Theatre and Human Rights: The Politics of Dramatic Form

ABSTRACT

This project develops theoretical intersections between theatre and human rights and provides methodologies to investigate human rights questions from within the perspective of theatre as a complex set of disciplines. While human rights research and programming often employ the arts as representations of political, social, and economic abuses, this study focuses on the intricacies of dramatic form and structure as uniquely positioned to interrogate important questions in human rights theory and practice. This project positions theatre as a method of examination, or as Alexander Baumgarten discussed, art as a way of knowing, rather than emphasizing more limited however important purposes the arts serve to raise consciousness that accompany other, often considered more primary modes of analysis. A main feature of this approach includes emphasis on dialectical structures in drama and human rights, and integration of applied theatre and critical ethnography with more traditional theatre research. This integration will demonstrate how theatre and human rights operates beyond the arts as representation model, offering a primary means of analysis, activism, and political discourse.

I. INTRODUCTION

In September of 2004, Connecticut Repertory Theatre hosted the first University of Connecticut Human Rights Institute Conference (Human Rights in the “War on Terror”)¹ that took place on the set for a production of Julius Caesar I was directing at the time.² The setting proved more symbolic than material, as the proceedings did not employ the arts within the panels or speakers. But the production design provided metaphorical power for the conference environment, informed, as it was, by imagery that evoked simultaneously a fortress and a prison. The discourse of the conference and the imagery of the theatre evoked something akin to Sebastian Wogentein’s restatement from Theodor Adorno: “The artwork is the point where the ‘movement of spirit’ and the ‘movement of social reality’ meet, and it is in this meeting that the relevance of literature (or drama) for human rights lies.”³ I recall this story to suggest that drama and theatre,⁴ especially forms of tragedy, provide a unique form of public life to experience problems associated with human rights. They provide this form often through the use of dialectic as a model for public discourse, or as Paul Cartledge suggests, “a rehearsal for democracy.”⁵

Another moment that sparked my inquiry occurred during a televised interview with Martha Nussbaum in 1988, when she illuminated the value of stories, plays, and particularly Greek tragedy when stating:

Tragedy only happens when you are trying to live well. When you are trying to live well, and when you deeply care about the things you are trying to do, the world enters in, in a particularly painful way. And when we try to wrest from the world the good life we desire—that then can lead us into tragedy.⁶

Nussbaum further argues that:

To see the complexity, that’s there and to see it honestly, without flinching and without re-describing it in the terms of excessively simple theory, is itself a progress for public life as well as private life, because its only when we have done that step, we can ask ourselves how our institutions might make it less likely that these (tragic) conflicts will happen to our people.⁷

This project begins from the premise that confronting and honestly engaging in the moral complexity in public and private life, provides a necessary precondition to effective public policy. To assist in presenting this complexity and to provide a foundation to this project, I propose to construct an Aesthetics of Human Rights inherent within a variety of dramatic forms that employ investigative dialectics to interrogate human rights questions, human motive, and action, through dramatic form and dramatic action. I propose five fundamental elements to define an Aesthetics of Human Rights in theatre that include a combination of the following:

1. 1. The use of dramatic performance forms built with dialectic structures and alternating episodes of disruption, engagement and estrangement

2. 2. A clear set of questions in human rights theory or practice also presented in some dialectical form, echoed by the dramatic structures engaged

3. 3. Performance as tactics to resist the oppression and strategies of powerful institutions

4. 4. An approach that engages “dialogic empathy” rather than “one-way empathy” between observer and artistic objects

5. 5. The use of proto-performance elements to develop theatre and engage audiences in multidirectional dialogue on the nature of the experience

Some previous attempts to integrate theatre and human rights posited that theatre best operates as mimesis or public representations of human rights questions or atrocities. However, the question of how theatre functions as representation seems less fully considered by most critics than what theatre represents. The latter emphasis on what theatre represents often focuses on generating pathos, or empathy, through presentations of victim’s suffering due to the inhumanity of various perpetrators. I argue that this type of presentation occurs so frequently that other more dynamic relationships between theatre and human rights garner less attention. Human rights function as a discipline that investigates and litigates atrocities, victims, and perpetrators. In contrast, the approach to generate pathos with theatre too often provokes public shame and provocation to point toward fault, guilt, and responsibility, and may also lack a contextual understanding of how and why violence arises amongst people with legitimate conflicting interests, or in some cases, between people who believe they are doing the right thing.

Any application of theatre as a social or political practice, as opposed to a purely artistic purpose, nevertheless depends on some type or range of aesthetics and dramaturgical methods to produce a harmony (or controlled dissonance) of the parts. For example, a dramatic structure and related aesthetics that match, comment on, or contradict each other and the political messages or discourse at hand. Therefore, looking carefully at a variety of forms of theatre provides methods of analysis that serve social, political, and cultural functions through both didactic and dialectic approaches. Essential ingredients to these approaches include analysis of theatre as art and social practice (including resistance), the complexity of thought and point of view structured into drama through character, dialogue, and dramatic action, and performance as cultural and political markers of human rights issues within local populations during conflict or in post conflict zones. Proposing an Aesthetics of Human Rights, while not intended as a definitive construction, may assist in theorizing what forms of drama with particular objectives create a useful framework for continuing discourse on how theatre and human rights intersect.

II. MORAL THEORY AND THE INDIVIDUAL

Philosophy and political theory contribute basic understandings about the relationship between moral theory and human rights with numerous writers providing ethical and moral principles as foundational to human rights as a discipline. Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, David Hume, Thomas Hobbes, Richard Rorty, Jack Donnelly, and others theorize persuasively on the necessity of moral relations, and the doctrine of “equal concern and respect” as defined by Ronald Dworkin as the state’s obligation, “to treat all persons as moral and political equals.”⁸ Theatre most often centers on the plight of individuals caught in a matrix of internal and external forces. Therefore, a theory on the nature of individual character, so often debated in drama and moral theory, provides an important dimension to consider. Human rights theory seems to treat humans as abstract entities that deserve ethical treatment by the state based on either teleological or deontological ethical theory. “All persons” appears in human rights documents without, for obvious reasons, ever specifying this particular person. In what often reads as a deductive thought experiment: from larger theory we establish principled treatment of individual people.

Drama, on the other hand, personalizes moral and political issues, presenting a flesh and blood reality in front of us, creating an inductive experiment from which we then transfer the experience to broader applications. Dramatists place the individual in relation to their environment through what Konstantin Stanislavski calls given circumstances.⁹ Borrowing from Martha Nussbaum, and in order to understand fully the value of drama relative to moral theory and human rights, we need a clear view of moral character.¹⁰ What creates a moral individual? What is the nature of good character itself? As Plato claims, does virtuous character result from the application of reason, and remains unchangeable, self-sufficient, and impervious to external forces? Following Aristotle, as Nussbaum insists, when discussing Hecuba from the play Hecuba by Euripides, does character remain vulnerable due to our commitments and the world’s intervention, and therefore good character suffers potential destruction from internal and external forces?¹¹ Engaging both approaches, as Nussbaum claims, drama provides a more nuanced moral theory than the philosophers due to the complexity of dramaturgically constructed character virtues and flaws, not always easily distinguishable from each other. Complex humans with moral commitments suffer direct assault from external forces that oppress and may destroy our homes and families. But these same forces may also destroy our ability to hold moral ground or, as we shall see, destroy our capacity to develop and maintain compassion and empathy.¹² Political theatre at its best builds complex moral dilemmas in which the protagonist either succumbs to or transcends the given circumstances that define them. I argue that despite the practice of multiple forms of drama that focus on human rights questions from a variety of angles, the most effective forms of human rights drama cause disruption, discomfort, intellectual and emotional engagement, and incorporate strong dialogic structures that actively engage civil discourse in situations with deeply conflicted and morally ambiguous claims.

