Excerpt used with kind permission of Faber and Faber Publishers and the Author
For details of all women playwrights in "... She Also Wrote Plays"
and regular updates on their work please go to:
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...She Also Wrote Plays

An International Guide to Women Playwrights from the

10^th to the 21^st Century

by Susan Croft

(pub: faber and faber, 2001, p.138)

Jenny Kemp

Australian, 1949 -

Highly visual in her approach, writer and director Kemp teaches at the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne. Her multi‑media pieces reject linear narrative in favour of repeated sequences of action, movement and video, influenced by surrealism and the work of archetypal psychologist James Hillman. The Black Sequin Dress excavates the cultural meanings of falling ‑ its terror, danger and humiliation, failing in love and its vulnerability and pleasure, the Fall into knowledge and death. Repeated images of a woman slipping over on a dance floor are juxtaposed with references to the journey to the Underworld across the River Styx and with monologues that, playing with the etymology of words, evoke memories and desires, in a piece which attempts to find a theatrical language to explore the psyche. In Remember a fractured interior landscape of remembered terror constantly intrudes upon the hospital room reality of a woman who has been raped.

Plays include: The Black Sequin Dress, ((4f+ifv,2m) Currency, 1996, Call of the Wild (4f,1m, 1989) in Allen and Pearlman; Sheila Alone (MS); Remember (3f,2m,id,1993) in Tait and Schafer.

See also: Minchinton in Performance Research, v3, 2.