Representing Soldiers to Soldiers Through Dance: Authenticity, Theatricality, and Witnessing The Pain of Others

Representations of war recur throughout art, whether celebrating the glories and heroism of conflict or depicting its horrors and follies. Typically, such representations are consumed by audiences who were not there—civilians, politicians, those who remained safely at home—enabling them to bear witness to war, albeit at a remove. This paper shifts this discussion by considering Soldiers' own responses to the representation of Soldiers, specifically through considering questions of authenticity, theatricality, and witnessing in response to choreographer Rosie Kay's dance performance 5 Soldiers: The Body Is the Frontline (Rosie Kay Dance Company 2010, 2015, 2016).¹

In her book, Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), Susan Sontag explores how attempts to represent war raise multiple questions, not least the potential to glamorize, sanitize, or aestheticize conflict through its transformation into art. Meanwhile, according to media and communication researchers Katy Parry and Nancy Thumim, the past decade has seen a "burgeoning" of depictions of the military that seek to represent "the complexities of the lived experience for Soldiers fighting the war in Afghanistan" (2016, 96). Kay's 5 Soldiers can be considered in the context of this: first performed in 2010 against the backdrop of the British army's involvement in the conflict in Afghanistan, it seeks to represent the military experiences of such embedded, on-the-ground conflicts. This paper enters into dialogue with Sontag, drawing upon the conceptual discourses of authenticity to explore the impact and meanings of Kay's 5 Soldiers, specifically in terms of the performance's presentation to army and ex-army spectators. It asks: what is the impact of representing Soldiers to Soldiers through dance?

My own involvement in the research began in 2015 when I was approached by Kay and invited to conduct audience research into responses to a new tour of the production. My work includes using qualitative methodologies to explore audiences' experiential, interpretative, and affective responses to performance, including dance. Although I had worked with Kay previously, I had no relationship to the work itself, giving me an independence and distance that is essential in conducting audience research as it allows the researcher to approach spectators in as neutral a position as possible. This article draws upon some of the qualitative interview and focus group material produced through the research, especially from interviews conducted with military spectators.²

The following discussion explores how these particularly invested spectators framed the dance representation in terms of questions of authenticity and the ability of the production to satisfy what one respondent described as his "institutional norms." At the same time, however, these perceptions of authenticity were accompanied by a strong degree of theatricality and abstraction as the military experience was translated into a choreographic and aesthetic form. This produced a simultaneous sense of aesthetic and empathetic engagement among both army and ex-army spectators. Finally, the role and value of the outside artist in representing Soldiers to Soldiers is explored in terms of its ability to bear witness to the experience, without narrowly representing (or even reliving or recreating) that experience.

Context and Methodology

5 Soldiers was developed by Kay following a period of field research, first as a participant in two weeks of full battle fatigue training with the 4^th Battalion The Rifles and later a secondment at the Defence Medical Rehabilitation Centre Headley Court, Surrey, England. This degree of immersion into Soldiers' training was essential to the development of the work and, as will emerge through this paper, to military spectators' subsequent experience of the performance. Reflecting on the impact of the field research, Kay writes that the experience:

Pushed me far beyond what I had reasonably expected of myself. The very act of touching the rifle, then learning how to fire, reload and zero it, was a step change in the experience. Then I truly went from one observing, to one participating—in effect I then went "native." The touching of the rifle changed my internal relationship with war, and with myself and the object, but it also changed the Soldiers' perceptions of me.

(Kay 2015)³

In describing...