Marie Clements: Stabilized Slippage

Both Derrida and Peggy Phelan have observed that theatre “ theatre continually marks the perpetual disappearance of its own enactment” (Unmarked 115). Carolyn R. Miller has proposed that genre be seen “one of the structures of power that institutions wield” (“Rhetorical Community” 71). Allan Luke notes that “texts are dynamic cultural forms, subject to heteroglossia and play in local, contested ways (Genre and the New Rhetoric viii-ix). As Catherine F. Schryer suggests theatre pauses in its “perpetual disappearance” in a “stabilized-for-now or stabilized-enough site of social and ideological action” (“The Lab vs. the Clinic: Sites of Competing Genres” 107).
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 The paper explores Vancouver-based playwright Marie Clements’s work in light of these theoretical notion, particularly Age of Iron and The Unnatural and Accidental Woman.Clement’s feminist and First Nations politic is layered and hybrid, moving—both thematically and scenographically—through a complex semiosis employing European, white Canadian and First Nations markers. Her design is equally layered—marked by projections, audio-visual effects and background soundscapes.  Her plays employ and subvert traditional genre to explore the power of social institutions, revealing the formative power of theatre within the institutionalization of power. Her plays—which demand a multivocal response—pause in “stabilized-enough” sites to make their statement, but their elusive design reveals, at the same time, the artificiality of such stoppage. In these ways Clement’s plays, then, themselves become metonymic of her political comment.