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  • Accountable and Theatrical Acts of Witness:Queen's University DRAM 476 Testimonial Project Pieces 2010
  • Kalanthe Khaiat (bio)

General Introduction

In my most recent cover letters for upcoming summer theatre festival work I described the kind of theatre I hoped to collaborate in creating as "socially conscious, engaging, thought-provoking, and formally innovative." Conceiving of theatre—and of artistic creation, more broadly speaking—in these terms, and prioritizing these particular qualities, I attribute to having been a student in Professor Julie Salverson's DRAM 476 class in 2009.

The title of the course is "Cultures of Theatre: Ethics and Performance, Facing History in a 'Tragic Culture."' Julie's course provokes students to think not just about how or why we make theatre, but also how to do so while respecting and harnessing theatre's power as a medium of socio-historical—and profoundly personal—representation, retelling, and commentary. Building on Peter Brooks' challenge to those of us who create and produce art "to consider all of our actions public, communal and witnessed," the course is designed to "explore how to think about what is at stake for artists and educators as translators of stories of public violence" (Salverson, "DRAM 476"). In 2009 we referred to our work in the class as dealing with how to tell "difficult stories." DRAM 476 demands intellectual and emotional engagement with some of the realities of the world that are most difficult to talk about.

These conversations do not happen often in Queen's Drama, partly because students tend to be so widely and heavily involved (theatrically and otherwise) that most time spent together is devoted to accomplishing a specific project. Drama feels different from Gender Studies (where I did the other part of my undergraduate work), and Cultural Studies (where I am pursuing my MA). Although every course in Drama demands passion for studying and participating in the creation of theatre, only DRAM 476 (cross listed to Cultural Studies) explicitly asks us as students to be accountable in our theatrical work. The forms of accountability the course demands are: to our individual aesthetic and ethical values; to the well-being of everyone participating in the discussions; and, for the Testimony Performance Project, specifically to the people whose stories form the basis for each piece.

Julie's assignment sheet describes the project that created the following short plays as "an exercise in performing testimony and exploring vocabularies of representation," and defines a Testimony Performance as "an act of witness within the confines of a culture of spectacle" (Salverson, "Testimony" 1). One of the bases for this project is to consider ourselves as potential witnesses of any and all crises around the world, past and present. The culture of spectacle manifests most obviously in contemporary Western mass media, in which moments of trauma from across the globe are represented for the consumption of a Euro-American public. One way to understand what the course calls our "tragic culture" is as an obsession with showing, telling, and receiving stories of violence that are not our own. By participating in this culture, we unconsciously become witnesses to violence, no matter how far removed from us in time and space the specific violations may be. The Testimony Performance Project asks students first to be conscious of their positionality (who they are as witnesses) and then to perform theatrical testimony from this acknowledged (and fluid) standpoint.

Two key questions immediately strike me regarding this assignment. Why is the focus on other people's "difficult stories" when students may well have their own? And, how can we avoid speaking for those others in a way that silences their voices, giving voice instead to us, as privileged Queen's students? Focusing on other people's stories reproduces the potential for voyeurism (implicit in mass media coverage), and for fetishizing an Other and her or his experience on the basis of her or his difference. This project, however, urges students to engage with other people (not Others!) and their stories in a completely different mode: not as passive consumers, but as active witnesses and retellers who recognize and respect the individuality and agency of the people directly involved in their chosen crisis.

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