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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 January 2009
In an earlier issue of New Theatre Quarterly, NTQ55 (August 1998), Marcia Blumberg examined the setting of the kitchen in performances by Bobby Baker and Jeanne Goosen, arguing for the ‘transitional and transgressive’ possibilities of this domesticcum-performance space. Here, Elaine Aston returns to the ‘kitchen’ in Bobby Baker's performances of ‘daily life’. The article examines Baker's ‘language’ of food which ‘speaks’ of domesticity, and her conjunction of comic playing and the hysterical marking of the body, to show how her performance work constitutes an angry, feminist protest at the lack of social transformation in women's lives. Elaine Aston has authored a number of studies on contemporary women's theatre, and is Chair of Contemporary Performance and Theatre Studies, Lancaster University.
1. Gavron, Hannah, The Captive Wife: Conflicts of Housebound Mothers (London: Routledge, 1966Google Scholar; revised edition, 1983). Gavron committed suicide in 1965, before she had turned thirty.
2. Gavron, The Captive Wife, p. 140.
3. Ibid., p. 146.
4. Baker has plans for a further ‘Daily Life’ show set in a church. During the 1990s she has been performing a series of ‘Occasional Tables’ – short one-off food performances created for specific events. In this article, my discussion of Baker's performances is based on the video recordings of her shows which are distributed by Artsadmin, London.
5. See MacDonald, Claire, ‘Feminism, Autobiography, and Performance Art’, in Swindells, Julia, ed., The Uses of Autobiography (London: Taylor and Francis, 1995), p. 187–95Google Scholar; and Heddon, Deirdre, ‘What's in a Name?’, Studies in Theatre Production, No. 18 (12 1998), p. 49–59Google Scholar.
6. MacRitchie, Lynn, review of My Cooking Competes, in Parker, Rozsika and Pollock, Griselda, eds., Framing Feminism: Art and the Women's Movement, 1970–1985 (London: Pandora, 1987), p. 230Google Scholar.
7. Kaplan, E. Ann, Motherhood and Representation: the Mother in Popular Culture and Melodrama (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 6–7Google Scholar.
8. In her autobiographical talk given at the New Works Festival, Leicester, in September 1997, Baker described the three fundamental principles of her work as (1) drawing on her own experiences; (2) working with food; and (3) striving for artistic integrity. Her principle of integrity she explained as her desire that a work of art, a performance, should be ‘complete’, or ‘undiminished’ – an almost impossible task, Baker claimed, but one for the artist to aspire to.
9. Quoted from publicity issued by Artsadmin.
10. See, for example, Lynn MacRitchie's review of My Cooking Competes, in Parker and Pollock, op. cit.
11. Gavron, The Captive Wife, p. 130.
12. Coward, Rosalind, ‘The Mouth’, in Female Desire: Women's Sexuality Today (London: Paladin, 1984), p. 121Google Scholar.
13. See Nice, Vivien E., ‘Mother to Mother’, in Mothers and Daughters: the Distortion of a Relationship (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), Chapter 6CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
14. It is also interesting to note that in Baker's life-size cake family in An Edible Family in a Mobile Home, the baby was modelled on herself, and was significantly the most distressed figure in the familial tableau.
15. Review, Drawing on a Mother's Experience, Performance Magazine, November 1990.
16. Similarly, in her next show, How to Shop, Baker presents the domestic task of shopping through the public discourse of the academic lecture. For a commentary on the kitchen as a private domestic setting used for performance, and the transgressive possibilities which this affords, see Blumberg, Marcia, ‘Domestic Place as Contestatory Space: the Kitchen as Catalyst and Crucible’, Neiv Theatre Quarterly, No. 55 (08 1998), p. 195–201Google Scholar.
17. The overalls signify not only domesticity, but also the idea of woman as patient. In Take a Peek!, for example, Baker wears several layers of overalls, which are removed, sequence by sequence, to expose social and medical objectification of the female body in a style of grotesque, circus-style, freak-show playing.
18. Stacey, Caroline, review of Kitchen Show, in Time Out, 10–17 07 1991Google Scholar.
19. On this point, see Chodorow's, Nancy seminal study, The Reproduction of Mothering (Berkeley; Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978)Google Scholar.
20. Catherine Clément, in Cixous, Hélène and Clément, Catherine, The Newly Born Woman, trans. Wing, Betsy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), p. 5Google Scholar.
21. For details see Showalter, Elaine, The Female Malady (London: Virago, 1985)Google Scholar.
22. The first and second phases are the epileptoid phase (the patient losing consciousness and foaming at the mouth); the phase of clownism (the patient producing incredible contortions, distortions of the body); as explained in Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady, p. 150.
23. The parallel between Charcot's patients and Baker's own style of hysteria is not lost on Baker herself. Reviewing Baker's show Take a Peek!, Marina Warner explained: ‘When [Baker] saw the images of herself grimacing, she realized they caught the feeling of the photographs Charcot had taken to illustrate the passions that surfaced in the hysterical condition’. See The Guardian, 21 June 1995.
24. Similarly, Charcot would photograph the attitudes passionelles of his female patients, and add his own captions as titles (see Showalter, The Female Malady, p. 150). In Baker's performances, however, it is she who authors her own image and determines meaning.
25. See Coward, Female Desire, p. 37–46.
26. Showalter, Elaine, Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Culture (London: Picador, 1997), p. 7Google Scholar.
27. Claire MacDonald, ‘Feminism, Autobiography, and Performance Art’, p. 190.
28. See Note 17, above.
29. Douglas, Mary, Purity and Danger: an Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 1966), p. 36CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
30. See Douglas, Purity and Danger, p. 34.
31. Rosalind Coward, Female Desire, p. 119.
32. See Freud, Sigmund, On Sexuality (Harmonds-worth: Penguin, 1977), p. 104Google Scholar.
33. Kristeva, Julia, Powers of Horror: an Essay on Abjection, trans. Roudiez, Leon S. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 2–3Google Scholar.
34. See Cixous and Clément, The Newly Born Woman, p. 8.
