Performing Emergency:
Witnessing, Popular Theatre, and The Lie of the Literal

Julie Salverson

Since the early eighties, I have worked as a playwright, theatre animator, and arts educator. Much of my work is in community-based popular theatre, and involves creating theatrical events through acts of storytelling in which some or all of the performers are members of the target communities. Though popular theatre as a named genre has only emerged in Canada during the past fifteen years, it has achieved a large degree of acceptability and wide public interest. Recently I have noticed that, together with the tremendous vitality, engagement, and indisputable learning generated by popular theatre projects, there are nevertheless certain uncomfortable elements that seem to repeat themselves. These include:

a similarity in the political analyses generated by the projects that often present a triad of victims, villains, and heroes;

confusion and hurt feelings expressed by a small but significant number of participants during or after projects, which indicate that telling stories is not always an empowering experience;

conflict among popular theatre artists/educators ourselves about the intersecting roles of art and politics, conflicts that too often result in failed communication rather than productive dialogue.

Observing these patterns has led me to question how much I understand of what is involved in the act of listening to and telling "risky stories" (Simon & Armitage-Simon), by which I mean stories that include and embody acts of violence. In this essay I will discuss difficulties that arose on a project involving refugees in Toronto. The broader context of the article is my concern with what in Canada is an enthusiastic but perhaps not always carefully considered use of personal narratives in classrooms and community organizations. I will address the significance of form and structure to storytelling and to popular theatre's potential for advocacy, healing, or harm, and consider how the power of images may provide "containment" and an environment where difficult histories might be witnessed.

As artists and educators, we must continually ask ourselves: in what context are risky stories being told? Within what frameworks did they originate? [End Page 181] And what is the cost to the speaker? Taking responsibility should extend beyond an ongoing inventory of who we are as individuals to an understanding that there are stakes for those with whom we work--stakes that exist, but are never more than partially knowable. Thoughtlessly soliciting autobiography may reproduce a form of cultural colonialism that is at the very least voyeuristic. This is particularly true when the voice of the artist or educator herself goes unexamined; or, when the choices students or project participants make for speech are privileged over choices made for silence, neglecting the highly complex negotiations that are involved in the politics of knowing and being known. ¹

In "Beyond Psychoanalysis," Ora Avni describes a character in the Elie Wiesel story "Night." Moshe the Beadle has been taken from his home by the Nazis, survived the murder of his convoy of foreign Jews, and returns to warn the others. But those to whom he returns do not, and more importantly, cannot believe him. Accepting his story would disrupt the very foundations of what they understand to be human. This story illustrates the ancient dilemma of the messenger and the audience. According to Avni, Moshe's return to town is an attempt to reaffirm ties with the human community of his past, whose integrity was put into question by the incomprehensibility of what he had witnessed. Avni is very clear about why it is essential that this messenger speak, not privately to a friend, but publicly to the community network to which he seeks readmission:

Only by having a community integrate his dehumanizing experience into the narratives of self-representation that it shares and infer a new code of behavior based on the information he is imparting, only by becoming part of this community's history can Moshe hope to reclaim his lost humanity. (212)

The enormity of such a re-imagining of identity implies the cost to both the messenger or storyteller and the listener, something at stake "that defies storytelling, 'lifting to consciousness,' or literalized metaphors" (213). To bring this man and his story into the story line of their history compels the listeners to radically uproot who they understand themselves to be, and, with the question of how they will respond, introduces a fundamental challenge to what they intend to become.

Avni's article speaks to the ways in which personal narratives of crisis are never merely personal:

Yes, we want to "heal." Society wants to heal; history wants to heal. But no, a simple "life goes on," "tell your story," "come to terms with your pain," or "sort out your ghosts" will not do. It will not do, because the problem lies not in the individual--survivor or not--but in his or her [End Page 182] interaction with society, and more precisely, in his or her relationship to the narratives and values by which this community defines and represents itself. (216)

In other words, we need to take seriously what it means to speak and listen to difficult histories. In Avni's explanation of the Wiesel story, the townspeople would rather risk their lives than unpin their cognitive framework; each party must be understood as existing on opposite ends of a transaction where Moshe's need to re-enter the shared narratives of his community conflicts with their need to maintain the integrity of that community (211-215). When I consider this in light of the questions raised earlier about the difficulties of popular theatre, it becomes clear that neither speaking nor listening is easy; it is not surprising that history repeatedly shoots the messenger. An environment in which witnessing is possible takes seriously what Walter Benjamin called the "permanent emergency" in which we live (257). ² How can educators, artists, or community workers take these issues into consideration?

