Julia Varley's solo performance Dõna Musica's Butterflies (1997) is one of the many performance pieces made by contemporary actresses which play with ideas of 'self' and 'character' (fig. 22). The performance, still on tour in 2005, is centred on Varley's Dõna Musica, an old, white-haired woman, standing alone in a circle of white roses, questioning her relationship to the actress who performs her. “Did the actress give me life? . . . Did the actress mould her energy so as to transform it into Dõna Musica? Or did I, Dõna Musica, modulate the actress's energy?” Dõna Musica/Julia Varley brings into focus one of the fundamental characteristics of solo performance, namely, the centrality of the relationship between text and performer. Varley interlaces an autobiographical perspective with an on-stage investigation into the creation of characters who originate in processes of improvisation and devising, giving the actress the dual role of actress and auteur. Thus Dõna Musica's Butterflies engages with the complex matrix of relationships between the actress/performer, the performed 'self', the context and content of performance and the audience for whom the performance is being made. Although many of the earlier solo performances by women examined in this chapter do not engage so self-consciously with these issues, there is a consistent awareness of the fluidity of the monologue as a form, and a deliberate professional strategising and theatrical self-reflection which reverberates in the work of actresses using the monologue from Fanny Kelly in the mid-nineteenth century, through to Joyce Grenfell in the 1950s.