Queer Healing: Exploring Dramaturgies of Suspension in Queer Contemporary Performance

Abstract

This thesis explores the transformative and queer healing potential of queer contemporary performance and artworks with Ophelia’s Got Talent as a focal point. In Ophelia's Got Talent, Austrian-born theatermaker and choreographer Florentina Holzinger reimagines Shakespeare's Ophelia as an empowerment symbol, interpreting her death as an act of agency. The performance, rich with water-themed imagery, features an all-female cast reclaiming trauma through daring acts in a talent show format. In 21st century Western society, one could argue we are experiencing a collapse in imagination, leading to a constant state of collective trauma. Lauren Berlant’s notion that normativity is violent is used to elucidate ways in which queer contemporary art can prompt queer healing. Drawing on Berlant’s “cruel optimism” and “crisis ordinariness”, six elements of queer healing are defined: community care, alternative kinship, Jack Halberstam’s “queer failure”, José Esteban Munoz’ “disidentification”, subjugated healing knowledges and Tony Wells’ “imagination”. Through a dramaturgical analysis of Ophelia’s Got Talent along the planes of spectatorship and statement it was found that the performance keeps the spectator suspended and in a state of what Victor Turner calls betwixt and between. Through the compositional element of watery imagery the performance produces a spectatorship of porosity. The ways trauma is represented in the performance aligns with Berlant’s concept of crisis ordinariness as the traumatic stories that are reclaimed are clearly embedded in societal systems of power and oppression. The performance Ophelia’s Got Talent strategically uses water to both engage with and subvert traditional gendered representations of water, thereby disidentifying with the passive victimhood often associated with femininity. From the analysis four paired dramaturgical strategies are identified and applied to three other queer contemporary artworks. The dramaturgical strategies are: ebbing, flooding, crystallizing and dissolving. In applying these dramaturgical strategies to the other case studies within a contextual analysis, it was found that they emphasized change, fluidity, and repetition. These strategies facilitated the undoing or dismantling of certain frameworks, systems, or worlds, thereby creating space for new possibilities and alternative modes of interaction and existence. In conclusion, this thesis