Popular theatre is a public and distinctly pedagogical enterprise, with its aims historically rooted in the efforts of poor and marginalized people throughout the world to stage and realize alternatives to their current lives. When popular theatre artists and members of a community negotiate how the telling of their stories will occur, both parties are attempting to set up conditions of reception that will urge and allow the participants and the eventual audience to be affected and changed by what they hear. A climate of witnessing thus involves not only listening to someone's story, but allowing our attitudes and behaviors to be changed by it.

During the initial stages of naming assumptions and setting goals on a project, we have the opportunity to ask questions significant to establishing an orientation from which participants and audience members might take what they hear personally. I draw here upon Simon's use of the phrase "to take personally," wherein events that "explicitly function to renew a reconstructed living memory" (l2) enable a transformation of the listener's understanding of her or himself not just as an individual but as a member of a community. Questions that establish such an orientation might include:

What are the primary narratives understood by our intended audience as their histories (collective, individual, intersecting) and in what way is our project an attempt to insert counter-narratives into those histories?

What do we expect from ourselves and our audiences in the way of initial resistant responses, and how can we prepare to engage them in what will perhaps be a conflicted listening?

How might the existence of trauma in the listeners relate to and affect the reception of traumatic narratives? [End Page 183]

How can we provide an environment within which the stories told can be heard by the listeners so as to reconfigure their sense of who they are in relation to the speaker and the event--a reconfiguration that causes them to take up a stance of obligation in relation to this event as they recognize and meet it in the world?

These questions help avoid one of the dangers in the transmission of stories: the lie of the literal. A common concern among popular and community theatre workers is to be faithful to the integrity of the storyteller--not to interfere with her words, to make her the final arbiter of what gets shown or said. This idealization of "authenticity" often happens at the expense of aesthetics or theatrical form, which may be considered as distortions, or as impositions of the artist's "high" culture. Yet this overemphasis upon a single, authentic story does not allow for sufficient complexity, nuance, and multiple points of entry. Such a story may remain either outside the experience of the listener, as the exotic and impenetrable but vicariously viewed "other"; or, it will be collapsed and assimilated by the listener as "just like me."

I am proposing an alternative approach to popular theatre practices (particularly in respect to how such practices employ and represent personal narratives) that speaks of "story" not as a fixed, knowable, finite thing, but as an open one that changes and carries with it the possibility of reformings and retellings. "Risky stories," stories of emergency and violation, need to be constructed in such a way that the subtleties of damage, hope, and the "not nameable" can be performed. ³ I am not suggesting a theatre that privileges the aesthetic over the material, the "look" of a theatre piece or story over the urgency of its conveyed meaning. I am instead suggesting that if the overly symbolic or abstract is evasive, the overly literal is a lie. Both approaches require attention to the "form" through which the emergency is spoken. I consider form as the structure of both a) the practice of speaking/listening/translating stories in popular theatre workshops and b) the created play or event through which an audience engages those stories. Within this form, which can be usefully conceptualized as a "container," a space or "gap" must exist. It is this gap that holds the circle of knowing open and invites a current that prevents steering a straight line through the story, or arriving at a predetermined destination. What might the notion of containment and gap look like in a popular theatre project, particularly when for at least one participant the container did not hold?

In l993 I was approached by an organization in Toronto to do a play about refugees, Are the Birds in Canada the Same? ⁴ I agreed to do the project and wanted to hire people who were both refugees and actors or artists. Eventually a theatre director, a refugee advocate, and I (the playwright/producer) began a five-week period with a group of people, one of whom I'll call "Tom." Tom had worked in his country of origin as an artist but not as an actor. The group spent [End Page 184] the first day talking. On the second day, we began to speak to each other in physical images. Although the director and I deliberately asked only general questions, Tom began to tell us, with no preamble whatsoever, about his experience of torture. What I remember most about that day was the silence in the room, the shock on everyone's face, and the complete ordinariness (something I now realize is common to retellings of torture) in the way he told the story. I now consider this what Walter Benjamin refers to as a "moment of danger," (255) one I registered but did not think through. ⁵ For Tom at that moment--two days into a project with strangers--there was not yet the possibility of a witness.

The group continued to work together for several weeks, after which I went away and, in a sense, wrote another story. The play I wrote took elements of what had happened to the participants and re-presented them, reshaped them, and put them into a form that they could first read, then re-enter as performers, and finally experience an audience receiving. That the audience was predominantly comprised of refugees was key, I believe, to the element of public ritual and mediation or healing in the performance. The response to each presentation was very positive, profoundly so on the part of refugees. Tom seemed extremely happy throughout the weeks we worked, but I worried about what would happen when the project was over. Unlike the others who had jobs and families, Tom was alone and had no other work. Within a matter of days after the end of our project, Tom began telling people how awful the experience had been. He refused to see any of us for weeks; when I finally met with him, he told me of the nightmares he experienced during the entire project. Tom had been settled in Canada many years, so this could not be explained away as the salting of fresh wounds.

