During the second half of the twentieth century, performance and artistic expression took a strong turn toward the personal with the embrace of the memoir in literature, sociopolitical and feminist visual art, solo performance art, and autobiographical performance. Since the start of the twenty-first century, with the pervasive public interest in reality television, YouTube and iPhone selfies, the private has indeed become public. As a result, the boundaries between truth and fiction, the real and the dramatic, have never been so ambiguous; the self can be viewed as being performed, everywhere.
Within the field of theatre, this impulse has expressed itself in the emergence of what might be called self-referential or personal theatre—that is, theatre in which the content of the performance consists of material from the actual lives of the performers. This work can be loosely categorized into autobiographical forms (concerning the actor’s personal life) and autoethnographic forms (concerning the actor's ethnicity, class, gender, or social grouping). Within each of these can be differentiated nontherapeutic forms (where the aim is primarily artistic, educational, or advocacy), and therapeutic forms (where the aim is personal growth). This book is about this last category: autobiographical and autoethnographical therapeutic theatre/performance.
The idea that therapeutic practice correlates with the telling of personal stories has a deep hold on western thinking. But when does telling one’s story have a liberating effect, and when does it become merely a recounting of one’s misery and victimization? This question acquires further significance in the context of autobiographical performance, as rehearsal practices allow experiences to become more rooted in our bodies and brains, and exposure in front of an audience helps to validate them. Does performing life experiences, obsessions, memories or dreams on stage invariably bring about therapeutic results? (Pendzik, 2013a; Thompson, 2009). What is required for an autobiographical performance to fulfill the function of promoting psychological well-being, healing from trauma, or advancing personal growth?
Psychoanalyst Charles Rycroft (1983) has questioned the therapeutic potential of autobiographical writings that merely serve the purpose of ‘advertising the continued existence of a long-standing ego’ (p. 193). He emphasizes the need for therapeutic autobiography to involve a reflexive practice that aims at self-discovery. In a true therapeutic process, he says, ‘a dialectic takes place between present “I” and past “me,” at the end of which both have changed and the author-subject could say equally truthfully, “I wrote it” and “It wrote me.”’ (p. 192).
The potentially empowering or healing effects often attributed to autobiographical performances may be associated with the feminist and political inception of the genre, which fueled the sense of personal agency exercised by the authors/performers, underlined the transformative possibilities inherent in the act of storying our lives, and offered a place of centrality—literally, a stage—to uncanonical, radical, and public representations of the personal (Claycomb, 2012; Heddon, 2008; Park-Fuller, 2003; Spry, 2011).
In this introductory chapter we begin by contextualizing therapeutic self-referential performance in the framework of other self-referential modes (western and non-western), connecting and contrasting it with parallel developments, particularly in autobiographical and autoethnographic theatre, that do not emphasize a therapeutic aim. The chapter lays out various definitions proposed by scholars and practitioners, highlighting common concepts as well as discussing areas that lack clarity. Throughout, we attempt to articulate the complex relationships between theatrical and therapeutic aims in such performances. After briefly summarizing the essence of each chapter in this book, we conclude by offering suggestions for future research.
Self-Referential Artistic Modalities in Non-Western and Western Traditions
Historically, the use of self-referential modes as a tool for personal expression that is both introspective and artistically crafted goes back centuries, and has been practiced throughout the world. As Jane Walker (1994) asserts, ‘All civilizations, not just the western, are attentive and have been attentive throughout their history to…“individual self-understanding”’ (p. 207)—including Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Arabic, and other non-western traditions, in which aesthetic self-referential forms have been cultivated by both women and men. For example, the Japanese literary tradition since its onset contains self-reflective works that can be viewed as having an autobiographical intent (Walker, 1994); among these, the Japanese poetic diary that flourished throughout the eleventh century, was considered to be ‘in its highest aesthetic quality, the property of women’ (Miner, 1968, p. 42). Closer to a performance of the self are the autobiographical narratives of the Kayabi people (an indigenous group living in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso), who interweave accounts of their personal experiences in the context of their rituals—including shamanic cures, in which shamans present their own dreams, emotional states, and former cosmic travels as part of their performative healing methods (Oakdale, 2005).