When faced with brute force motivated by what we call evil in the world, whether in the death camps of Auschwitz, Cambodia, or in the indiscriminate murder of civilians in the Ukraine, no amount of study or debate will abate our condemnation of deliberate cruelty. Neither can we excuse the targeting of civilians under any circumstances. At some point relativist values and inquiry into moral character is useless when up against Vladimir Putin. Thus, the necessity of theorizing on the nature of moral character does not intend to excuse or justify violence, but rather allows us to grasp the unique, contextual reasons for the failure of human rights as an aspiration, that results in the deconstruction of human potential into moral chaos. Moral theory of human nature also allows us to understand what is actually happening between individuals and the state. For example, with state-sponsored terrorism or oppression, the machinery of power operates seemingly at times without direction, but by the force of its own historical imperative. As we shall see in examples to follow, nation states deny human rights to individuals and groups based on the belief they are unworthy of protection because of various negative perceptions of an individual or a group’s ethnic character. In these cases, the fundamental belief in human rights as a universal mandate suffers dismissal either due to political or security related arguments, often rationalized by racial or gender-based discrimination or simple greed. In these cases, theatre offers a distinctive form of mediation between an audience’s perception of victims and perpetrators, and their standing relative to human rights and their treatment by the state.

Central to a consideration of moral character in drama and human rights, power structures in both highly autocratic states and western democracies enact propaganda and media control to justify the exclusion of particular groups from their access to basic human rights. In the construction offered by Edward Hermann and Noam Chomsky, both liberal and non-liberal governments declare individuals and groups as “worthy or unworthy victims” to suit national interests and inform policy relative to the enforcement of human rights in a highly selective manner.¹³ In addition to commenting on the rights of individuals and groups within political and armed conflict, drama contributes meaningful analysis in the use of public messaging as a rhetorical war, as Jennifer Curtis argues in her book on Northern Ireland.¹⁴ In both Northern Ireland and Palestine, the political control of minority and indigenous majority populations depends on the absolute and permanent estrangement of these populations from their basic human rights across a spectrum of issues including health care, equal legal protections, economic rights, access to water, travel, family unity, education, and political agency.¹⁵ Whether a member of the provisional IRA, a Palestinian fighter, or rogue attacker, all individuals, nevertheless, deserve the benefits of the human rights regime. Everything we believe about human rights depends on this fundamental principle, yet we are aware this is not always the case.

The study of drama in this context, informed by an understanding that moral character is malleable due to severe inequities, underscores the root causes of violence where continuing colonialist expansions reveal oppression of individuals or groups in stark relief. As D. Soyini Madison points out, in reference to Howard Zinn’s play Marx in Soho, a radical act of performance “is a confrontation with the root of the problem.”¹⁶ Thus analysis of our subject position and our view on moral character allows us to employ drama as a model of inquiry into the relationship of oppression to violence in order to interrogate the most intimate and personal, political and moral complexities within various stages of conflict.

III. MAJOR THEMES

As the international human rights regime expanded after the first declaration in 1948, scholars developed influential interdisciplinary collaborations to demonstrate how human rights perspectives integrate with an array of academic subjects and various social and political practices. Such interdisciplinary and subdisciplines included humanitarianism, jurisprudence, philosophy, social sciences, the humanities, and economics, among others. However, as to the arts in general, and theatre in particular, a similar construction remains elusive. Most often, if not entirely, these attempts focus on how theatre provides representations of human rights questions through embodied experience within various works to develop empathy on the part of the public for individuals or groups. However, in this study I argue that emphasis on representation and empathy generation distracts us from deeper connections that theatre, drama, and the arts in general offer as a method of deliberating questions in human rights. In addition to the aesthetic principles of theatre connected to human rights previously stated, this project builds arguments around four overarching themes with adjacent objectives:

1. A. To clarify an Aesthetics of Human Rights, I emphasize dialogic forms of theatre structure that humanizes the intense complexity of conflicting rights

2. B. To indicate how theatre functions as successful activist and resistance tactics in legitimizing human rights claims in a variety of circumstances

3. C. To offer a comprehensive set of dramaturgical methods to categorize and critique the objectives of various theatre projects in relation to human rights

4. D. Employing some of these methods, to establish how theatre can function as a distinct methodology to research various questions in human rights in specific settings

A. Aesthetics and Dialectic Forms

When theatre focuses only on representations of suffering, the effect minimizes complexity, without investigating root causes of conflicts or investigating how individual or group rights operate in conflict with each other. However, even when demonstrations of political conflict are the main objective, I argue that theatre most effectively intersects with human rights when employing a dynamic, investigative dialectic between complex multiple perspectives. Human rights research often formulates critiques on the presence or lack of rights, enforcement of existing or claimed sets of rights, or as Hannah Arendt argues, “the right to have rights.”¹⁷ Human rights as a discipline addresses universal rights across societies in concert with more narrowly defined civil rights issues. As a result, there appears a paradox between the microscopic nature of theatre, and the international scope of human rights theory. Political theatre describes precise moments in time and space where conditions and experience of a particular individual or small group are examined. Treating these types of drama as inductive logic allows us to imagine how the dramatic action, structure and form of performance functions as effective activism and allows us to imagine how human rights questions flow from individuals and groups through societies and across national boundaries.

One important element found in the discipline of performance studies, places primary importance on the body in performance. Also borrowed from Bertolt Brecht’s theory on Epic Theatre and alienation, emphasis on the body shows how theatre creates complex dialectics where the actor functions as character, creator, commentator, and activist simultaneously.¹⁸ In these forms the actor or character’s performance in public space does not represent something that exists in any temporal reality, but rather creates an imagined and original socio/aesthetic form with layered dialectical aesthetics and politics that challenges our understanding of the status quo. Further the use of a body of one ethnic or national group to inhabit a character, perhaps even one from a remote geographical space, challenges our normalized impression of each group. As Brecht claims, this effect requires us to reevaluate something we believe to be true, only by virtue of it being familiar—and forces us to contend with what now becomes newly and uncomfortably unfamiliar—that in turn challenges our original assumptions.¹⁹

For example, in the Jenin Refugee Camp in Palestine, The Freedom Theatre production of The Island, by Athol Fugard, Winston Ntshona, and John Kani, Palestinian actors embodied characters written as South African political prisoners.²⁰ On tour abroad, the production forced audiences to contend with this duality and the cognitive dissonance produced from both identities merging into something hybridist, unique, and not representative of anything. Here, as in Brecht, the play functions as a mediator between what is considered familiar and sympathetic, South African political prisoners, and that which is considered unfamiliar and perhaps unsympathetic, Palestinian political prisoners. Despite any inherent biases, the effect dis-orients and challenges the audience to face the obvious humanity of the men on stage, revealed in all their vulnerabilities. Similar creative acts allow us to imagine how renderings of local human rights conflicts expand to a transnational context.

