Article Title：Daughters Opera: an epistemic representation of feminist solidarities
Abstract：
Daughters Opera (2020), an inter-cultural Indian-Australian opera, offers possibilities of solidarities through a unique interdisciplinary and experimental encounter using text, music, movement, and site. Women artists from the Global North and Global South come together to embrace multiple performative forms to create an immersive experience focused on women's experience of violence (domestic and institutional) from the everyday to the extreme. Drawing from writings on the aesthetics of care, these practitioners prioritise relationality and interdependency, wherein the participants and the art-making process is intrinsically linked. It is their feminist aesthetics of care, their 'affective solidarity' (Thompson 2015: 430), which enables them to show the migrant figures as resilient and optimistic in spite of their marginalised lives. Daughters Opera showcases individual stories of working-class women navigating the intense hardships levied on them due to their precarious position as disenfranchised subjects. This article delineates how Daughters Opera, through a series of carefully curated images, depicts women's labour as conveniently invisibilised, and how they are kept in a state of impermanence and marginality. I read the performance as a distillation of female suffering and peripheral positioning through images of migrating bodies, labouring and oppressed voices, and fragile female bodies burning out and performing displacement.
Keywords: Feminist theatre; embodied performance; Indian theatre; gendered violence; Anuradha Kapur; collaborative art
DOI: 10.1080/14682761.2024.2342704
Source：STUDIES IN THEATRE AND PERFORMANCE
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