Abstract

At the beginning of her classic study Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, Cathy Caruth draws our attention to the human voice that cries out from the traumatic wound, a voice that attempts to speak ‘a reality or truth that is not otherwise available’. But she also notes that this voice is addressed to another and that in this ‘encounter with another’ we find the necessarily intersubjective and relational experience of trauma: ‘the very possibility and surprise of listening to another’s wound’. Each of the performances I discuss in this paper invite an active listening to the pain of another that does not attempt to separate the individual experience of past trauma from the subject who has suffered it, but that through the live, real-time process of bearing witness to its performative repetition in the present distributes its ownership, and likewise the social responsibility for channelling its effects. I explore this idea of the performatively distributed voice of trauma through a brief examination of three works of interdisciplinary performance. The first, Tightrope, by the Montreal-based queer performance duo 2boys.tv, is a work of cabaret theatre that combines spoken word storytelling, singing, and drag in order to channel an historical archive of grief and loss around AIDS that also becomes a future-oriented act of transnational repertory remembrance. The second case study is The Events, Scottish playwright David Greig’s staging of the aftermath of a mass shooting that is based on his research into the 2011 massacre on the Norwegian island of Utøya. Greig’s play calls for the on-stage presence of a different community choir at each performance. Thus incorporated into the tragic events of the play, these choirs also distribute an empathically embodied response to their effects through the shared act of song. I conclude by discussing Betroffenheit, a collaboration between Vancouver-based choreographer Crystal Pite and the writer and actor Jonathon Young. In this acclaimed work of dance-theatre the combining of somatic and acousmatic techniques of expression, not least through the art of lipsynch, distribute what might have remained a private and distinctly local experience of trauma and grief into a public and performatively transnational act of kinaesthetic empathy.

Bio

Dr Peter Dickinson holds a joint appointment at the rank of Professor in the English Department and the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. He is also an Associate Member of the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies, and in January 2015, became Director of SFU’s new Institute for Performance Studies. His research coalesces around the following interconnected areas: theatre, dance, and performance studies (including, more recently, performance ethnography); film studies (with a particular focus on adaptation and queer film and video); queer theory and gender studies; and contemporary Canadian and Québécois drama and literary/cultural studies. Most recent book-length publications include: World Stages, Local Audiences: Essays on Performance, Place, and Politics (Manchester University Press, 2010); the co-edited volume Women and Comedy: History, Theory, Practice (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2014); a co-edited special issue of the journal PUBLIC on Mega-Event Cities: Art/Audiences/Aftermaths (#53, Spring 2016); and the co-edited collections Q2Q: Queer Canadian Theatre and Performance and Q2Q: Queer Canadian Performance Texts (Playwrights Canada Press, 2018). Dr. Dickinson also founded and edits the online open access scholarly journal Performance Matters (performancematters-thejournal.com), and his produced plays include The Objecthood of Chairs (2010), Positive I.D. (2012), and Long Division (2016/17). Contact: peter_dickinson@sfu.ca.