B. Theatre as Resistance Tactics

Some argue that theatre best functions as representations of human rights as social criticism and empathy generation, and caution against an approach that emphasizes theatre as effective activism. However, by looking at applied theatre forms in concert with critical ethnography practiced in the field as resistance tactics,²¹ we see that theatre does provide a means to enumerate and assert rights as suggested by D. Soyini Madison in Acts of Activism, Human Rights as Radical Performance. Madison refers to Michel de Certeau’s definition of tactics as “creating a means and a space from whatever elements or resources are available in order to resist or subvert the strategies of more powerful institutions, ideologies, or processes.”²² Relating human rights to social justice, Madison argues for performance that emerges from local cultural foundations as public discourse—even incitement—to overpower or neutralize the boundaries of oppressive ideologies. While many assume most, if not all, performance generated from critical ethnography functions as didactic, or protest drama, Madison emphasizes the dialectic between experience, reflection, and interpretation to produce the ability for artists, participants, and audience to respond, or develop a “response-ability.”²³ Connecting ethics and advocacy, and through a careful self-evaluation of our positionality, Madison reports: “I had strong responses to what I witnessed during my fieldwork. These responses demanded that I be responsible for providing an opportunity to gain the ability to respond in some form.”²⁴

These writings echo and compliment similar sentiments expressed by Nabil AlRaee, former artistic director of The Freedom Theatre. AlRaee regularly argues that artists face a responsibility to create work that responds to the deeper causes of injustice in their communities, and to clearly identify the motivations for the use of personal stories in creative acts taken from daily life.²⁵ Echoing Madison, AlRaee emphasizes that in building a production, or curriculum for an activist actor, the first step must be for the individual to ask, “[w]ho are you in your own story and what is your responsibility to yourself and the community within that story?”²⁶ Both Madison and AlRaee, however separated by geographies and subject positions, insist on the necessity to develop creative performance as the natural extension of ethnographic field study. For Madison, this manifested as devised theatre that emerged from work in Ghana, and later performed in the US. For AlRaee, this manifested in the development of political activist drama from within the Palestinian community and adjacent to conservatory training.²⁷

C. Dramaturgical Methods

Whether specific theatre productions focus on demonstrations of suffering, or debates between competing ideas, dramaturgical structures range across a variety of forms and offer a comparative method of analysis and insight into the objectives of specific work. Dramatic structural elements typically determine the internal logic or organization of theatre to accomplish specific aesthetic goals. Some of these methods and dramaturgical structures also indicate political intentions, often operating as binaries, and include:

• • Theatre that is fundamentally disruptive to or conforms with social norms

• • Theatre that employs dialogic or monologic forms

• • Theatre that embodies a search for justice or reconciliation

• • Theatre that is ideological or nonideological

• • Theatre that focuses on the psyche of victims, and/or perpetrators

• • Theatre created from the margins or center of society

• • Theatre that attempts to create empathy within, or across cultural or ethnic boundaries

• • Theatre that eschews empathy construction in favor of developing authentic political agency

• • Theatre that is realistic or abstract, employing sequential or nonsequential narratives

Throughout my research these intentions and methods emerge from textual and critical analysis of production and are in no way mutually exclusive. Artists and playwrights regularly employ these methods across a variety of forms and structures including narrative drama based in realism, nonrealistic theatre, experimental theatre, verbatim forms, participatory or applied theatre, devised theatre and even improvisational or spontaneous performative acts of public protest. Which elements artists utilize also may indicate the subject position of the creators, and their relationship to existing power structures. For example in Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness, bell hooks argues that moving from one’s geographic or cultural position to another, as with The Island, serves as a radical act of resistance.²⁸ This suggests that theatre, originating at the margins of society and penetrating mainstream performance and other public spaces, disrupts the generally held connections between institutional theatre and the economic, political, and cultural forces that maintain those institutions. In addition, the relationship of the production to the text becomes, itself, a politically charged dialectic, again as The Freedom Theatre production of The Island confirmed. In this case casting disrupted audience expectations through the recontextualization of what otherwise remains an essentially realistic play. When performed in Jenin, or on tour in the West Bank, the play offered testimony to the ubiquitous experience of family members arrested and detained sometimes for years without charge or trial.²⁹ On tour abroad, however, the mere presence of the actors in a play about South African apartheid provided a radical political act. Even more so with AlRaee’s production of The Siege, based on the Israeli army’s 2002 siege of the Nativity Church in Bethlehem, which, when on tour in the United Kingdom and New York, spawned significant protests against the institutions that presented them.³⁰ The presence of the production, arriving as it did from the margins of the international political space of a Palestinian refugee camp was, itself, provocative, regardless of the play’s content.³¹

D. Current Patterns in Theatre Research

The study of theatre forms utilized during various stages of conflict reveals how local communities view which human rights questions affect them most deeply, how those communities see themselves in relation to specific rights, and the capacity (or risks) those communities face to affect their circumstances. This includes the capacity to enter into various political processes such as attempts at community reconciliation. For the purposes of this project, research regarding theatre and human rights for social justice falls into three general categories.

The first, theatre studies research, offers critiques of theatre and performance typically from a historical, literary, or regional studies perspective. While theatre makers build issues of social justice into a production in question, generally we critique and analyze that production from within the world of theatre, even when motivated by political factors. This research, up to now, only occasionally employs the terminology of human rights.

The second category includes applied theatre research as described in projects such as Performance in Place of War, by James Thompson, Jennie Hughs, and Michael Balfour and Research: Radical Departures by Peter O’Connor and Michael Anderson.³² These projects discuss applied theatre research that may not employ the language of human rights directly but investigate various methods of applied theatre in the field. They also offer research methods to ask questions about how theatre functions during conflict, in prisons, or other settings where human rights questions arise sometimes by other means.

The third category includes performance studies research stemming from critical ethnography and participatory observation, such as those championed by Dwight Conquergood and D. Soyini Madison who advocate for performance designed to actively claim human rights in specific settings.³³ Both Conquergood and Madison redefined their approach to ethnography through “co-performative witnessing,” which later in their work began to replace the term “participant-observation.”³⁴ Both suggest “a body to body in the field relationship with the subjects of ethnography through performance, as a politics of the body deeply in action with Others.”³⁵

Applied theatre research, a large and robust field of inquiry, often operates independently from other forms of performance activity and research. Within the two major anthologies published in the last ten years regarding theatre and human rights, the editors mention applied theatre briefly in the introductions, and few of the chapters in either volume involve case studies connected to applied theatre practice.³⁶ More recently performance studies and theatre research employ forms of ethnography in studying performance as seen in conference presentations where participatory research, critical ethnography, and theatre research overlap. However, scholars rarely employ such innovations to specifically demonstrate or imagine an intersection between human rights and theater research. As a result, the currently published work on theatre and human rights remains quite narrowly defined (often as an extension of literary studies) and not regularly published by scholars who work in the field as ethnographers, theatre artists, applied theatre specialists, or human rights activists.

