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‘Where Does It Hurt?’: Genocide, the Theatre and the Human Body

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2009

Robert Skloot
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Extract

Our desire for a humane future, for a future diminished in violence and enhanced in human possibility, insists that every means possible be used to warn and work against genocidal activity. Political scientists, historians, psychologists and others have their disciplinary agendas when they seek to sound the genocidal alarm, and to prevent the eruption of wholesale slaughter. I am concerned with the arts and how they contribute to moving us ‘toward the understanding and prevention of genocide’, specifically how the art of theatre can be used for the purpose of creating a world less violent and more protective and supportive of human life.

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Research International , Volume 23 , Issue 1 , Spring 1998 , pp. 51 - 58
Copyright
Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 1998

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References

Notes

1. This is the title of the volume of papers of the 1982 International Conference on the Holocaust and Genocide, edited by Israel Charny (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1984).

2. Hirsch, Herbert, Genocide and the Politics of Memory (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), p. 161.Google Scholar

3. Hirsch's preventive to genocidal behaviour finds a corresponding echo in the recent book of Martha C. Nussbaum, from which one of the epigraphs to this essay is taken. Nussbaum specifically (and I think problematically) excludes ‘modern drama’ from her statement concerning the benefits to be obtained by legal scholars and practitioners from reading literature in order to ‘imagine what it is like to live the life of another person who might, given changes in circumstances, be oneself or one of one's loved ones’ as a way ‘to form bonds of identification and sympathy’. See Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), pp. 5, 7. Although I agree with her ‘empathic’ concerns, the case Nussbaum makes for them, by concentrating on the stable and finite form of nineteenth and early twentieth-century realistic novels, cannot take note of the far more complicated and contested forms of modern and postmodern theatre practice. Her reasons for excluding drama from her investigation are found in note 8, p. 124.

4. Gambaro, Griselda, The Camp, translated by Oliver, William I. in Voices of Change in the Spanish American Theater, edited by Oliver, William I. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1971), p. 103.Google Scholar The play was first performed in 1967.

5. Kopit, Arthur, Indians (New York: Hill and Wang, 1969), p. 61.Google Scholar Kopit's play, along with three others, is discussed in Skloot, Robert, ‘Theatrical Images of Genocide’, Human Rights Quarterly 12 (1990), pp. 185–201.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6. Barnes, Peter, Auschwitz in Plays of the Holocaust, edited by Fuchs, Elinor (T. C. G. Press, 1987), pp. 144–5.Google Scholar

7. See Carlson, Marvin, Theories of the Theatre (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984)Google Scholar for an historical overview of catharsis and related terms.

8. And in postmodern times, we have performers and performance groups who, in fact and deed, commit their bodies to specific physical harm, including cutting, piercing and irrigating. See Rose, Jim, Freak Like Me: Inside the Jim Rose Circus Sideshow (New York: Dell, 1995).Google Scholar Jeanie's Forte's essay ‘Focus on the Body: Pain, Praxis and Pleasure in Feminist Performance’ explores the work of female performance artists who purposefully confuse their ‘real’ selves from their ‘performing’ selves, thus ‘provoking a blurring of distinctions between reality and representation’. In Critical Theory and Performance, edited by Reinelt, Janelle G. and Roach, Joseph R. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), pp. 248–62.Google Scholar Forte acknowledges the importance of Scarry's work in her own. It is important to note that I am discussing theatre of a mostly mainstream kind, while at the same time referring to its resistant strategies. Thus, the three plays I discuss preserve the idea of ‘character’ and exclude the types of performance that Rose or Forte describe and analyse.

9. There are many volumes that provide plentiful amount of information about the work of the actor and the meaning of acting theory. One expansive volume that comments on the many problems and assessments of contemporary acting theories and styles is Zarrilli, Phillip B., ed., Acting (Re) Considered: Theories and Practice (London: Routledge, 1995).Google Scholar

10. Scarry, Elaine, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of The World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 6.Google Scholar

11. Ibid., p. 9.

12. Langer, Lawrence's The Age of Atrocity: Death in Modern Literature (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978)Google Scholar, is ‘primarily concerned with the gradual erosion of the human image’. In ‘losing reverence for the human image’, he writes, ‘we are accelerating our own doom’ (pp. xii, xiv).

13. Three representative criticisms of the realistic form indicate the diversity of concerned responses.

A) ‘Modernist modes of representation may offer possibilites of representing the reality of both the Holocaust and the experience of it that no other version of realism could do. […] This is not to suggest that we will give up the effort to represent the Holocaust realistically, but rather that our notion of what constitutes realistic representation must be revised to take account of experiences that are unique to our century and for which older modes of representation have proven inadequate’. (White, Hayden, ‘Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth’, in Probing the Limits of Representation, edited by Friedlander, Saul (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 52.)Google Scholar

B) ‘The most successful among these [theatrical] forms [of plays dealing with terror] … are those which dramatise terror by distancing us from it, while restaging its menace and its climate of fear. […] What is often taken as the most pressing issue of the day in media melodrama works best in theatre when it is devoid of melodramatic content. This is not to say that theatre should ignore terror as spectacle—it always needs to embody it in some form—but that it should find jarring ways of estranging us from it in an age of dramatic self-consciousness where performance is often regarded as an aggressive thrusting of spectacle in the faces of its spectators’. (Orr, John, ‘Terrorism as Social Drama and Dramatic Form’, in Terrorism and Modern Drama, edited by Orr, John and Klaic, Dragan (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990), p. 67.)Google Scholar

C) ‘Realistic theatre imposes a conservative sense of order by delivering its ideology as normative. The transcendent posture of illusionist theatre makes the society it reflects appear to be incapable of change. Realism naturalizes social relations imposed by dominant ideology and mystifies its own authorship’. (Dolan, Jill, The Feminist Spectator as Critic (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991), p. 106.Google Scholar (First published in 1988). Clearly, both Orr and Dolan are believers in the power of theatre to work for some kind of change in the audience.

