1st Edition
Theatre Responds to Social Trauma Chasing the Demons
This book is a collection of chapters by playwrights, directors, devisers, scholars, and educators whose praxis involves representing, theorizing, and performing social trauma.
Chapters explore how psychic catastrophes and ruptures are often embedded in social systems of oppression and forged in zones of conflict within and across national borders. Through multiple lenses and diverse approaches, the authors examine the connections between collective trauma, social identity, and personal struggle. We look at the generational transmission of trauma, socially induced pathologies, and societal re-inscriptions of trauma, from mass incarceration to war-induced psychoses, from gendered violence through racist practices. Collective trauma may shape, protect, and preserve group identity, promoting a sense of cohesion and meaning, even as it shakes individuals through pain. Engaging with communities under significant stress through artistic practice offers a path towards reconstructing the meaning(s) of social trauma, making sense of the past, understanding the present, and re-visioning the future.
The chapters combine theoretical and practical work, exploring the conceptual foundations and the artists’ processes as they interrogate the intersections of personal grief and communal mourning, through drama, poetry, and embodied performance.
List of Contributors
Acknowledgements
PART I
Introduction
1. Theatre and Social Trauma: Introduction and Overview
Ellen W. Kaplan
2. The Story Before the Script: Documenting and testifying to trauma histories of incarcerated persons
Julie Kriegler
PART II
Exiles: Loss of Language, Loss of Home
3. Weaving Personal Trauma in Video Opera “THE WArDROBE”: Transdisciplinarity and Womanhood
Nerina Cocchi
4. Lampedusa Beach: A Voice from the Depths of the Sea
Anna Botta
5. Interview with playwright Lina Prosa
Anna Botta and Nerina Cocchi
6. The Theater of Arístides Vargas: Antidote Against Death
María Estela Harretche
7. Bearing Witness to the “Unspeakable”? Poetry writing in the aftermath of the Êzîdî Genocide
Mairead Smith
PART III
Theatre Companies Wrestle with Social Trauma
8. A Serpent’s Tale: The Work of El Teatro Indigena de la Sierra Tarahumara
Gabriel Harrell
9. Witness Theater: The Power of Embodied Storytelling
Sally Grazi-Shatzkes
10. Resistance: Theatre as Protest and Reckoning
Jean-Remy Monnay
11. Life Suspended: Theatre as Social Practice in Afghanistan
Abdul-Hakim Hashemi Hamidi
12. Contemporary Kenyan Theatre as a Response to the Traumas of Colonialism
Aroji Otieno
13. Community as Theatre: Shakespeare Festival in St. Louis and Community Partnerships
Mariah L. Richardson
14. Interviews with Dominic Dupont and Marjolaine Goldsmith of Theater of War
Ellen W. Kaplan
15. Trauma and Morality in Classical Greek Drama: Trauma and Authentic Accountability Before the Christian Era
Len Berkman
PART IV
Processes of Embodiment
16. Interview with Carol Gilligan
Ellen W. Kaplan
17. Interview with Trenda Loftin
Ellen W. Kaplan
18. Pedagogies of Embodied Healing: Devised Theatre and Reciprocal Empathy
Zoe Rose Kriegler-Wenk
PART V
Closing the Gaps: Social Trauma and Text
19. Empathy, Imagination, and Embodiment: Turning Document into Fiction
Alex Poppe
20. Calls to Action: Collaboration across Difference
Catherine Filloux
21. AFTERWORD
Ellen W. Kaplan
Index
Biography
Ellen W. Kaplan is Professor of Acting and Directing at Smith College, a Fulbright Scholar, Fulbright Senior Specialist, an actress, director, and playwright.