To sum up, performance studies scholars and ethnographers touch on human rights as an important theme and objective; applied theatre artists and researchers refer to human rights but focus on social impact; and theatre scholars of dramatic literature and regional studies address human rights and performance, but generally only as representations. Fully integrating these areas of research and scholarship provides a detailed model of how theatre and human rights operates—beyond the arts as representation model—and offers a primary methodology for analysis, activism, and political discourse relative to human rights.

IV. DEMONSTRATIONS VS. REPRESENTATIONS, DIALECTICS, AND EMPATHY

While some emphasize performance as representations of suffering or, as I prefer, demonstrations of complex ideas, theatre artists and critics must delve deeper into how theatre articulates complex, contradictory, and paradoxical elements of human rights in practice. On one level, similar to human rights, theatre envisions a world that anticipates and embraces the human rights regime as seen in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) model. As Jack Donnelly argues, “Human Rights thus can be seen as a self-fulfilling moral prophecy. Treat people like a human beings [sic] . . . and you will get truly human beings. The forward looking moral vision of human nature provides the basis for social changes implicit in the claims of human rights.”³⁷ Thus, when aligned with human rights, theatre’s capacity to personalize large scale conflict functions as a public moral experiment or as a form of applied political philosophy.

Human Rights seeks to fuse moral vision and political practice. The relationship between human nature, human rights, and political society is dialectical. Human Rights shapes society so as to shape human beings, so as to realize the possibility of human nature, which provided the basis for these rights in the first place.³⁸

Conversely even as the Human Rights Regime enunciates these aspirations as a universal and global practice, the UDHR model nevertheless remains, at best, an incomplete project. Populations in certain areas of conflict remain skeptical and consider human rights an extension of western hegemony and continued colonization. One need only compare the response by the United States and Europe to the Russian invasion of the Ukraine, to the nonintervention policy of the West during the Rwandan genocide. If empathy for suffering and the dignity of the individual function as two equal and foundational pillars of human rights theory and practice, how can instruments of international policy and intervention remain so inconsistently applied?

Insofar as theatre can be designated as a subdiscipline of human rights, the dialectic referred to by Donnelly—that is between our view of human nature and its potential—also forms the basis for aesthetics of human rights in drama and performance. Human rights theatre might be one that bears witness to suffering or testimony but so does the evening news. This is not to denigrate the use of testimony in performance (which can be profoundly effective), but to shape testimony within the construction of complex dialectics when expressed in theatrical form. The complex and reflexive nature of human rights theory is most profoundly expressed when the dialectic and investigative nature of theatre disrupts rather than lectures. This includes the ability for theatre to critique the relationships between western nations, political realism, and complicity with international criminality that undercuts the same aspirations that the West promulgates through human rights in the first place. Nor should theatre stand entirely on a foundation of reconciliation or empathy construction through the commodification of suffering. Instead, we need to consider the possibility of irreconciliation, where multiple points of view coexist within public space and accountability is consistently applied. As Richard A. Wilson points out: “Adopting a stance of irreconciliation, repudiating the status quo, and refusing to be mollified by the national discourse on reconciliation is to continue to insist on a program of social change that addresses deep seated inequities in society.”³⁹ Performative attempts at reconciliation, or enforced peace without justice to Palestinians, for example, remains just another form of oppression.

Art and theatre incorporate these questions and contradictions as temporal impermanent visions of a nonempirical discipline. Following Alexander Baumgarten’s notion of art as “sensitive logic,”⁴⁰ Theodore Adorno noted, “[o]nly by virtue of separation from empirical reality, which sanctions art to model the relation of the whole and the part according to the work’s own need, does the artwork achieve a heightened order of existence. If artworks are answers to their own questions, they themselves truly become questions.”⁴¹ This approach supports theatre that makes no attempt to represent the empirical per se, but rather by subjects the empirical to interrogation, and bringing into question everything we think we knew.

A. Mimesis to Pathos: Theatre as Representation

Some argue that theatre provides representations of human rights questions to generate empathy on the part of the public for individuals or groups. Derbyshire and Hobson describe this often-assumed role drama plays: “[t]he theatrical treatment of human rights allows for the dissemination of information, the arousal of compassion, and the raising of consciousness in a way that is particular to that form.”⁴² Presenters and scholars sometimes compare these representations against proscriptions established by the UDHR and other international conventions to show how various actors violate human rights. This approach provides important functions and is certainly valuable in raising consciousness and support for victims and marginalized groups. A relatively small number of works including one monograph, two edited volumes, one book on applied theatre practice and ethnography, and a handful of book chapters and journal articles attempt to elucidate this sort of relationship between theatre and human rights.

In Imagining Human Rights in Twenty-First-Century Theatre: Global Perspectives, the editors, Florian N. Becker, Paola S. Hernandez, and Brenda Werth posit two points surrounding the organizing principles for their volume which concerns what can reasonably be expected of theatre and performance to do for human rights.⁴³ First, their examples demonstrate interaction between theatre and the institutions, objectives, and principles of human rights including a critique of those same entities. Second, the editors argue that theatre functions best as representations by claiming theatre as “a minority practice” cannot reasonably be expected to prevent human rights violations. As Brenda Werth points out:

[w]hat these diverse answers have in common is that they keep sight of the fact that these questions concern not only the nature of human rights and the relation between human rights and art or representation in general, but also, and crucially, the nature of theater as a distinctive representational practice.⁴⁴

Mary Luckhurst and Emilie Morin, in their anthology Theatre and Human Rights Since 1945, employ the concept of the unspeakable that audiences confront as drawn from, “[a] large body of historical studies on torture and state terror, war crimes and genocide [that] now utilizes the unspeakable as a key term, to be investigated with care and situated within the context of its historical emergence in human rights debates.”⁴⁵ They also refer to philosophical resonances from Theodor Adorno, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Giorgio Agamben as a collection of ideas that encourage, or not, the expression of what remains silent due to the unspeakable nature of various crimes.⁴⁶ As a primer for the historical development of pity and sympathy, Luckhurst and Morin refer to Luc Boltanski’s descriptions of western theatre as, “rhetorical models predicated upon associations between human nature and a capacity for pity and sympathy.”⁴⁷ So, each set of scholars and critics define one relationship between theatre and human rights: a relationship that humanizes various subjects through representations of suffering, in order to elicit sympathetic or empathic responses from the audience.

B. Theatre as Demonstration of Complex Dialectics

However, little published material exists regarding the complexity, and at times, contradictory sets of empathic responses that develop on the part of an audience, or how aesthetic structures provide a deeper understanding of important human rights questions, particularly through a distinctively dialectic rather than didactic approach. What feels absent in many analyses when addressing exactly what is being represented or how, are the ways theatre creates public debate through forms that deemphasize empathy and encourage provocative public discourse or social action. Scholars and theatre in general may suffer from an over dependence on representations that place characters or forces in binary opposition as perpetrators and victims. This structure of perpetrators and victims neglects theatre as dialectically complex, as for example through the use of unresolvable moral dilemmas (as with Nussbaum and the Greeks), and we may lose an essence of theatre’s distinctive nature to require us to hold multiple truths simultaneously.

