1.1 Introduction
To write on the staging of trauma is to write on the staging of suffering. It is an attempt to identify personal and public, as well as individual and collective, patterns of pain, fear and dissociation that are dramatised or theatricalised for public engagement. Hence, to write on the staging of trauma is to approach, with trepidation, these shadowed spaces of performance, knowledge, memory, politics, and experience. This field of analysis necessitates an ambitious and flexible scope for the distinct and case-specific conditions exploring intention and complicity, perpetrator and victim, pain and recovery, redress and denial, continuity and rupture, and indeed, how to navigate and represent these in the live medium of performance, that which increasingly includes elements of recorded performance within its medium. More specifically, to interrogate traumatic encounters drawn from both history as well as myth staged for public performance, which are by their dissociative contexts considered unknowable, unspeakable and unrepresentable in varying degrees, is reflective of the very aporia so central to any engagement with trauma studies. On this, Jean-François Lyotard observes, âWhat art can do is bear witness not to the sublime, but to this aporia of art and to its pain. It does not say the unsayable, but says that it cannot say it.â1 To write on the staging of trauma, thus, is to accept from this opening point of theoretical departure that suffering is uniquely personal, and indeed, complex, not least when it occurs in collective contexts. It cannot be known in its totality and this volume does not claim to know it. As Susan Sontag declares in Regarding the Pain of Others, âNo âweâ should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other peopleâs pain.â2 Rather, the forthcoming analyses map the fragmented shards of traumatic histories and stories as staged by the selection of case studies and reaffirms their worthy significance for global attention in critical studies of theatre and performance, as well as trauma and memory studies, cultural politics, and studies of gender and feminism. The case studies under analysis in this volume each stage a traumatic experience that speaks to this âaporia of art and its pain⊠[and] says that it cannot say it,â (1990, 47) yet through the processes of staging, performance and reception, embroils itself in this effort of limited articulation nonetheless.
The staging involved, particularly via embodied knowledge and viscerally affective encounters, creates a shared space for the unspeakable to struggle in its desire for articulation and acknowledgment. The compulsion, and indeed inherent contradiction, to simultaneously express and suppress the traumatic is unfaltering in these performance contexts. This centralising of trauma(s) can manifest via diverse modalities, such as narrative, design, embodiment, gesture, pattern and symptom, and often in sporadic, non-linear and inconclusive ways, as is customary with performance. In Professing Performance, Shannon Jackson notes these areas of interdisciplinarity, most significantly that âPerformance conventionally employs bodies, motion, space, affect, image, and words; its analysis at times aligns with theories of embodiment, at times with studies of emotion, at times with architectural analysis, at times with studies of visual culture, and at times with critiques of linguistic exchange.â3 Suzanne Little draws from much of the critical work across the humanities and social sciences in her astute article âRepeating Repetitionâ to identify the range of potential registers one may expect from an encounter with trauma or shock. She summarises acute conditions such as âwordless and affectless states; loss of the ability to comprehend or use syntax; distortions of vision, taste, sound and touch and hallucinationsâ.4 The performance space that stages trauma must host these states of traumatic play, constantly navigating the disruptions that emerge as theatre artists draw upon both their imaginative resources as well as what David Dean, Yana Meerzon and Kathryn Prince note in History, Memory, Performance, âthe archives and repertoires of memory, a notion understood on the one hand in its collective, national, and public contexts and the other as something acutely personal, subjective, individual, even idiosyncratic and unreliableâ.5
The selected case studies in this volume, by staging trauma, confront intense personal experience dominated by post-traumatic structures of contradiction, disrupted linearity, compulsive repetition, problematic confusion with Self and Other, ethical murkiness, and a general milieu of potential vulnerability and disorientation for theatre artists and the audiences who encounter the work. Interestingly, this list of attributes is arguably applicable, though in varying degrees, to the wider performative politics of staging and liveness. Thus, the very form, immediacy and structural parallels of performance is linked intersectionally with the interdisciplinary discourse of trauma. To highlight the point, I draw from performance scholar Diana Taylor, who queries, âIs performance that which disappears, or that which persists, transmitted through a nonarchival system of transfer that I came to call the repertoire?â6 It is both. The embodied moment of live performance (embodied for both performer and spectator/audience) disappears the moment it manifests, while the memory of the moment lives on, in flux from the performance environment to the wider public sphere and is thus subject to the socio-economic and cultural conditions which interact there. Similarly, is trauma that which disappears, or that which persists? It is both, and this introductory chapter will detail debates concerning both originary traumatic experiences and established paradigms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). To unpack this terrain, this introduction utilises certain loci to foreground the volumeâs leading concerns, explored in the sections 1.â2, âTrauma and Performanceâ, 1.3, âProduction Contextsâ, 1.4, âSelected Case Studies,â 1.5, âThe Extraordinary Everyday Experienceâ, and finally, 1.6, âPerformance, Trauma, Trustâ.
