ABSTRACT
In this, and the following chapter, I wish to focus on women’s lives as a subject for devising. My concluding chapter looks specifically at working with our selves as the subject/s of the feminist devising process, while here I am principally concerned with the lives of other women: working with the possibilities of feminist biography, rather than autobiography. At the outset of this study we noted Alison Oddey’s observation, ‘devised theatre can start from anything’ (Oddey 1994:1), and this being the case I found it difficult to decide which devising projects to share in this part of the volume. However my attention to women’s lives in this and the final chapter arises from the ways in which they touch centrally on the principal concerns of many woman-centred projects: representation of the self/selves, the (de-) construction of social and cultural identities, and the question of ‘truth’. My proposals in this chapter are illustrated by a brief case study of a devised performance based on the life and writings of the poet Christina Rossetti.
