마부 마인의 <인형집>(Dollhouse) 공연 분석 -연극성과 수행적 성별(peformative gender)의 전경화(foregrounding)-

Abstract

Mabou Mines’ Dollhouse juxtaposes the artificiality of theatre with the performative nature of gender. Director Lee Breuer revisits Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House by enhancing Ibsen’s critical realism and foregrounding theatricality. He continuously reminds the audience that they are seeing a drama/theatre and exposes theatrical conventions in order to underscore the artificiality of theatre. Breuer's postmodern quotation of theatricality resonates with Nora's artificial life, which is full of masquerade and exaggeration. Since Dollhouse represents Nora's femininity and wifehood as a daily performance that conforms to social scripts of gender, it reveals and comments on the theatrical aspect of being(actually, “doing”) a woman. In this light, I argue that Dollhouse brilliantly illustrates Joan Riviere’s concept, “womanliness as a masquerade” and Judith Butler’s notion of “gender performativity” through Nora’s transformation from a blonde-wigged doll-wife to a charismatic feminist with a shaved head. As Dollhouse demystifies realistic illusions, it also denaturalizes gender and sheds light on the ways in which gender is constructed. Nora and Trovald’s home turns out to be a dollhouse theatre where the two actors play disguised love and cultural ideals of femininity and masculinity. Breuer adopts the politics of body size to explore power dynamics within the given gender inequity by casting little men and tall women. Whereas male characters are seemingly domineering and competent, their small-sized bodies visually rupture men’s authority and destabilize the power relations of men and women. Dollhouse diminishes men’s bodies and instead, enlarges men’s emotionalism to call attention to men’s repressed emotions and their anxieties of weak masculinity. Parodying men’s excessive melodramatic feelings, Breuer counters the dominant assumption of women’s emotionality vs. men’s rationality. Opera Aria lip-sync/puppet scene condenses Breuer's postmodern stylization of the emotional and reconfirms the fact that Nora and Trovald were puppets manipulated by gender norms. Dollhouse offers the audience a critical mirror to reflect their own gender embodiment as regulatory practices, but the question remains whether it was successful in updating the classic from a Nora’s perspective in terms of contemporaneous contents beyond the formal experiment.