The first question this volume must address is why should one write a monograph dedicated to this field of contradiction, complexity and debate? The responses are multiple, and at times, risk generating more tangents and trajectories the further that they delve. Acknowledging this, certain points of heightened urgency emerge. To begin on this path of justification and contextualisation, I argue that the contemporary performance culture in Ireland, the north of Ireland and Britain is informed directly and consciously from urgent societal conditions. This performance culture increasingly eschews mythical frameworks to produce dramaturgies that are immediately relevant to traumatic experience and histories, often suppressed or marginalised in centralised public discourse. Postmodernism, poststructuralism, postcolonialism and postmemory dominate the dramaturgies in this volume and point to parallels in cultural and social structures as well as historical contexts and experience. In The Generation of Postmemory, Marianne Hirsch suggests that this prevalence of âpostâ in recent decades, particularly from the 1980s to the early twenty-first century, âsignals more than a temporal delay and more than a location in an aftermathâ.7 Indeed, these âpostsâ, âcontinue to dominate our intellectual landscapeâ (2012, 5) and thus âinscribe both a critical distance and a profound interrelationâ (5) between the âpostâ and its subject. In summary, they signify a layering of experience and subjectivity, aligning with âthe practices of citation and supplementarity that characterize themâ (5). As such, navigating contradiction, disrupted linearity, compulsive repetition, problematic confusion with Self and Other, ethical murkiness and a general milieu of vulnerability and disorientation also increasingly embed the contemporary performance encounter.
For the purposes of this study, âcontemporaryâ refers to the most recent phase of global neoliberal activity throughout the last five decades approximately, which is indeed, the same cultural moment as the pervasiveness of the âpostâ as Hirsch theorised for the context of her particular study. This timeframe speaks to societies informed by major transnational patterns in consumption, movement, digitisation and disorientation, which remain ongoing and in crisis.8 In these contemporary performance encounters, the disruption of âknownâ narratives of character-identity and place-history are foregrounded, illuminating the lesser-known narratives of dispossession of body and space, relying on form as well as theme to challenge convention, expectation, and a sense of certainty more familiar with master-narratives of the twentieth-century Western canon. This ideological and cultural environment, pervasive throughout Ireland, the north of Ireland9 and Britain (and not denying these patterns exist elsewhere, but this remit constitutes the accessible geographical scope for this study), signals a sphere of conscious and unconscious acknowledgment of pervasive traumas. These traumas are contemporary and specific to this culture while also part of a wider transnational climate that is directly politicised, permeated by resurgent feminist activity, neoliberal conditioning, globalised experience and personalâpolitical identity disorientation. The performance and interaction of contemporary society is dizzying, anxious and indeed, traumatic. In unexpected contrast, perhaps, the staging of trauma in performance environments tends to be an integrated experience. Here, I do not refer to âintegrated experienceâ in the sense of a totalising representative illusion, as indeed the form often precludes âa coherent fictive cosmosâ.10 Yet, due to the very apparatuses required of performance and production, performances that stage traumatic encounters tend to manifest as events that are nuanced, focused and, often, affective in a generative and collective capacity.
At the risk of repeating the point, I must stress that for any study of trauma and performance, the consistency and complexity of contradiction is paramount to the analytical journey. Linearity and logic do not hold court in the study of traumatic experience, PTSD, and live performance. Simultaneously however, certain paradigms and parallels of subject matter and context do become apparent, and thus, demand close inspection. In these case studies, patterns of trauma and abuse directed at the female body largely dominate, whether in the form of âdocudramaâ drawn from archives, oral histories and/or testimonies, or narrated via a dramatic text with no formally acknowledged or obvious link to the cultural sphere. In addition to this pattern, another thread appears: the silencing or âshadowingâ of trauma and abuse directed at the female body and female experience in public discourse and representation. By âshadowingâ I contend that they are not fully silenced events or narratives as with policies of censorship would dictate, but that they become de-escalated in urgency, isolated from public points of discourse, and somehow associated with threat or danger so that any individual or institution that may interact with them is at risk of becoming tainted by association. This volume takes these shadowed bodies from the margins and places them as a centre point of enquiry. The study interrogates not only their traumatic experience but also these processes of marginalisation and shadowing which seek to underplay the significance of their narrative and diminish the integrity of their autonomy.
Throughout the four case studies in this monograph, On Rafteryâs Hill (2000) by Irish playwright Marina Carr in Chap. 2, âViolationâ, Colder Than Here (2005) by English playwright Laura Wade in Chap. 3, âLossâ, Laundry (2011) directed by Irish director/theatre artist Louise Lowe for ANU in Chap. 4, âContainmentâ, and Sanctuary (2013) directed by US director Teya Sepinuck for Derry Playhouse Theatre of Witness in Chap. 5, âExileâ, these points of convergence and contradiction will be scrutinised. First and foremost though, my study must address this question to proceed: What is trauma? There are many avenues to theorise this. I choose to begin with Judith Hermanâs outline of the traumatic event in her seminal treatise Trauma and Recovery, as her research closely follows traumatic experiences of women and is thus fitting to open my enquiries:
Trauma will be examined in greater detail in the next section,âTrauma and Performanceâ, but this summary regarding the traumatic events and the affective experience it describes points to the visceral milieu that emerges in each of the case studies, though as a result of significantly distinct traumatic events. It is the space encompassing the actual traumatic event, often referred to as the originary trauma (sometimes consciously acknowledged and other times supp...Traumatic events are extraordinary, not because they occur rarely, but rather because they overwhelm the ordinary human adaptations to life. Unlike commonplace misfortunes, traumatic events generally involve threats to life or bodily integrity, or a close personal encounter with violence and death. They confront human beings with the extremities of helplessness and terror, and evoke the responses of catastrophe.11