings? The character of Anna is a non-matemal mother, and the character of Billie is a disturbed daughter. Billie's demand that Anna reveal her emotional feelings might seem reasonable in the context of an exchange between a mother and a daughter. This drama reiterates a widespread social belief in Australia - supported by much therapeutic practice - that an individual's emotional feelings should be discharged, especially to family members, albeit in controlled ways. Underlying this belief is an assumption that intimate spaces arise with embodied emotionality. Realist drama would seem to have thrived in this ideological context. But there is also an accompanying belief that another's subjective emotional feeling can be known; in the example here, Billie is provocative because she believes that she can predict what Anna feels. In actuality, the problem in the scene is that Anna should be displaying the requisite emotions of a nurturing, caring mother, which Billie seeks. An expectation in drama and its theatre that a character will reveal subjective emotions corresponds with perceptions of the social benefits of expressing emotional feelings. It needs to be asked if such beliefs have cultural specificity like realist drama. Love Child is one of the few Australian plays to be translated and produced in Seoul, South Korea. The play is an emotionally charged encounter between an adult daughter given up for adoption at birth, who is meeting her birth mother for the first time. The South Korean production raises the question as to how the emotion in the play translates for an audience in a very different culture from that of Australia, even given that a mother-daughter relationship is completely portable. Can a drama simply be assumed to carry its emotional content into another culture's theatre? In claiming that emotion is unnatural, anthropologist Catherine Lutz argues that social communication about emotion is culturally specific.9 She argues against an assumption in Euro-American culture that the meanings of emotions are naturally intrinsic to the body and universally understood. For example, the recognition of emotion in face muscle configurations scarcely begins the process of understanding the complexity of emotional exchanges in social relationships. …
Publication Year: 2006
Publication Date: 2006-10-01
Language: en
Type: article
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