Autobiographical narratives in non-western traditions may exhibit more stylized or fictionalized versions of the self (Walker, 1994), multiple and hybrid images (such as the merging of self and context in Frida Kahlo’s self-portraits (Helland, 1992), or may defy organization ‘around a privileged Self, in relation to which events and other persons are arranged as background’ (More-Gilbert, 2009, p. 103). As noted by postcolonial and feminist critics, marginalized artists may voice their self-narratives in forms that privilege plurality, emphasize orality, or use dialogical forms, rather than the traditional western self-presentation or confessional style (Miller, Taylor, & Carver, 2003; Smith & Watson, 1998).
Grace (2003) highlights that in western culture, textual narratives tend to dominate the critical discourse as an organizing axis for understanding all forms of autobiographical representations. Scholarship traditionally grants Saint Augustine’s Confessions a position of fatherhood, placing it as ‘the origin of modern western autobiography’ (Anderson, 2011, p. 17). Aligned with his work are a host of male descendants (such as Rousseau and Wordsworth) who have been considered exemplary in the genre, despite the fact that life-writing has been used by many female authors (such as Saint Teresa of Avila) as a strategy to gain access to the written word through one of the few channels that were open to women: writing about their personal experiences (Weber, 1990). The western literary canon has taken a mostly ambivalent stance regarding self-referential writing, either questioning its literary merit or restricting its focus to illustrious (usually male) representatives. Critical debate has centered for the most part on establishing the author’s honesty and truthfulness in autobiographical works, memoirs, and other forms of self-writing, and in discussing the relationship between author and text (Anderson, 2011; De Man, 1979; Smith & Watson, 1998).
Contextualizing Self-Referential Theatre and Its Relation to Therapeusis
In contrast to the long-established patriarchal approach to self-referential written texts, it appears that self-referential performed praxes in all their shapes and forms have been born in freedom: A gender and politically-aware perspective has been adopted in the critical discourse of self-referential theatre, supporting self-determination, promoting emancipatory actions, challenging colonization, shaping a critical awareness, and endorsing a feminist worldview that reveals the in/visible threads linking the personal and the public (Forte, 1988; Schmor, 1994). As Deidre Heddon (2008) claims:
The autobiographical and the political are interconnected. Who speaks? What is spoken? What sorts of lives are represented, contested, imagined? The vast majority of autobiographical performances have been concerned with using the public arena of performance in order to ‘speak out,’ attempting to make visible denied or marginalized subjects, or to ‘talk back,’ aiming to challenge, contest, and problematize dominant representations about those subjects (p. 20).
She adds that during the 1970s the main motivation for translating personal content ‘into live performance was inarguably tied to consciousness-raising activities’ (p. 21), which were meant to activate the collective understanding that personal life and gender oppression should be explored together. In the last decades of the twentieth century, this spirit reverberated in the celebratory performances of queer autobiographical solos, which challenged social invisibility and marginalization, exploring issues of identity and ‘speaking out’ (Sandhal, 2003; Pearlman, 2015).
Heddon (2008) defines the current work of autobiographical performance as one that aims ‘to explore (question, reveal) the relationship between the personal and the political, engaging with and theorizing the discursive construction of selves and experience’ (p. 162). In her view, by bringing ‘to the fore the self as a performed role,’ autobiographical performance reveals ‘not only the multiplicity of the performing subject, but also the multiplicity of discourses that work to forge subjects’ (p. 39).
In a similar vein, autoethnographic theatre methods are context-oriented and informed by socio/political/gender approaches (Saldaña, 2003; Spry, 2001); they tend to ‘have a social awareness agenda’ (Saldaña, 2011 p. 31) and to address issues such as gender and racial inequity (Spry, 2010). Conceived as politically and academically transgressive forms of inquiry, these methods aim at re/introducing the body into research discourse in a way that ‘can emancipate the scholarly voice from the monostylistic confines of academic discourse’ (Spry 2001, p. 720). In Tami Spry’s (2011) words:
Performative autoethnography is a personal/political social praxis, and a critically reflexive methodology, meaning it provides a framework to critically reflect upon the ways in which our personal lives intersect, collide, and commune with others in the body politic in ways alternate to hegemonic cultural expectations. It provides a narrative apparatus to pose and engage the questions of our global lives, asking us to embrace one another as fully as we challen...