C. Death and the Maiden

For example, in the play Death and the Maiden, by Ariel Dorfman, we encounter the character of Paulina.⁴⁸ As a victim of rape and torture, Paulina’s experience represents the suffering of others, thus creating empathy for victims of specific atrocities with the audience. Scholars and presenters often employ this play to examine the various political forces that produce the same atrocities. Death and the Maiden provides an illustration to study the history of human rights abuse in Chile and South America. As essentially a didactic approach, social scientists and literature scholars often employ the play as an example of a particular victim’s experience that humanizes broader historical events.

However, looking at the play through its dramaturgical design we see dramatic form provoking debate on larger and specific questions directly related to the delicacy of human rights and democracy in post conflict; specifically, the triangular relationship between the three characters, Paulina, her husband Gerardo and the accused torturer, Dr. Roberto Miranda highlight such questions. After Paulina hears Miranda’s voice and determined that Miranda is the doctor who tortured and raped her, Paulina violently restrains Miranda, and forces her husband, a lawyer, to defend him in a mock trial. Earlier the same day, the President of the unnamed country appointed Gerardo as counsel to the truth and reconciliation commission that would only bring cases to trial that resulted in death. The political conditions of the country indicate a delicate condition, where the recently reestablished and fragile democracy may still be at risk, if the government goes too far in holding the military accountable.

Shifting patterns between the three characters drive each, at various moments, to function as a mediator, prosecutor, or defendant with shifting alliances. The playwright creates dramatic conflict where the audience must lean-in and align with complex characters, each with malleable and conflicting points of view. The dialectic that takes place could occur between audience members, but more importantly, it occurs within the individual audience member. The content, form, and structure of the play, evokes, and even anticipates the common frictions between attempts to achieve both justice and reconciliation found in many post conflict zones. Similarly, the relationships developed by the playwright demonstrate how individual dramatic actions raise questions of national importance, and how international human rights dilemmas flow through individuals and toward larger populations in crisis. Studying the play provides a primary means to investigate the complexity of the issues rather than only as a representation of issues raised through other means. Death and the Maiden is not a play about human rights because it represents a victim of torture and the presumed torturer. It is a play about human rights because in the embodied experience of the characters, especially the husband Gerardo, we bear witness to two difficult and complex political realities: first, that the social objectives of justice and reconciliation conflict, threatening each other within the same political space; and second, echoing Wilson, that the State is incapable in many instances of reconciling this conflict to the satisfaction of neglected victims, or of achieving the goals of either justice or reconciliation.⁴⁹

D. Antigone

In producing the play Antigone, various groups utilize the main character as a heroic rebel who courageously opposes a tyrannical, morally corrupted king. Often portrayed as an early Christian martyr archetype, Antigone falls victim to the State—typically portrayed as the oppressor. But some Athenians, particularly from the landowning class, remained skeptical of democracy and viewed rights very narrowly, only granting them to Athenians due to their status as citizens. Socrates and Plato considered Antigone’s claim— that individual or universal rights trump civil obligations—as radical and dangerous.⁵⁰ While Sophocles posed important questions for the Athenian audience to debate, today Antigone often reverberates as an allegory with Antigone making the singular ethical argument as she confronts tyranny. But this reduction does not, in my view, offer dramatic conflict that would have been understood by the Greeks, or contemporary audiences as more complex or relevant.

To revisit this complexity other playwrights, including Jean Anouilh, positioned the play differently by looking carefully at the relationships within the play. In my own adaptation, I focused on the family, as well as the State, to reveal the central theme of the play: the position of love in public life. Through compassion and social justice, or in protection of the vulnerable, love informs civil law as well as family obligations. Creon attempts control through fear as his expression of love for his city. To Antigone, love defines the values in all public life to instill hope free from fear. In Antigone, this conflict between Antigone and Creon reflects the larger conflicts of the play that concern public obligations, and within family life itself. Thus, the play moves back and forth between the realms of family and the State to explore the relationships and various beliefs of the characters, and the audience, in both realms. Creon is Antigone’s Uncle. Antigone, a rebellious and animated young woman, searches for justice from a subaltern position in society. Antigone believes the gods demand her to act, but her own inherent moral compass based on an obligation to a familial blood tie motivates her choices.

But Creon is not a villain. While his version of love manifests as control and the fear he invokes, it is still his version of love—his version of moral duty. He loves his country and believes in sacrifices necessary to preserve it. In the disconnect between his motives and methods lies his particular tragedy. We should remember that the play takes place immediately after a brutal war that threatened everyone. The effects of trauma on the characters also motivates each in their own way. For Creon, that trauma was the death of his elder son and the trauma inflicted on his city by a traitor.⁵¹ For Antigone, we bear witness to the impact of trauma following the profound tragedy of her entire family.

The Greeks viewed blind loyalty to blood ties with suspicion as they were well aware of natural law requirements, for example, taking revenge. One example of many, found in Agamemnon by Aeschylus, concerns Electra who commands her brother, Orestes, to kill their mother to avenge the murder of their father, Agamemnon. Sophocles takes note of this Greek aversion to blind blood tie loyalty when he provides Antigone with language to indicate her unwillingness to attempt rebellion for a husband or child but will do so only for a brother who cannot be replaced. To clarify why legitimate conflict between these perspectives in both of these plays is essential, I am drawn to the principle Harold Pinter suggested: “the more political we are in theatre the more scrupulously objective we must be.”⁵² The clash between civil authority, individual rights, and familial obligation has suffered a long and bloody history. Both plays attempt to reveal, as deeply as possible, the effects these conflicts have within both the State and the family.

Antigone and Death of the Maiden work as human rights plays not only because they enumerate, envision, enact, and legitimize particular rights and represent suffering, but because they demonstrate a major question in human rights: how rights and attempts at empathy construction often operate in opposition to each other. They also function as human rights plays because, as Jack Donnelly suggested, they shed light on the difference between doing right and having a right.⁵³ The state may deny an existing right or refuse to do the right thing by refusing protection to Paulina or Antigone, and whether it is one or the other shapes the nature of injury each character experiences. Antigone, in the scope of the original play, does not actually have the rights she claims; rather the State denies those rights through both law and the political philosophy of the day. Antigone claims her rights based on religious tradition and family obligations, which indicates how the rights and obligations argued in the play confront each other in direct opposition. Antigone’s claim, Creon argues, is subversive to the normative conditions of law and the state. Christophe Menke offers a model for Antigone’s experience by suggesting that everything that binds society within the law, by definition, excludes elements that operate outside law, which connect to nature.⁵⁴ It is precisely Antigone’s insistence on natural law that puts her at odds with Creon.⁵⁵ By contrast, in Death of the Maiden the State with full knowledge of Paulina’s rights, has the power to offer remedy by applying criminal accountability based on statutory and human rights, but chooses to deny her. Her violent reaction naturally follows from a desire for spiritual and psychological survival and terror intertwined within her organic experience. Thus, in contrast to Antigone, who operates outside the law, Paulina has a right to remedy through the law, and the State has an obligation to do the right thing, but both claims are denied.

