Performing Emergency: Witnessing, Popular Theatre, and the Lie of the Literal

Since the early eighties, I have worked as a playwright, theatre animator, and arts educator. Much of my work is in community-based popular theatre, and involves creating theatrical events through acts of storytelling in which some or all of the performers are members of the target communities. Though popular theatre as a named genre has only emerged in Canada during the past fifteen years, it has achieved a large degree of acceptability and wide public interest. Recently I have noticed that, together with the tremendous vitality, engagement, and indisputable learning generated by popular theatre projects, there are nevertheless certain uncomfortable elements that seem to repeat themselves. These include:

• • a similarity in the political analyses generated by the projects that often present a triad of victims, villains, and heroes;

• • confusion and hurt feelings expressed by a small but significant number of participants during or after projects, which indicate that telling stories is not always an empowering experience;

• • conflict among popular theatre artists/educators ourselves about the intersecting roles of art and politics, conflicts that too often result in failed communication rather than productive dialogue.

Observing these patterns has led me to question how much I understand of what is involved in the act of listening to and telling “risky stories” (Simon & Armitage-Simon), by which I mean stories that include and embody acts of violence. In this essay I will discuss difficulties that arose on a project involving refugees in Toronto. The broader context of the article is my concern with what in Canada is an enthusiastic but perhaps not always carefully considered use of personal narratives in classrooms and community organizations. I will address the significance of form and structure to storytelling and to popular theatre’s potential for advocacy, healing, or harm, and consider how the power of images may provide “containment” and an environment where difficult histories might be witnessed.

As artists and educators, we must continually ask ourselves: in what context are risky stories being told? Within what frameworks did they originate? And what is the cost to the speaker? Taking responsibility should extend beyond an ongoing inventory of who we are as individuals to an understanding that there are stakes for those with whom we work—stakes that exist, but are never more than partially knowable. Thoughtlessly soliciting autobiography may reproduce a form of cultural colonialism that is at the very least voyeuristic. This is particularly true when the voice of the artist or educator herself goes unexamined; or, when the choices students or project participants make for speech are privileged over choices made for silence, neglecting the highly complex negotiations that are involved in the politics of knowing and being known. ¹

In “Beyond Psychoanalysis,” Ora Avni describes a character in the Elie Wiesel story “Night.” Moshe the Beadle has been taken from his home by the Nazis, survived the murder of his convoy of foreign Jews, and returns to warn the others. But those to whom he returns do not, and more importantly, cannot believe him. Accepting his story would disrupt the very foundations of what they understand to be human. This story illustrates the ancient dilemma of the messenger and the audience. According to Avni, Moshe’s return to town is an attempt to reaffirm ties with the human community of his past, whose integrity was put into question by the incomprehensibility of what he had witnessed. Avni is very clear about why it is essential that this messenger speak, not privately to a friend, but publicly to the community network to which he seeks readmission:

Only by having a community integrate his dehumanizing experience into the narratives of self-representation that it shares and infer a new code of behavior based on the information he is imparting, only by becoming part of this community’s history can Moshe hope to reclaim his lost humanity.

(212)

The enormity of such a re-imagining of identity implies the cost to both the messenger or storyteller and the listener, something at stake “that defies storytelling, ‘lifting to consciousness,’ or literalized metaphors” (213). To bring this man and...