‘Why Can’t I Stop Looking?’ A Therapeutic and Performative Debate on the Performance of Trauma (original) (raw)
Related papers
‘Why me?’ Trauma through a Performance Lens: Performance through a Trauma Lens (Book Chapter)
The Strangled Cry: The Communication and Experience of Trauma , 2013
Originally constructed as a performance piece, this work invites discussion of the uncomfortable, but nonetheless delightful, differences and similarities of interpretation of the discipline-specific methodologies of performance and therapy. Using three case studies we consider the performance of trauma: as the replication of experience; it’s effect on the maker, the performer and the audience of the work; and questions that touch upon power, perception and interpretation; and, the implication that psychological safety and ethics inherent in the reciprocal sharing of such powerful materials is questionable.
The idea of trauma has become so used in the public sphere as to become almost meaningless in its ubiquity. But this is also to say that we live in a historical moment in which society feels bound to its traumatic experiences. Trauma, it would seem, has become a cultural trope. Furthermore, contemporary trauma theory suggests a performative bent in traumatic suffering itself – the trauma-symptom is, after all, a rehearsal, re-presentation, re-performance of the trauma-event. This is not to trivialise traumatic suffering or detract from the insistence that trauma narratives must adequately, truthfully, be borne witness to so as not to diminish the weight of the original event. ‘On Trauma’ explores a range of instances in which performance becomes a productive frame through which to address traumata and/or where trauma theory illuminates performance. With papers examining topics from African funeral rituals to witnessing, and ethics to Argentinean escraches, this issue of Performance Research benefits from a cross-cultural dynamic which brings together academic articles on and artistic responses to performance that embodies, negotiates, negates or provokes trauma.
Feeling performance, remembering trauma
Platform, 2007
In recent years there has been a surge in the growth of Trauma Theory as an important and engaging field of academic study and while it has begun to engage with both literature and fine art it is yet to be fully theorised in relation to theatre and performance. This paper seeks to briefly highlight one of the ways in which trauma theory might engage with performance and vice versa. Employing both theories of trauma and kinaesthesia this paper examines the felt quality of performance as a catalyst to receiving an understanding of the performance and to a re-embodiment of (personal) traumatic memory through this. After briefly tracking the history and development of trauma theory, the paper reads it alongside examples of live performances. Through this the paper establishes live performance as the ideal site for an exploration of the difficulties of traumatic experience and the creation of understanding through the visceral quality of performance.
Sight as trauma : the politics of performing and viewing the body on stage
2012
My thesis aims to partake in the controversial and theoretical debates surrounding sight which can be traced as far back as Plato. It seeks to provide an overview of the cultural history of the gaze in order to set up a triangulated and indepth schema or triadic relationship between theatre, text and trauma through the lens of psychoanalytical, phenomenological and socio-theoretical frameworks. More specifically, it attempts to explore the various interactions, along the axis of representation, between theatrical metaphors and those of traumatic vision, as well as traumatic representations on stage of viewing and the multi-layered and sociopolitical implications of various ways of looking (or non-looking), which often trigger traumatic responses. By examining two canonical plays – Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex and Shakespeare’s Macbeth – as well as the modern performances of artists such as Orlan and Franko B, I hope to show how visual trauma can transcend time and space and how the stage,...
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.
Trauma and Performance: Primary Sources
This article proposes a primary function for art, that creation and performance may be on a level with eating and drinking. A second proposition is that through a concept of primary source trauma performance we are able to redefine artistic value in relation to the individual and society. Creativity, performance, theatre, music and the arts in general represent in fact a primal human need; that their denial – or relegation to a minority interest - is a denial of humanity itself. These propositions are examined in relation to a selection of case-studies where an artist is still working even when faced, or overcome, with life-threatening force.