Patrick Duggan

Editorial: On Trauma

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.

Trauma and Performance: Maps, narratives and folds

The idea of trauma is now so ubiquitous in the public sphere that it has, for many, been evacuated. But this is also to say that we live in a moment when society feels bound to its traumatic experiences. Just as Raymond Williams explored the possibility of modern tragedy in a dramatized society, we might ask about the figuring in performance of trauma in a traumatized culture. It might be argued that, since Modern Tragedy (1966), the mass communications systems Williams explored elsewhere have themselves traumatized the global subject – by a paradoxical combination of overload and evacuation. We consider this later. Meanwhile, notwithstanding the effects of postmodern mediations, trauma remains ordinary:

‘Dis-ease’ and the Performance of Radical Resistance in the Maze Prison

In his study of Northern Ireland, Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland (1991), anthropologist Allen Feldman proposes that the H-Blocks of the Maze prison were full of ‘myths, local histories, performance spaces, carnivals of violence, symbolic kinship, death rituals, and animal totems’ (Feldman 1991: 166).2 Throughout Formations of Violence — and indeed elsewhere in the extant literature on the Maze prison — the events that took place in the Maze are described as ‘theatre’, ‘theatrical’ and/or as ‘performance’. To a certain degree these terms are deployed poetically to highlight the spectacular, internally spectated and performance-like nature of many of the events within that carcerial space. Even so, the use of such terminology in studies that are not from performance or theatre studies calls to mind the fact that, to some degree, all theatre and performance is concerned to explore presence and absence, visibility and invisibility, representation and ‘reality’. This concern with visibility or presence is precisely at the heart of the different protests performed in the Maze prison between 1976 and 1981. My contention in this chapter is that the learning of Gaelic (the Irish language), the so-called ‘dirty protests’ (1979–81) and the 1981 hunger strikes were performative attempts to rewrite the narrative of the prison space and to make radically visible the body and body politic.

Introduction - Performing (for) Survival: Frameworks and Mapping

In Nation and Narration (1990), Homi Bhabha argues that a nation shapes and narrates understandings of itself through the stories it tells about itself to itself. Such stories naturally take multifarious forms: political institutions, monuments, architecture, pageants, celebrations, commemorations and, of course, art practices such as performance. Bhabha’s proposition is a useful one for the concerns of this volume in so far as it looks to the potential for theatre to help peoples cohere, to create communitas, to function as a means of embodied thinking through contexts and problems. The diverse performance practices explored here could be considered what Thompson and Schechner (2004) call ‘social theatre’ in so far as the ‘ruling objective’ is not necessarily aesthetics and the ‘quality’ of the performances. The objective might be political agency, group cohesion, protest, amelioration of pain, or any of the dozens of other social functions that can be served by the stories that societies in crisis tell themselves about themselves.