Walking sideways and alongside: Becoming-woman-crab in performative theater

Abstract

In this article, we discuss how performance and performative theater can create collective space-times for confronting and overflowing hegemonic narratives of patriarchal domination. Rather than illusionist theater, the aim was to establish, through the active relationship between audience and actresses, an active experimentation in which autobiographical testimonies give rise to events in the non-stage scene. As a genuine space for group co-creation, performative art sets up a plan for composing otherselves and the world. Through authorial and convivial performative processes, the tangible effects of a colonial, patriarchal, sexist, and misogynist socio-subjective project are reported. By inhabiting the sensitive zone of the submissive bride, we experience a political, clinical, and pedagogical feminist metamorphosis in which the becoming-woman-crab bets on the production of new bodies, new subjectivities.