Gestus The Rover

A professor in Rutgers's Department of Women and Gender studies, Elin Diamond is well versed in the connection between feminist theory and the links between the theatre of today and that of the seventeenth century. Her peer reviewed essay, Gestus and Signature in Aphra Behn's the Rover, is a frank analysis of the methods Aphra Behn used in her plays to reveal the truth of her the societal rules that governed her demographic. Mainly what is discussed is the use of gestus and imagery to invoke the image of a woman as a material to be traded as commodity. Gestus is described as "a moment in performance that makes visible the contradictory interactions of text, theater apparatus, and contemporary social struggle," (Diamond, 519). The gestus
Consequently, this woman is viewed as an object. The article then continues to describe this society and the rules that even the female playwright Aphra Behn had to conform to. This was a society where "there were thirteen women to every ten men, and cash portions had to grow to attract worthy suitors," (Diamond, 524). In other words, the male relatives of the female suitors had to pay for the women to get married. Other aspects of the theatrical culture are revealed, so that there is no doubt that women were indeed, to borrow a term from the article, fetishized. Theatres were candlelit and decorated with movable scenery, and heavily costumed women were categorically
The best example I can think about is the use of Gestus in A Chorus Line. The end of the musical is nothing if not subtle. The audience is seeing smiling faces amongst the chorus dancers, but if they look at the imagery of the dancers juxtaposed with the images they presented earlier in the play, one can see that they are revealing the sadness of their plight as chorus members. Earlier dances in the play are complicated, multilayered and they have formation. They are presented in the hope that the chorus dancers can move beyond the line they wait behind, in other words, the machine of theatre that strips dancers of their individuality. The result of their toils is not that they surpass the line and become their most individual selves, but that they become the line. The audience interprets the ending as the chorus members getting what they want, but the formation they are in is not one that shows them off individually, and the dance isn't particularly difficult. The message evoked is one of wasted effort, the chorus is now performing something that is unsatisfactory because that is the best they could do. This is gestus because it is never mentioned in the play, it is only an idea that is intimated by the imagery of cloned costumes put on a simple choreography danced by dancers who have been stripped of the