Repeating Repetition

Abstract

This article examines the intersections of trauma with performance, paying particular attention to attempts to represent and repeat ‘real’ trauma experience in verbatim theatre. In her pivotal essay, “Performance Remains” (2001), Rebecca Schneider suggests that performance is a “means of reappearance” (2001, 103). The theatrical performance may therefore have a unique ability to both evoke and stage the mediated remains of traumatic memory. Schneider critiques the logic of the western archival practices, which, she argues, institutionalise and privilege the material ‘bones’ or ‘document,’ over the transmission of ‘flesh’ or ‘remains’ of knowledge/experience that occur in performance. I draw on Schneider to interrogate approaches to the representation and treatment of trauma survivor testimony in verbatim theatre, analysing the verbatim productions of Jonathan Holmes’ Katrina: A Play of New Orleans (2010) and Version 1.0's The Disappearances Project (2011-2013). I highlight the markedly different dramaturgical approaches to the treatment of testimony in these works and to the perceived ability of testimony to ‘remain’ through performance. While one production involves an attempt to represent the traumatic event and experience through a conventional linear re-enactment, placing testimony as a ‘document’ and guarantee of ‘real’ past experience, the other production represents a more promising approach, presenting testimony as part of a fractured, yet repetitious, loop of sounds and images that seem to echo the action of the recurring trauma flashback. I conclude that while performance and the trauma symptom may both operate through repetition, some dramaturgical practices work to set testimony as a narrativising ‘document’, while others appear to allow the ‘flesh’ remains of trauma testimony to re-erupt and re-transmit in performance. As such, a deeper examination of the notions of remains and testimony may also give insights into wider issues related to trauma and repersentation.

Notes

¹ See Cathy Caruth for a detailed discussion of trauma as a return of history (1995: 3–12).