Performing Atrocity: Staging Experiences of Violence and Conflict (original) (raw)
Related papers
Balancing Acts: (Meta)theatricality and Violence
Performance Research, 2019
This article examines how theatricality, specifically metatheatricality, functions in the depiction of perpetrators of violence and considers this from an ethical perspective. Performances that dwell on the ideologies and behaviours of perpetrators of violence are difficult to stage and present a range of ethical problems, including whether it is appropriate to grant the privilege of ‘presence’ to such figures, the risk of reiterating violent ideology, the risk of occluding the experiences of the victims and sensitivity to survivors of violence. These ethical problems in turn generate a set of aesthetic problems. This article focuses on two case studies where metatheatrical devices are used as a response to the challenges outlined above: Manifesto 2083 (2012), a solo performance about mass-murderer Anders Behring Breivik by Danish theatre-makers Christian Lollike, Olaf Højgaard and Tanja Diers; and Joshua Oppenheimer’s documentary about Indonesian government death squads of the 1960s, The Act of Killing (2012). While metatheatricality may at first glance seem to negate theatricality through pointing to the constructedness of theatrical illusion, I draw from Samuel Weber’s explanation of theatricality, in particular his notion of ‘linked separation,’ to suggest that metatheatricality, in fact, constitutes an intensification of theatricality. Moreover, I propose that the concept of ‘linked separation’ provides an effective critical lens through which to scrutinize the ethical dimensions of the uses of metatheatricality as a response to violence.
The Witness Turn in the Performance of Violence, Trauma, and the Real
Ethical Exchanges: Translation, Adaptation and Dramaturgy, 2017
While much attention has already been given to the ethics of practice involved in representing violence and trauma on stage, recently there has been a shift in focus towards the ethics of spectatorship. Here, I identify two trends in the 'witness turn' and the issues that surround each. The first trend is the attempt to configure audiences as witnesses in a way commensurate with the concept of witnessing in Trauma Studies. The second is the desire to charge spectators as complicit creators in the production of violent and depraved theatre.
Metatheatrical Dramaturgies of Violence: Staging the Role of Theatre
2022
This book examines a series of contemporary plays where writers put theatre itself on stage. The texts examined variously dramatize how theatre falls short in response to the demands of violence, expose its implication in structures of violence—including racism and gender-based violence—and illustrate how it might effectively resist violence through reconfiguring representation. Case studies, which include Jackie Sibblies Drury’s We Are Proud to Present and Fairview, Ella Hickson’s The Writer and Tim Crouch’s The Author, provide a range of practice-based perspectives on the question of whether theatre is capable of accounting for and expressing the complexities of structural and interpersonal violence as both lived in the body and borne out in society. The book will appeal to scholars and artists working in the areas of violence, theatre and ethics, witnessing, memory and trauma, spectatorship and contemporary dramaturgy, as well as to those interested in both the doubts and dreams we have about the role of theatre in the twenty-first century. Introduction: Staging the Role of Theatre, Performative Violence and Self-Reflexive Dramaturgy: A Study of Guillermo Calderón’s Kiss and Other Works “Touching Something Real”: The Critique of Historical and Theatrical Methodology in Jackie Sibblies Drury’s We Are Proud to Present… The Ethics of Imagining Others: The Limits of “Performative Witness” in Michael Redhill’s Goodness and Erik Ehn’s Thistle Staging Rage: A Feminist Perspective on Theatrical Self-Reflexivity in Ella Hickson’s The Writer and Tim Crouch’s The Author Metatheatrical Dramaturgies of Reception: Mirroring the Audience in Ontroerend Goed’s Audience and Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Fairview Conclusion
“In and Out of Tune with Reality: Opposed Strategies of Documentary Theatre”,
Over the last few decades, documentary theatre has experienced a boom in popularity with the commercial and critical success of works such as Anna Deveare Smith's 'Twilight: Los Angeles' (1994), Tectonic Theatre's 'The Laramie Project' (2001) and docudramas by David Hare such as 'Stuff Happens' (2004) and 'The Permanent Way' (2005). Recent works span everything from natural disaster survival stories, to the staging of dramatized versions of inquests to well as the examination of family violence in New Zealand in Hilary Halba's and Stuart Young's 'Hush' (2009 - present). Whether this documentary boom will follow the cycle of its economic counterpart and result in a bust can only be seen with the benefit of time. Rather, this paper focuses on the nature of representation in documentary theatre, in particular its relationship to the real. It is argued that the complexities involved in, and approaches to, representing the real in performance, place documentary theatre along a series of spectra. Documentary theatre does echo economic patterns in that at least two 2 polarised extremes of the form would seem to exist. As the terminology of a spectrum implies though, these opposing strategies exist more as a range of shifting, uncertain attempts to reconcile competing tensions, rather than as a sinusoidally oscillating pair of opposites. Attempts to avoid manipulating and aestheticizing the source material can result in strangely muted presentations that strip the drama from theatrical representation, placing it at one end of this spectrum. Other attempts to creatively shape and reconfigure testimony and context, can result in a heightened aestheticization and sensationalism. This theoretically pushes the performances to a "boom" out of tune or out of synchronicity with thesource material and to the other end of a perceived fiction-reality spectrum. This paper will examine some of the practices and ideas that inform the choices practitioners make in representing the "real" in performance and examine the aesthetic and ethical ethical impact these choices can have on the resulting performances.