As a result, I argue the operating structures in Antigone and Death and the Maiden that evoke these dynamics depend entirely on a dramatic form built on dialectical arguments and largely unanswerable questions. However, the dialectics do not operate in a pure Hegelian sense with a specific thesis and counter thesis that remain largely unaltered. The dialogic form of the play allows for dynamic and investigative engagement that shift and, at times, forces us to hold multiple truths simultaneously. Thus, when connecting theatre to human rights and utilizing a form of realism that might be referred to as representational, we ought not focus only on the curating of actual events or fictionalized visions of imagined events with definite and clear outcomes. Rather we should consider theatre as the means by which the audience and greater community can wrestle with moral ambiguity in order to understand themselves more fully and to debate how conflicting interests might find resolution.

E. Problems with Representation: Aristotle and the Issue of Plausibility

Western narrative drama typically places the individual at the center of dramatic form, consistent with Martha Nussbaum’s arguments that tragedy functions as public discourse on problems associated with complex moral dilemmas.⁵⁶ This emphasis on individuals creates the trope of the tragic figure, or hero, who must face a variety of internal and external forces that challenge their capacity to function in a moral way. Stanislavski restates this ingredient of dramatic form as given circumstances when he asks: what personal, social, historical, and philosophical restraints or expectations rob us of our political agency or motivate characters into believable responses?⁵⁷ I argue that in this form, drama always interrogates how the main figure transcends or fails to transcend those given circumstances. Examples include Hamlet, who rejects the role of revenge murderer; Orestes, who demands justice in lieu of healing; or John Proctor from The Crucible, who refuses to cooperate with a morally corrupt system of justice. These examples, and innumerable others, point to the dramaturgical devices of plausibility and causality as introduced by Aristotle: “[t]he plausible impossibility is preferable to the implausible possibility.”⁵⁸ Coupled with an internal structure based on causality—each dramatic event logically motivates the next to a believable conclusion—Stanislavski reinterpreted these elements in theatre and realism in particular to reflect life as it is as opposed to some other imagined world.⁵⁹ Peter Brook refers to this type of theatre as a collective yes, or consistent with social expectations of believability based on agreed social and political norms.⁶⁰

However, Bertolt Brecht argues that Stanislavski style realism functions as a form of social coercion.⁶¹ If drama represents the world as we believe it is, then the only plausible endings or conclusions must conform to the limited world view of a particular audience. This implies the suffering of individuals in so-called realistic plays occurs due to certain natural laws. The structure of the play mirrors the structure of the world as we see it. Representational theatre need not always focus on the individual, or only represent people’s suffering and their conditions. Even when the play demonstrates how ideas manifest in individuals, as in Death and the Maiden, the product intended by the playwright is not pathos, but rather thought to disorient us from preconceived expectations. For this reason, Ariel Dorfman refuses to resolve clearly whether the accused torturer, Doctor Miranda, is in fact guilty. The play does not intend to generate pathos or assign guilt, but rather to provide disruption, even confusion, when faced with two meta interests: justice and reconciliation.

Brecht claims further, that when playwrights deploy realism and pathos, audiences find it extremely difficult if not impossible to challenge the given circumstances of the play.⁶² Emotional connection hypnotizes the audience, disconnecting them from their rational observational skills. Empathy, often a desired product of both human rights and drama theory, distracts us from the major questions at hand and does not guarantee, and may actually undermine, political action. As Lindsay Cummings points out in her research, empathy in these cases moves in one direction only, is fixed, nondynamic, and rarely shared with or from the point of view of the subject.⁶³ For Brecht, this means that in realism the event depends entirely on the audience member’s feelings. Once we experience those feelings, the event is complete.⁶⁴ At that point the audience members’ own feelings are the event, and more important than the suffering of the character. We feel good about feeling bad.

F. Pathos: Development and Critique of Empathy

Certainly events, victims, perpetrators, and relationships of individuals to each other and to power structures, provide common subjects for theatre, and many believe empathy remains an important objective of theatrical practice. As Aristotle wrote, pity and fear result from the representation. In her work on documentary theatre, Brenda Werth argues that “[t]heater is a singularly compelling form, capable of bringing together audiences in a live public forum to witness the embodied actions of performers, while producing a complex and compelling set of identificatory processes and empathetic responses to the presentation of human rights abuses.”⁶⁵ The question is—what sort of empathy?

In Empathy and Dialogue in Theatre and Performance, Lindsay Cummings lays out compelling arguments that critique generalized assumptions regarding theatre as an engine for the construction of empathy.⁶⁶ Cummings argues that empathy operates best as dialogue between artist and audience. In most narrative or realistic theatre intending to generate empathy for represented suffering, aesthetic empathy operates in one direction only, that is from the “spectator to aesthetic object” or, in our case, from the audience to the stage.⁶⁷ This single, directional empathy also occurs in forms of public discourse in human rights, social services, and other international interventions including nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and humanitarianism, and even some types of ill-practiced ethnography.

Some of the problems arising from single directional or non-dialogic empathy discussed by Cummings include:

1. 1. We may only empathize with the familiar. We are more inclined to empathize with people we find attractive and “those who look like us or share our ethnic or national background.”⁶⁸ This may actually encourage tribalized alignments rather than openness to experience another that seems strange or unfamiliar. When engaged in dialectic theatre, these tendencies could affect how well observers engage with the larger subjects.

2. 2. Non-dialogic empathy often results in misguided projections of our own feelings or, produces a skewed interpretation of another’s individual story to serve our own needs. “Empathy is the idea that the vital properties which we experience in or attribute to any person or object outside ourselves are the projections of our own feelings and thoughts.” This constitutes a misattribution that may alter the experience we witness, reinterpreting it to fit our own needs sometimes as a confirmation bias.⁶⁹

3. 3. Attempts at identification actually lessens importance and uniqueness of experience and dilutes or redefines it through oversimplifications that can actually do harm if coopted or explained to others.⁷⁰

4. 4. Non-dialogic empathy can be intrusive.⁷¹

5. 5. In nondialogic empathy, the empathizer seeks similarities and common ground, determining what values and experiences merit the appellation “human.” If the previous dynamics operate against the subject, the product may only confirm our views of the other as inhumane.⁷²

To prevent these problems Cummings articulates that “dialogic empathy”⁷³ constantly evolves based on exchange, like the theatre itself, between observer and subject. Dialogic empathy never arrives as an endpoint of understanding, or actual complete identification, but changes over time, to allow individuals to consider multiple points of view. “The dynamic give and take that I have attributed to theatre does not, in itself, guarantee respectful, dialogic empathy. To achieve this, we have to attend to our own motives and desires, as well as to directly experience how our engagement is received.”⁷⁴ “Dialogue is emergent (rather than preformed), fluid (rather than static), keenly dependent on process (at least as much as content), performative (rather than representational), and never fully finished (rather than completed).”⁷⁵ This critique echoes Madison who regularly argues that our subject position in research requires thorough examination of our own “biases, vulnerabilities and blind spots.”⁷⁶ Applying self-examination to the question of empathy in the theatre begs the question as to whether the presentation of suffering actually causes an audience to examine their own positions or simply confirms them.

