Improvising Theatrical Jazz in a Queer Space: Aishah Rahman’s Unfinished Women Cry in No Man’s Land While a Bird Dies in a Gilded Cage
Ege Altan
Publication: Volume 2 Issue 1
Abstract
Omi Osun Joni L. Jones finds the relations between queerness and jazz in the concept of theatrical jazz in Theatrical Jazz: Performance, Àṣẹ, and the Power of the Present Moment. By undoing the conventional way of thinking about queerness, Jones unites queerness and jazz in the concept of theatrical jazz. She writes, “[t]he jazz aesthetic in theatre is the spatial, aural, linguistic embodiment of queer, the expression of a self-naming that is consciously and insurgently liminal, unfixed.” Liminality is a key concept in relation to queerness, as she expresses that “liminality is the space of possibility in which people are not bound to the social structures, but are given freedom to conceive, to imagine, to invent, to make.” Liminality becomes “[…] the space of improvisation – invention within a prescribed structure, the making of something that did not exist before.” Aishah Rahman’s Unfinished Women Cry in No Man’s Land While a Bird Dies in a Gilded Cage (1977) is a very interesting play to trace the trajectory of theatrical jazz because it uses theatrical jazz to create its own language in a unique form. This article will show that Rahman situates her play in the context of theatrical jazz, which creates a queer time and space, whereby she explores freedom in the form.
Keywords: Queer studies, Queer temporality, Theatrical jazz, Experimental theatre, Liminality
Ege Altan (altanegeozge@gmail.com) completed her Master’s in Comparative Literature at King’s College London, UK (2018). She is currently working on a series of publications addressing experimental writings, including an article on the relationship between travel and translation based on her recent presentation, “Traveling with the Self and Translating the Self in Jhumpa Lahiri’s In Other Words” at the conference organised by Çankaya University, hosted at Dimitrie Cantemir University, Bucharest, Romania. Her research interest include queer studies, narrative theories, and modes of storytelling in experimental and contemporary writings.