Performing testimony, ethics, pedagogy, and a theatre beyond injury

grantor: University of TorontoThis study is written from the perspective of a practicing theatre artist and addresses the relationship between subjectivity, representation and ethics. Chapter One outlines a theory of witnessing as pedagogical and ethical engagement with testimony in the context of performance. Beginning from the premise that a privileging of trauma as a mode of knowledge fixes testimony within a discourse of loss and the tragic, the chapter examines problems of authenticity, voice and representational realism. Chapter one concludes by introducing the ethics of Emmanuel Levinas and the problem of the thesis: how can artist/educators, theatre participants and audience members find the resources to become an 'I' capable of responding to the ethical call of the other? What is it to enact this 'I' as a witness on stage? Chapter Two elaborates what is at stake for participants approaching testimony and articulates a relationship between Levinas' ethical relation and mimesis as a practice of negotiation between contact and distance, self and other. The chapter focuses first on the pedagogy and aesthetics of Theatre of the Oppressed and then explores the role of trauma memory in a project with refugees. Chapter Three continues discussion of this project in the context of mourning, melancholia, and an aesthetic of injury in English Canadian popular theatre. The chapter critiques a too easy empathy within psychological realism and discusses intersubjectivity, structures of identification and roles of victim and helper in the context of audience reception. Chapter Four discusses a play about land mines to examine staging an intervention in melancholia and a working through of encounters with loss. The chapter explicitly engages how performers and audience might develop a critical awareness of how to approach messy truths, suggesting there is a creative place for anxiety and resistance in drawing near to another. The thesis concludes by reiterating the importance of a mimesis that risks naming and resists closure in the name of ethics. Only performance forms and processes which invite an 'I' capable of approaching an 'Other' might generate possibilities for witnessing.Ph.D