Theatre Responds To Social Trauma

This book is a collection of chapters by playwrights, directors, devisers, scholars, and educators whose praxis involves representing, theorizing, and performing social trauma. Chapters explore how psychic catastrophes and ruptures are often embedded in social systems of oppression and forged in zones of conflict within and across national borders. Through multiple lenses and diverse approaches, the authors examine the connections between collective trauma, social identity, and personal struggle. We look at the generational transmission of trauma, socially induced pathologies, and societal re-inscriptions of trauma, from mass incarceration to war-induced psychoses, from gendered violence through racist practices. Collective trauma may shape, protect, and preserve group identity, promoting a sense of cohesion and meaning, even as it shakes individuals through pain. Engaging with communities under significant stress through artistic practice offers a path towards reconstructing the meaning(s) of social trauma, making sense of the past, understanding the present, and re-visioning the future. The chapters combine theoretical and practical work, exploring the conceptual foundations and the artists’ processes as they interrogate the intersections of personal grief and communal mourning, through drama, poetry, and embodied performance.

With 70% of the world’s population expected to live in urban environments by 2050, cities are poised to become the most significant spaces to shape personal and communal identity. As contemporary cities become “event destinations” a dialogue is emerging between the performing arts and the urban context and social fabric. Inspired by the principles of Psychogeography, this collection of essays highlights the performative aspects of cities as landscapes of creative inspiration where curiosity, imagination, playfulness, and the energy of the street combine with contemporary performance practices to create immersive public art experiences. Written by an international cohort of scholar-artists, these essays offer arts practitioners, urban specialists, and general readers a practical guide to experiencing the cityscape as the Artscape.

Trauma-tragedy investigates the extent to which performance can represent the ‘unrepresentable’ of trauma. Throughout, there is a focus on how such representations might be achieved and if they could help us to understand trauma on personal and social levels. In a world increasingly preoccupied with and exposed to traumas, this volume considers what performance offers as a means of commentary that other cultural products do not. The book’s clear and coherent navigation of complex relation between performance and trauma and its analysis of key practitioners and performances (from Sarah Kane to Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, Harold Pinter to Forced Entertainment, and Phillip Pullman to Franco B) make it accessible and useful to students of performance and trauma studies, yet rigorous and incisive for scholars and specialists. Duggan explores ideas around the phenomenological and socio-political efficacy and impact of performance in relation to trauma. Ultimately, the book advances a new performance theory or mode, ‘trauma-tragedy’, that suggests much contemporary performance can generate the sensation of being present in trauma through its structural embodiment in performance, or ‘presence-in-trauma effects’.

In this book Sue Jennings brings together international dramatherapists and theatre practitioners to challenge, clarify, describe and debate some of the theoretical and practical issues in dramatherapy and social theatre.

This book explores the use of drama or theatre texts about, as approaches to, or methodologies for, interventions in conflict and post-conflict contexts. It maps the role of drama/theatre in the centre and in the aftermath of overt and direct conflict, traces how the relationship between drama/theatre and conflict is shaping the socio-cultural, political, and aesthetic landscapes of these contexts, and engages with drama/theatre as methodologies to address or forge new relationships around conflict. As such, it deals with the transformative abilities of drama/theatre in contexts where conflict or violence is overt or covert in its effects, expressions and modes of social control in a range of geographical constituencies. It includes chapters predominantly from South Africa, but also from rural Nigeria and New Zealand, reflecting work on conflict in prisons, tertiary and secondary education, cities, villages and families. It also contains two new original play scripts, both resulting in acclaimed performances: Hush, on family violence in New Zealand, and The Line, on xenophobia in South Africa.

Despite its international influence, Polish theatre remains a mystery to many Westerners. This volume attempts to fill in current gaps in English-language scholarship by offering a historical and critical analysis of two of the most influential works of Polish theatre: Jerzy Grotowski’s ‘Akropolis’ and Tadeusz Kantor’s ‘Dead Class’. By examining each director’s representation of Auschwitz, this study provides a new understanding of how translating national trauma through the prism of performance can alter and deflect the meaning and reception of theatrical works, both inside and outside of their cultural and historical contexts.

War, rape, domestic violence, child sexual abuse and loss challenge all those affected to find ways to come to terms with and transcend their experience. This book strives to offer new understandings.