The journey into theatre-made places offered here is both analytical and creative. It is comprised of case studies analysing three theatre productions that occurred in Perth between 2004 and 2006 and two of my own creative works, forming the Prologue and Conclusion to the thesis. Throughout, I am informed by Edward Casey’s philosophy of place as I work to develop both a poetics and a dramaturgy of place in theatre. I draw upon of a range of thinkers in order to interrogate the limits of theatrical representation and to suggest that an active engagement in the process of place-making in theatre offers a touchstone and paradigm that can release both thought and the body from totalizing and foreclosing cultural imperatives. This dramaturgical and poetical journey into place works, I hope, toward creating an open and dynamic field from which to experience the ‘here and now’ of being in place in theatre, and in the world. I argue that the notion of place as embodied meaning frames the body and the mind in contexts that are personal, emotional, historical, ethical, and political; that to be in place, to be aware that one’s body is a particular place, suggests that the body and mind are listening to each other. This conscious connection, I believe, offers a radical challenge to the bifurcation of body and mind that runs as a consistent theme throughout the history of Western thought. More particularly, I aim to demonstrate that a voyage into place, in theatre, conveys the body and mind together in ways that allow us to “resume the direction, and regain the depth, of our individual and collective life once again – and know it for the first time” (Casey, 1993: 314).

Grounded in a historical, socio-cultural consideration of Indigenous women’s theatrical production, this dissertation examines representations of gendered violence in Canadian Indigenous women’s drama. The female playwrights who are the focus of my thesis – Monique Mojica, Marie Clements, and Yvette Nolan – counter colonial and occasionally postcolonial renditions of gendered and racialized violence by emphasizing female resistance and collective coalition. While these plays represent gendered violence as a real, material mechanism of colonial destruction, ultimately they work to promote messages of collective empowerment, recuperation, and survival. My thesis asks not only how a dramatic text might deploy a decolonizing aesthetic, but how it might redefine dramatic/literary and socio-cultural space for resistant and decolonial ends. Attentive to the great variance of subjective positions occupied by Indigenous women writers, I examine the historical context of theatrical reception, asking how the critic/spectator’s engagement with and dissemination of knowledge concerning Indigenous theatre might enhance or impede this redefinition. Informed by Indigenous/feminist poststructuralist and postcolonial theoretical perspectives that address the production and dissemination of racialized regimes of representation, my study assesses the extent to which colonialist misrepresentations of Indigenous women have served to perpetuate demeaning stereotypes, justifying devaluation of and violence – especially sexual violence – against Indigenous women. Most significantly, my thesis considers how and to what degree resistant representations in Indigenous women’s dramatic productions work against such representational and manifest violence.