Mimesis and Remembrance

Abstract

This article asks what is the function of theatrical simulation, or mimesis, in the testimonial performance genre? The analysis focuses on a verbatim project by Daedalus Theatre Company, A Place at the Table, an eye-witness exposé of the atrocities of the conflict in Burundi and the civil war in Rwanda, 1993 – 1994. This production was a design-led, overtly theatrical response to the varying documented ‘truths’ about these events, from UN Security Council reports to personal testimony, that positioned the performers as multiple testifying subjects, emerging in a range of performance genres from seemingly realist performance, to abstract embodied simulation of the disputed territories. These performances, a combination of conscious theatrical replaying, testimonial and remembrance, drew heavily on theatrical simulation; a particular testimonial mimesis. To explore how this might function as a part of the testimonial genre, I draw on the theories of mimesis by Roger Caillois and the more positive version thereof by Michael Taussig. Caillois's material mimesis is a dangerous lure between self and space based on the desire not for visual replication or the facsimilie of similarity, but for the act of being similar. Taussig interprets in this temptation a potential for the self to playfully sample the Other, an act of selfing of space which suggests agency in mimesis. My analysis of this in A Place at the Table countenances possibilities in the performance of the intolerable, and offers an example of Ranciere's witness as artist, not victim. Thus I argue for an emancipated understanding of mimesis that asks us to consider the agency of performing the remembered.

Notes

¹ While there is ‘no fixed, reliable or agreed English equivalent’ (Shepherd and Wallis 2004: 212) for the Greek term mimesis, the alternative versions listed here all share one ‘similar’ property, which is that they are plastic. Mimesis, however it is organized, coerced, reclaimed or liberated, remains an aesthetic proposition.

² The production was a developed at Camden People's Theatre (CPT), North London and subsequently toured with performances at Southwark Cathedral, South London and for Amnesty, returning to CPT in 2011. For more information on the production, see: www.apatt.co.uk

³ Charlotte Wilson a Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO) worker in Burundi was robbed and murdered along with twenty or more passengers in 2000. The difficulties in ascertaining the facts of this event and the trauma of uncovering the varying ‘truths’ are documented in Titanic Express (2000) by her brother Richard Wilson, who is also an advisor for A Place at the Table.

⁴ Mimicry is also a category of Caillois' classification of games that form the basis of his ludic theory, the most advanced manifestation of which is acting, a sophisticated version of ‘passing for another’ (Caillois 2001: 21).

⁵ This essay had a notable impact on subsequent theories of self, identity and similarity. Lacan's The Mirror Stage (1949), for example, can be read as a response to this theory of the fusing of self and space in which he acknowledges Caillois' ‘signification of space for a living organism’ (Lacan, cited in Frank 2003: 90).

⁶ Shepherd interprets Caillois' instinct d'abandon as a reflection of ‘the relationships between body and space as constitutive of identity’ (Shepherd 2006: 166) in which the self becomes a part of a ‘represented space’ (Caillois, cited in Shepherd 2006: 167) befitting Shepherd's emphasis on the appearance and perception of ‘the becomings’ (167) of self in drama, which depend on the ‘psychic and social circumstances of those watching the becomings’ (167).

⁷ This was the sequence of declarations as performed at CPT in May 2009, although a note to the script states that although this sequence is in part improvised, it always ends with the repetition of the culminating statements.