Violence in the Arts: Performing & Witnessing
The wide subject of violence in art presents the scholar of today with a whole range of theoretical possibilities in the treatment of the chosen topic. The change of major aesthetical concepts in the period of modernism, post-modern aesthetic egalitarianism with levelling of traditionally high and traditionally low genres, new treatment of identity issues, cultural relativism, and other symptoms of post-modernity have brought about new narrative strategies, causing dramatic change in all aesthetical concepts, offering new perspective to old ideas such as the idea of empathy. The main ambition behind this text is to analyze some recent works on the crossroad of art intervention and performance, and to point to the difference between ideas- based conceptual subversion on the one hand, and body-based transgression in the performance that involves physical pain.
Christopher Marlowe's The Massacre at Paris, a play which probably dates from 1592 but has reached posterity in a mangled form, enacts the incorporation of religious and state politics in the theatre. Through a sequence of short scenes characterized by senseless brutality and black humor, Marlowe revisits one of the darkest episodes of French history, the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre, which took place on the 24 th and 25 th August 1572. Dramatizing the slaughter of thousands of Protestants by Catholics, the play not only reflects on the significance of massacre as a political term for an increasingly absolutist Renaissance Europe but also translates the violence of massacre into aesthetic form. Itself alien within the body of Marlowe's dramatic works, The Massacre at to recent wars and atrocities and rejoice in the irony of the play. This paper seeks to investigate the play's ability to convey political thought and provoke contemporary audiences by reading it together with Delaveau and Mitterer's adaptations. The challenge of reworking the Massacre for our age involves the question of the theatre's potential to expose the audience to the horror of history.
Repertoires of Remembrance: Violence, Commemoration, and the Performing Arts
Journal of the British Academy, 2020
This essay argues for a reconsideration of performative and embodied memory in illuminating how the performing arts—and music in particular—offer a unique means of embodying knowledge and of performing memories of violence. Incorporating insights from these fields provides an alternative approach to the questions of who, what, and for how long we should remember. After establishing a conceptual framework for the mobilisation of rituals of artistic practice and cultural memory, this article discusses examples from a range of cultures and performance practices to explore aesthetic and ethical characteristics of performative memorials. It concludes that performance’s self-consciously ephemeral, temporal, and iterative character means performative memorials can refocus the commemorative impulse away from the past by shifting our collective attention from the question of what should we remember to the question of what should we remember for?
Revista Folios, 2017
A pesar de los treinta años que separan ambas producciones, Saved de Edward Bond y Blasted de Sarah Kane provocaronreacciones similares cuando fueron estrenadas en el Royal Court Theatre en 1965 y 1995, respectivamente. Mediantela representación de varios tipos de violencia en escena, ambas obras pretenden conseguir que sus espectadoresestablezcan paralelismos entre las situaciones teatrales y las de la vida real para que, finalmente, sean capaces derechazar la violencia en general y sus distintas manifestaciones en la sociedad. Para lograr este objetivo, tanto Savedcomo Blasted resaltan la cuestión de testimoniar a dos niveles. Por un lado, a nivel de personaje, ambas obras incluyenindividuos que presencian, sufren y/o infligen algún tipo de crueldad y que, por lo tanto, participan en los continuos ciclosde violencia representados en el escenario. Por otro lado, a nivel de espectador, el público se convierte también en untestigo directo –y en un participante silencioso– de la obra ...
International Journal of Cultural Studies
Through an analysis of The Act of Killing (2012) and The Look of Silence (2014), this article explores the idea of provocative engagement as a way of extending our understanding of the affective dimensions of documentary and its role in civic engagement. The study draws on qualitative research, based on interviews with the filmmaker, and interviews with 52 viewers in Denmark, Sweden, Japan and Colombia. This data is used to explore the idea of subjectivity in documentary through the performance of memory, power and impunity in both films concerning the perpetrators and victims of the Indonesian genocide of 1965. Overall, our analysis highlights how performance documentary challenges the affective relationships between filmmakers and their audiences, and in this particular case we see a type of raw, provocative engagement with the act of documenting genocide, the act of watching, and what this means to people in the context of their political and lived realities.