Richard A. Wilson and Richard D. Brown similarly review the limits of empathy in the connections between humanitarianism and human rights. While demonstrating the historical relationships between narratives of suffering from documented or literary sources and mobilization of public opinion and social actions, they also summarize more realist perspectives on the limitations of sympathy and pity to galvanize human rights at the political level. They point toward Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution, where she expressed serious misgivings regarding the relationship of pity and sympathy in the advancement of human rights. “For Arendt, facing up to reality means looking at tragedy without looking through the prism of victims’ narratives of suffering.”⁷⁷ In addition, as we saw in Greek drama, focusing on the suffering of one individual or a group may well be motivation for another to seek revenge or tribalized retrenchments. We do not necessarily know what the results will be when placing narratives of suffering into a politically charged landscape. Recalling Madison and AlRaee’s exhortations toward self-analysis and clarity about who we are in our own story, rendering another’s suffering to an audience with limited capacity to grasp their own biases may actually aggravate tensions rather than alleviate them.

When engaging with students in the study of theatre where violence takes place, especially when individuals perpetrate violence in rebellion or resisting oppression, students naturally gravitate toward their desire to decide if the violence is justified and determine that judgement largely on whether they empathize with the perpetrator from the student’s point of view. I point out that empathy cannot work only by asking ourselves to identify with the emotional life of the person involved, but, invoking Nussbaum, we must ask: “[w]hat would have to happen to us, to motivate similar acts?”⁷⁸ What if anything could damage our own sense of good character? These questions do not attempt to justify violence but appeal for a full interrogation of ourselves in a situation where our own capacity for compassion might be severely damaged or even destroyed.

Dramatic form and structure in performance, as with forms of critical ethnography, allow for a deep contextualization of the relationships between suffering, human rights violations, violence, and conflict. Proto-performance structures such as organized talkbacks or other interactions,⁷⁹ play an essential role in whether dialogic empathy takes place, and whether or not the play operates as complex dialectics, as in Death and the Maiden. Often the two concepts go hand in hand. Narrative and realist forms such as those based in Stanislavski methods naturally limit dialogic empathy due to the same internal structures discussed earlier, including social expectations that encourage plausibility and causality in dramatic structure. The task for theatre artists when engaging with human rights as a form of artistic analysis may be to create a disruption rather than a consistent narrative. Disruption, or even disorientation, causes the audience to reexamine what they witness, or believe to be true, both within the theatre and outside on the streets.

V. THEATRE AS DISRUPTION: BERTOLT BRECHT

By contrast to theatre as narrative representations of either suffering or ideas, practitioners utilizing Epic Theatre forms developed by Bertolt Brecht, or any other applied theatre methods assert somewhat different claims. Such practitioners focus on engaged relationships between theatre activity and communities, particularly while employing forms utilizing staged interventions, interruptions, and participatory theatre connected to social action. Applied theatre and the research, partly inspired by Brecht, provides examples of social and political intercession.

In his development of Epic Theatre, Bertolt Brecht, calls for dialectic approaches that include the actor’s perception of the character.⁸⁰ The form and structure also integrate purposeful interruptions to pause or restrain our natural inclinations for affect, or empathy as Brecht understood it, to create an alternating rhythm of engagement and estrangement. In many cases these experiments include metatextual elements, including what I call inappropriate behaviors, attached to contrasting content that contradict or comment on the material at hand. Think, for example, someone singing a lullaby, gently moving side to side in a summer dress and a beautiful hat, and handling a knife, while the text concerns itself with revolutionary rhetoric and the guillotine during the French revolution. Such a scene appears in the play, The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade by Peter Weiss, originally directed by Peter Brook.⁸¹ The juxtaposition forces us to reconsider the character and the subject. Another structural element employed by Brecht and others, including Frank Galati, includes a narrator who interrupts the action with commentary, forcing an additional dialectic and encouraging the audience to engage with multiple realities; that is, the narrative content of the play and the production’s meta-awareness that it is a play. This method acknowledges there is no realistic illusion associated with this type of theatre. As Peter Brook opines, Hamlet, for example, does not take place in Denmark. Theatre always takes place in front of us—right now.⁸² Other examples of the narrator device can be seen in the plays of Peter Shaffer, including Royal Hunt of the Sun, about the destruction of the Incan Empire, and Equus, where the main character, a psychiatrist, speaks directly to the audience regarding a teenage patient who, in a psychotic episode, blinds a group of horses.⁸³

These devices provide a form of alienation—or as Brecht termed it, the Verfremdungseffekt—partly inspired by the concept of alienation offered by Hannah Arendt and Karl Marx.⁸⁴ The purpose of these devices, in addition to providing a pause or interruption to produce thought, also provides a means to challenge our assumptions regarding the given circumstances as necessary, plausible, or inevitably causal. The presentation of a personage or object we consider familiar in an unfamiliar or radically conflicting form, challenges our perceptions and biases about the original object. When examining specific plays by Harold Pinter, as with Mountain Language for instance, we experience a stage reality geographically unspecified and unconnected to any empirical rendering of the world.⁸⁵ The play doesn’t represent anything—it exists in its own form—but nevertheless exudes deeply political resonance.

In Mountain Language, characters sit in waiting rooms as interrogations take place and a mountain language is alternately disallowed and allowed without specific political conflicts named. The play offers no back story or description of relationships, nor does the text offer traditional exposition, or other structural elements normally associated with western drama, such as a clear climax and resolution. Echoing the existential void as seen in the plays of Samuel Becket, Pinter nevertheless creates a space where psychological violence permeates a deeply ambiguous nonreality. We receive the play somatically without a means to rationally explain what happens. The content of the play, interactions between guards and those we presume to be family members, points to abuse perpetrated in any number of countries, totalitarian or democratic, and forces the audience to experience an unnamed disorientation and unease to be contemplated. Under this kind of theatrical spell, no room exists for political, security based, or nationalistic justifications. We are forced up against ourselves and the complicity we sense, even if we cannot immediately name it.

VI. THEATRE AS HUMAN RIGHTS RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

This study developed in part to clarify how applied theatre research contributes methodology for human rights research in the field.

A few years ago, a university in the United States approached me to cooperate on a reconciliation project in collaboration with the University of Haifa to extend a program operating on the north coast and areas around Jerusalem into the occupied territory of the West Bank. The project created opportunities between Arab Israelis and Jewish Israelis to cooperate in various activities including sport and cooking, attempting to offer space for reconciliation between these two often violently conflicted groups. The program leaders invited me to join the project due to my extended time working with arts and cultural organizations in the West Bank and wanted me to suggest partners to extend the programming across the so-called green line.⁸⁶ After considering their proposal flawed, I declined and discouraged them from pursuing the project further. While international NGOs operate reconciliation programs in post conflict areas, such as UN programs in the Congo and Rwanda, their success depends on whether participants view themselves as actually living in post conflict, as opposed to continuing conflict. In effect, the program design was jumping the gun. While some Palestinians living in Israel view their particular issues as civil rights related problems of an ethnic minority within a functioning state, West Bank Palestinians generally view their conflict with Israel as ongoing. I communicated to the group that no cultural, political, or civil society programs in the West Bank would cooperate with the program because they would consider it normalization, or essentially a performative process of normalizing the occupation. The project would fail, or worse, might place West Bank individuals and groups at risk as the boycott of Israel remains a fundamental tactic in resisting the military occupation they live under. To this point, I argue that artists provide unique perspectives to illuminate which human rights questions should appropriately rise to our attention in post conflict, and how those questions affect and are perceived by individuals and larger groups. Reconciliation and cohabitation may be an interest to Palestinians living in Haifa, Acre, or the Galilee, but are rarely of interest to Palestinians in the West Bank.

