Abstract
The author explores ‘artivism’ through co-produced theatrical productions. The phenomenon of staged performance as a medium through which experiences of atrocity and violence are articulated is both an evocative and pertinent form of representation for anyone engaging with theatrical art-forms and the visual, sensory, and performative expression they facilitate. Drawing on the rationales underpinning Teya Sepinuck’s Theater of Witness and the collaborative work of Bravo 22 Company and The Drive Project as indicative examples, this contribution interrogates two broad questions emanating from projects of this nature. Firstly, for scholars exploring the affective, sensory, and existential relationships between bodies, violence, injury, memory, memorialisation, and reconciliation, what exactly is it about these performances that should constitute ‘the empirical’? It is argued that any analytical attempts to harness the power of staged performance must resist the temptation to reify its meaning. Rather than trying to decipher ‘the real meaning’ of a play, for example, only approaches which pay close attention to the practices of production and consumption associated with the performance as centrally important phenomena are able to faithfully comment upon its all-important context. Rather than discrediting or disregarding the power of documentary and applied theatre, the author argues that we should pay closer attention to the specific and unfolding form such production practices take. Such performances should not be taken as ontological moulds of the ‘actors’ involved, but rather as practical, and therefore contingent, accomplishments which are themselves constitutive of the things they are attempting to convey. Rather than reading such performances as texts capable of telling us ‘what really happened’ or ‘what was really meant’ within their scripts in a didactic sense, we must recognise that their true meaning is to be found in their particular and situated ‘circumstances of use’.
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Notes
- 1.
The kind of theatre critically described by Ackroyd also closely resembles the work of Brazilian theatre director and theorist Augusto Boal, whose widely acclaimed Theatre of the Oppressed project (Boal 1979) attempted, among other things, to bring Paulo Freire’s (1970) tenets from Pedagogy of the Oppressed to life through participatory theatre. Ackroyd’s political account of applied theatre is somewhat reductive, overlooking the frequently contradictory dynamics at play between the politically progressive aims of such projects and the popular ideas and practices of participants (see Snyder-Young 2011). In short, while not all, or even most, theatre projects of this nature are designed a priori to promote political ends, the ones that are have no guarantees of success. Furthermore, within that body of projects whose aims are explicitly political, we can identify historical transitions between their approaches. Neelands (2007), for example, argues that far from reflecting the ‘old left’ politics of redistribution which we might expect to see in the political caricatures offered by Ackroyd, contemporary applied theatre has moved discursively towards a ‘new left’ political position of recognition and difference. Even this claim confined to a Western context, we should surely bear in mind, may have expired since the global financial crisis of 2008–2009, the wake of which has seen a resurgence in redistributive politics. The point again is that the politics of documentary and applied theatre are contingent accomplishments with little guarantee of fixity.
- 2.
Whether verbal and conceptual understandings of practices under study will suffice, or whether researchers must also become competent in those practices before being able to adequately study and explain them remains a contested issue amongst ethnomethodologists (see Lynch 2011: 934).
- 3.
Other considerations include not only anonymity but also the potential costs of re-enactment for actors. Jeffers’ (2008) fascinating article about participatory theatre practice with refugee groups illustrates this tension particularly starkly, explaining that asylum seeker and refugee actors are necessarily embroiled in the production of ‘victim narratives’ because of the appalling processes underpinning the UK government’s asylum system driven by the precedent to validate stories of suffering.
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Acknowledgements
The author is very grateful to Michael Mair at the University of Liverpool for many thought-provoking conversations, both on the specific topic being addressed here and, more broadly, on questions of epistemology and method. He must also acknowledge the advice and enthusiasm of Emma Murray in writing this chapter. The impetus for writing it actually originated in discussions of a project at Liverpool John Moores University involving artists, academics, and men on licence within the criminal justice system which Emma both participated in and facilitated.
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McGowan, W. (2019). Performing Atrocity: Staging Experiences of Violence and Conflict. In: Lippens, R., Murray, E. (eds) Representing the Experience of War and Atrocity. Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13925-4_9
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