Staging Violence in Pig Iron Theatre Company’s Anodyne

Anodyne, an installation and performance staged by Pig Iron Theatre Company in 2001, opened with an exhibition of photographs of a displaced-persons camp in Poland in the immediate aftermath of World War II. In the second part of the piece, the audience watched a loose reenactment of these images and discovered in the process that the photographs were counterfeit. Drawing on Roland Barthes, Augusto Boal, and Tadeusz Kantor (among others), this essay argues that Anodyne flaunted both photography and theatre as techniques of staging. Taken as a whole, Anodyne did not assert that violence should remain untouched by art, but instead endeavored to make visible the distance that intervenes between representations of atrocity and what they purport to represent—a distance that much art about violence tries to conceal under the cover of its supposed status as authentic and evidentiary.