A. Applied Theatre Research Methods

Published research in applied theatre, or participatory theatre for community development appeals to theatre practitioners as methodological approaches outside of, or parallel to, normative theatre practice as an artform. For example, the comprehensive study, Performance in Place of War, charts how various types of applied theatre function across different landscapes of conflict.⁸⁷ Applied theatre researchers, including James Thompson, collected data on the types of performance that generate from local communities in various stages of conflict, often considering them relative to various systems of measurement. These systems include categorizing performance as acts of resistance, rehumanization, or reconciliation; analysis of cultural products across three separate cartesian axes of orientation and analysis including Time and Space, Memory and Forgetting, and Peace and Reconciliation;⁸⁸ and the use of applied theatre to intervene and address individual and collective Post Trauma Stress Disorder (PTSD) that often produces continuing violence.

In returning to Death and the Maiden, the play takes place fifteen years after Paulina’s internment, rape, and torture. With her husband Gerardo, they moved to the coast away from the capital. So, if we plot the play within an x/y axis, of time and space, with the 0—0 point being in the space of war at the time of war, we can see that the play’s events are removed substantially by time from the most violent period in their lives, and at least nominally removed in space. Nevertheless, Paulina remains on edge, unable to connect emotionally or physically with her husband, and extremely anxious when the car of Roberto Miranda arrives in late evening. As a corollary, this process of analysis reflects that public events or theatre productions employed to encourage reconciliation likely occur removed by time from the central events of violent conflict, if not also by space. Likewise, we can anticipate that in some cases, diaspora populations removed by space might remain virulent regarding long settled conflicts such as the Cuban population of South Florida, even if those directly connected to historical conflicts have moved on. The lack of resolution, admission, and acceptance of responsibility on the part of perpetrators leaves individual and collective effects of PTSD that remain unresolved over time. One can witness the effects of this dynamic in the streets of the Old City in Jerusalem where throughout the Armenian Quarter, maps of Turkey cover many of the stone walls marked with indications of genocidal massacres or the destruction of villages. Remembering is essential in the pursuit of accountability.

With Paulina, especially when we consider her state of mind and the likely remaining effects of PTSD, two observations come to mind. First, the refusal of the State to acknowledge her experience for the sake of national reconciliation triggers an already pronounced sense of dread when anticipating the future. Second, using the analysis from above we likely have misplaced her on the axis of time and space. While her husband Gerardo and Roberto Miranda desire to move on, removed as they are in time, she cannot. We can easily see the effects of PTSD and observe, as with other examples of unresolved trauma, time does not heal. But more importantly, it doesn’t matter where they go—to the coast or abroad—because she can never be removed in space. The space of her experience is not the city or the prison or even the country. The conflict zone is her body and she can never leave. If the time/space axis is superimposed on one constructed relative to justice and reconciliation, we see the relationship between the latter in even more clearly conflicted and tragic terms.

Applied theatre, mediation studies, ethnography, and intercultural field study demonstrate how local social structures and various forms of performance reveal how human rights are perceived. In some cases, the capacity for public performance of specific material anticipates and predicts what level of rights advocacy might be accomplished politically, or risk further harm. Examples abound where government and international NGO sponsored reconciliation projects failed because the target population saw themselves at ground zero of a continuing conflict rather than in post conflict. Some of these projects similar to the one mentioned may have exacerbated circumstances leading to further violence.⁸⁹

VII. SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION

A. Structural Intersections of Theatre and Human Rights

Theatre performance and drama humanizes political questions by revealing their complexity within the intimate details of human experience and relationships. These relationships occur between characters, and between characters and powerful social and political systems. The coldness of political discourse melts when confronted with the flesh and blood embodiment of that same discourse within the material reality of the stage. Employing theatre as an inductive experiment, I emphasize dialectic structures in theatre in form and content as public political culture to initiate debate regarding community or national problems. Theater research provides a methodology to discover how various communities or groups view human rights questions and may anticipate potential political solutions, risks, or liabilities. The types of theatre and public events taking place indicate how the local populations view themselves within various stages of conflict.

Through experiments in theatre structure and form, and the deemphasis on realist, direct representations, nonrealist, or radical theatre structures operate as metaphors for social change with actors often functioning as both artists and activists simultaneously. Theatre mediates between entities with conflicting claims to challenge our notions of the familiar or to introduce us to the unfamiliar.

Protest theatre forms oriented toward political action offer tactics for active resistance, rebellion, through intentionally disruptive events and does so effectively when developed through participatory theatre structures and critical ethnography. Through participatory methods, theatre democratizes public discourse, allows public space for the rehumanization of victims and oppressed groups, and provides a process for psychological renewal, community development, and local social action. Particularly through verbatim theatre forms, theatre provides a means to offer testimony of events as a commemorative or memorial act, as a public evidentiary process, or as an alternate narrative to state sponsored or otherwise so-called official reports of events.

B. Conclusion

As this project attempts to define connective tissue between the distinct fields of theatre and human rights, preliminary conclusions point toward three material goals to guide scholars and artists, and invites consideration of the following applications of creative practice and research methods:

1. 1. To invite human rights scholars and activists to incorporate performance, applied and participatory theatre as a methodology in their research and practice. This could result in the inclusion of applied and participatory theatre into human rights curriculum and research. The inclusion of these methods in human rights studies parallels the use of ethnography which, as seen with Soyini Madison, allows research to find expression in performance with a local, regional, and international scope.

2. 2. To encourage theatre scholars to more consistently incorporate critical ethnographic approaches and participatory observation with human rights theory into field work to expand our ability to articulate the intersection of theatre and human rights.⁹⁰

3. 3. To encourage Theatre artists to interrogate more deeply issues of representation, the desire to create empathy versus the ability to build political agency and consider more carefully the commodification of suffering. To reconsider theatre and performance as representations of suffering and the ethics of representing violence in performance.

Theatre is a not a representational practice. It is an artform, and while nonempirical, offers truths to consider that affect us through somatic, psychological, and rational means. Incorporating an aesthetic of human rights that emphasizes nonrepresentative performance built on dialectic structures engages dialogic empathy rather than one-way empathy between observer and artistic object. Through proto-performance elements, the questions raised through theatre also engage audiences and community in dialogue on the nature of the experience and the issues at hand.

To establish the study of drama and theatre as a method of inquiry in conducting human rights research, and to elevate theatre and the arts more broadly as a subdiscipline of human rights scholarship, I argue that a human rights theatre exists primarily as a provocative public act. Examination of theatrical performance offers an important opportunity to grasp how individuals and communities experience and internalize conflict that also manifests in various forms of political activity. By looking carefully at performance practice in regions of conflict, social scientists, NGOs, human rights and theatre scholars, and activists may see more clearly how to determine which human rights questions resonate, within individuals, communities, and national or ethnic identities in conflict. Hopefully this project will appeal to scholars, field practitioners, and theatre artists to assist in generating programs and projects on behalf of various stages of community development, identity construction, support for victims, public discourse, and influence public policy that reflects the complexity of human experience.