Witness Onstage is a detailed study of the remarkable growth of documentary theatre forms in Russian since the early 2000s. It draws on the author’s work as a performer, producer, and researcher of documentary theatre both in Russia and internationally to provide new perspective on the mechanics of theatre as a venue for civic engagement.
The Wound and the Witness offers a historically grounded approach to an urgent contemporary problem: the persistence of torture in Western culture. Drawing upon ancient Greek and Roman texts, as well as contemporary media events, Jennifer R. Ballengee explores the spectacle of torture as a persuasive device. She suggests that both torture and the witnessing of torture are forms of polemical writing, carried out on the body. The analysis combines close reading and philological study with a materialist cultural approach to ancient Greek theater, early Christian accounts of martyrdom, and recent political controversies over the interrogation tactics in the U.S. government-run Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib prisons. By incorporating key classical texts by Sophocles, Achilles Tatius, and Prudentius, the author demonstrates how deeply the ancient literature resonates with contemporary issues of the body, rhetoric, and the spectacle of pain.
The act of bearing witness can reveal much, but what about the figure of the witness itself? As contemporary culture is increasingly dominated by surveillance, the witness--whether artist, historian, scientist, government official, or ordinary citizen--has become empowered in realms from art to politics. In Seeing Witness, Jane Blocker challenges the implicit authority of witnessing through the examination of a series of contemporary artworks, all of which make the act of witnessing visible, open to inspection and critique.
Samuel Beckett and the Theatre of the Witness explores Beckett's representation of physical pain in his theatre plays in the long aftermath of World War II, emphasising how the issues raised by this staging of pain speak directly to matters lying at the heart of his work: the affective power of the human body; the doubtful capacity of language as a means of communication; the aesthetic and ethical functioning of the theatre medium; and the vexed question of intersubjective empathy. Alongside the wartime and post-war plays of fellow Francophone writers Albert Camus, Eugène Ionesco, Pablo Picasso, and Marguerite Duras, this study resituates Beckett's early plays in a new conceptualising of le théâtre du témoin or a 'theatre of the witness'. These are plays concerned with the epistemological and ethical uncertainties of witnessing another's pain, rather than with the sufferer's own direct experience. They raise troubling questions about our capacity to comprehend and respond to another being's pain. Drawing on an interdisciplinary framework of extant criticism, recorded historical audience response, theatre and affect theory, and medical understandings of bodily pain, Hannah Simpson argues that these plays do not offer any easily negotiable encounter with physical suffering, pushing us to recognise the very 'otherness' of another being's pain, even as it invades our own affective sphere. In place of any comforting transcendence or redemption of endured pain, they offer a starkly sceptical, even pessimistic probing of what it is to witness another's suffering.
Demanding Witness argues that we need to reconsider the stories we tell about war's aftermath and its traumatic effects on soldiers and civilians. Many homecoming stories from antiquity to today focus on a "trauma hero" who returns home and overcomes pain and injury. Yet this story excludes many others harmed by war, including noncombatants, and fails to question why soldiers are going to war in the first place. Several Greek tragedies explore the traumatic effects of war on the home. This book shifts the focus to the representation and reception of women's expressions of trauma in these plays to expose the ripple effects of war, even on individuals and communities distant from the fighting.
What should Christian witness look like in our contemporary society? In this timely book, Alan Noble looks at our cultural moment, characterized by technological distraction and the growth of secularism, laying out individual, ecclesial, and cultural practices that disrupt our society's deep-rooted assumptions and point beyond them to the transcendent grace and beauty of Jesus.
The Art of Experience provides an interdisciplinary analysis of selected plays from Ireland’s premier female playwright, Marina Carr. Dagmara Gizło explores the transformative impact of a theatrical experience in which interdisciplinary boundaries must be crossed. This book demonstrates that theatre is therapeutic and therapy is theatrical. The role of emotions, cognitions, and empathy in the theatrical experience is investigated throughout. Dagmara Gizło utilises the methodological tools stemming from modern empirically grounded psychology (such as cognitive-behavioural therapy or CBT) to the study of theatre’s transformative potential. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of theatre, performance, and literature, and will be a fascinating read for those at the intersection of cognitive studies and the humanities.
Theatre of Witness is a model of performance that gives voice to those who have been marginalized, forgotten or unheard in society, creating a safe forum for audiences to bear witness to real-life accounts of suffering and transformation. This book chronicles the author's 26 years of creating and producing theatre with people whose stories have previously gone untold, including prisoners and their families, refugees, survivors and former perpetrators of domestic abuse, ex-combatants and those who have lived through war. With an engaging and heartfelt narrative, it beautifully conveys the key principles of Theatre of Witness and explores the author's own journey that lead to the conception and growth of this unique model of performance. Exploring diverse human experiences in the United States, Poland and Northern Ireland, this book will be of interest to practitioners and students of applied theatre, peace and conflict studies, professionals working in conflict resolution, counselors, psychotherapists, professionals in the field of criminal and restorative justice, dramatherapists, psychodramatists and spiritual seekers.
When a wealthy widow is found murdered, her married lover is accused of the crime. His only hope for acquittal is the testimony of his wife, proving his alibi. However, she has some secrets of her own to reveal.
What is the epistemological value of testimony? What role does language, images, and memory play in its construction? What is the relationship between the person who attests and those who listen? Is bearing witness a concept that is exclusively based in interpersonal relations? Or are there other modes of communicating or mediating to constitute a constellation of testimony? Testimony/Bearing Witness establishes a dialogue between the different approaches to testimony in epistemology, historiography, law, art, media studies and psychiatry. With examples including the Holocaust, the Khmer Rouge Killing Fields and the Armenian genocide the volume discusses the chances and limits of communicating epistemological and ethical, philosophical and cultural-historical, past and present perspectives on the phenomenon and concept of bearing witness.