14. Griffin, Susan, A Chorus of Stones (New York: Anchor Books, 1992), p. 164.Google Scholar

15. Taylor, Diana, ‘Violent Displays: Griselda Gambaro and Argentina's Drama of Disappearance’, in Information for Foreigners: Three Plays by Griselda Gambaro, edited and translated by Feitlowitz, Marguerite (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1992), p. 169.Google Scholar Also see Taylor, 's comprehensive Theatre of Crisis: Drama and Politics in Latin America (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1991), pp. 96–147.Google Scholar One of her conclusions bears restating: ‘The radical theatre practitioners were right, however, to despair of theatre's efficacy as an instrument of measurable, foreseeable social change. Theatre is politically too unstable to be an unequivocal, reliable “weapon” in political struggle. Though it can alter the social order through the laborious process of consciousness raising, it is dangerously vulnerable to assimilation by any given social order. Systems and parties appropriate theatre and theatricality (icons, images, plots, rhetoric) to further their own ends, to bolster themselves through images that signal stability and legitimacy. […] Dramas of terror and oppression can paralyse the audience by means of real, though highly theatrical, acts of public execution, torture and terrorism’. (pp. 18–19)

16. Stoppard summarizes: ‘Briefly, art—Auden or Fugard or the entire cauldron—is important because it provides the moral matrix, the moral sensibility, from which we make our judgements about the world … The plain truth is that if you are angered or disgusted by a particular injustice or immorality, and you want to do something about it, now, at once, then you can hardly do worse than write a play about it. That's what art is bad at. But the less plain truth is that without that play and plays like it, without artists, the injustice will never be eradicated … That's why it is good and right that Savages has a long run in the West End’. (Stoppard, Tom, ‘Ambushes for the Audience: Towards a High Comedy of Ideas’, Theatre Quarterly, IV, 14 (05–06, 1974), pp. 13–14.)Google Scholar

17. Dubois, Page, Torture and Truth (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 144.Google Scholar In her use of the word ‘essentialist’, Dubois means ‘irreducible’ and ‘unavoidable’. For a useful overview of the issue of politics and art in the postmodern age, see Auslander, Philip, ‘Toward a Concept of the Political in Postmodern Theatre’, Theatre Journal (03, 1987), pp. 20–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

18. Kott, Jan, ‘The Memory of the Body’, translated by Vallee, Lillian, in The Memory of the Body (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1992), pp. 114, 115.Google Scholar

19. Griffin, , A Chorus of Stones, p. 168.Google Scholar

20. It is a method investigated by Patraka, Vivian M. in ‘Feminism and the Jewish Subject in the Plays of Sachs, Allan, and Schenkar’, Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Practice, edited by Case, Sue-Ellen (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), pp. 160–74.Google Scholar Also see Patraka's essay on the danger of fascist aesthetics and how uncritical theatricalization can reinscribe the fascist dynamic rather than problematize it. She writes: ‘By staging dangerous history I mean the use of history in theater to create a political critique of the present by revealing repeating or resonant structures in the past. Such a critique need not be a direct assault upon spectators to challenge their concepts of “how to respond”. But the representation needs to challenge the safety of local conditions and structures in an unfacile way—one that in this case might reveal present or potential fascistic structures or suggest ways in which they might be mutated or recycled by the slippery operations of a fascist machinery in a postmodern context’. (In ‘Fascist Ideology and Theatricalization’, in Critical Theory and Performance, edited Reinelt, Janelle G. and Roach, Joseph R. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), p. 337.)Google Scholar

21. Millett, Kate, The Politics of Cruelty (London: Viking, 1994), p. 144.Google Scholar

22. Martin, Jane, Keely and Du (New York: Samuel French, 1993), p. 65.Google Scholar The text of the play concludes with a scene in a prison hospital where a feeble and incapacitated Du is visited by a hale and unforgiving Keely, whose life Du had saved after Keely's self-administered abortion. In the prison scene, the audience is provided with the facts of the post-abortion story. I chose to play this ‘concluding’ scene first, as well as last, as a way (in Brechtian terms) of breaking the hold of realistic ‘suspense’ and accentuating the artificiality of realistic ‘closure’. Cf. Auslander, : ‘There is much a postmodern political theatre can learn from Brecht, but such a theatre must also move beyond Brecht, for whom the transgression of the conventions of bourgeois theatre remains to the point’. (Toward a Concept of the Political in Postmodern Theatre’, p. 26).Google Scholar

23. Griffin, , A Chorus of Stones, p. 183.Google Scholar Kate Millett's comments are also appropriate: ‘If ordinary citizens are fascinated, titillated, it is important to examine the elements in a culture which utilizes our responses as a government prerogative or resource. The difference always seems to be a matter of believing in the reality of what is taking place. Not as one believes a myth, but literally as one might believe something could happen to oneself. Until one can reach that point, until conscious identification takes place, there is a certain inertia which separates the victim from those around him, a separation most advantageous to the state. If we cannot imagine torture, we can never stop it’ (The Politics of Cruelty, pp. 163–4).