The Unconventional Or Rebellious Resist The Rules, But Only Revolutionaries

The unconventional or rebellious resist the rules, but only revolutionaries seek to break them to achieve permanent change a principal equally applicable to artists. The arts, and particularly the theatre, have always made use of stereotypes and archetypes, often parodying or subverting them. Those practitioners who set out to achieve truthful performances, to 'get under the skin' of a character, can identify with these typical representations, as role play exercises reveal, but the underlying personality lies a layer or two deeper.
'In the theatre the actor and the audience both know that the actor is not who she is playing. But in real life a person is simultaneously performing herself and being herself. The matter is, of course, nicely complicated because in some methods of realistic acting, actors are taught how to use their own selves to construct theatrical roles'. (Schechner, 2002, P. 177)
In approaching the role of , for example, a science teacher, and avoid a one-dimensional portrayal, an actor must discover the character as not simply a teacher, carrying out a teacher's role, but as an individual when 'off duty' during times, as Schechner puts it, when 'the performance aspect of ordinary behaviour is less obvious, but not absent'. (Schechner, 2002, P. 177) 4
The actor can draw on his/her own experience, be it of a personal kind (i.e. they may have previously been a teacher) or from memories and observations based on an actual person, or persons. (E.g. a teacher who had taught them) Naturally, this approach places more demands on the actor, enabling him/her to enact a performance of a person who is also a science teacher, rather than simply a science teacher with no identity beyond his/her teaching duties.
A-Gender, produced in 2004 by Joey Hately, artistic director of Transaction Theatre Company, was a postmodern theatre piece that adopted many of the elements of new theatre and performance theory very effectively. Ostensibly a presentation of gender politics portrayed as a personal case history, A-Gender presented the issue of transsexualism in a powerfully theatrical manner, deploying methods of performance outside the restrictions of conventional theatre.
The use of the 'one man (or one woman) show' format (a prototypical popular cultural form) and the 'stand up' routine, interwoven with visual media (video sequences) and other performance modes, enabled the artist/performer to convey the confusion, pain and anger of person whose gender identity causes them to believe that they have been born in the wrong body, the wrong gender.
A-Gender adopted a modus operandi of style and performativity that placed it squarely in the new theatre approach. Its subject matter determined this, and evident devices to unsettle, or even alienate, the audience were adopted by Hately effectively.