Tom's story brought me face to face with the persistence of trauma memory. ⁶ I now think he told his story in a space structured to invite his pain but unable to contain it adequately, a space of relationship that did not permit the sharing of knowledge, which goes beyond mere information, knowledge the leaders of the project were not, in any case, prepared to understand. We were ready to hear stories about torture. We were not ready to hear what it would mean for Tom to remember and speak them. The container, in other words, was suggested but not fully built; the gap was a gaping hole.

The concept of container and gap that I apply to the building of an environment within which to witness stories builds upon images and ideas I borrow from alchemy, psychoanalysis and shamanic healing practices. The word for container comes from the Greek temenos, meaning a sacred space and time specially prepared and set apart in order to reconnect with ancient energies. It is a term often used to describe environments built in therapy, where members of a group act as each other's witnesses, and the exchange of stories happens [End Page 185] within a ritual space. When a ritualized act is public, as I suggest it is in popular theatre, its public nature is dependent upon the shared narratives of the communities that practice it, and the histories and beliefs that allow the recognition of common images and responses to those images. People's responses to ritual "are likely to be at several levels: physical, affective, cognitive, imaginative and metaphysical" (95). According to Jungian therapist and writer Marion Woodman:

In every creation myth a Divine Being creates a cosmos imaged as a container and a contained. Every culture moves toward the complete adjustment of the contained to its container. Culture assumes that we dwell within a universe that is our home. The loss of this home, for whatever reason, is the origin of neuroses: the contained has lost its container. ( l57)

If the notion of container relates as strongly to culture and home as Woodman's description of the creation myth suggests, then aren't containers also potentially totalizing structures that readjust the "containeds" to meet social norms? ⁷ Certainly a "container," whether popular theatre process or story, can become a straitjacket, a set of norms imposed by a leader, rigorously followed by group members, and, tragically for some, masquerading as homes in the form of cults, rigid ideologies, or in Foucault's words, "regimes of truth." To be vigilant against this danger does not mean we must stop doing our work or telling our stories. The question mark, the gap, the possibility of being wrong--these are essential to the integrity of what remains to be seen and said about each participant, each listener, and each story. The gap ensures that there is always something more to say.

My concept of the gap as a structured space for calling up what is unmarked, or for holding in mind "the lie of the literal," gains substance from Michael Taussig's description of the lack of realism in magically effective mimetic images. Taussig gives the example of dolls and drawings used in healing that display little likeness to the people they are meant to heal or bewitch (51), suggesting to me that a too perfect likeness might be like a too literal representation, or a too tight container. In other words, what might appear to an outsider as a bad copy is really a structure that contains both connection and space. Such a space offers room for the listener to enter, and for the unmarked, or Other, or dissenter, to remain. The gap is for me the pivotal element of the container. If it is too large it will destroy the structure, and there will be no connection between listeners and storytellers. Perhaps there will even be no connection between the storytellers and their own stories. If the gap is too small or nonexistent, there is no room for the Other, no space across which the familiar and the strange can gaze upon each other. Within such a balancing act of negotiations, it is not surprising to feel off balance.

Very particular suggestions of containment were structured into Are the Birds in Canada the Same? that, I now realize, created for Tom a place with the [End Page 186] possibility of testifying and being witnessed. These elements include the multidimensional and corporeal aspect of the theatre work, the heightened ritualistic power of the performance space, and the presence of significant listening others. The backlash experience afterwards happened in part because we--and I mean here the leadership team--did not realize that we had created such a container, were not aware of the extent of the bargain being made, and so did not adequately stay in touch or "in-tension" with the participant through the experience. We could not hold the impact of this collision of personal narratives together with our desire to listen. The result for Tom, as he revealed to me later, was a sense of having been used and discarded. The cause was not our reluctance, but our actual inability to "stand to hear" him (Herman l38), to hold ground and accompany him through a process we had initiated but did not ourselves fully understand or recognize.

The final critical element in the story of Tom concerns the way he "acted" in the play about refugees. Tom, who was not an actor, spoke lines he had created and told stories he had lived. My mistake as a playwright was not writing for Tom a character sufficiently new and different from "Tom"--one that would allow him to step into a character who was not himself. By acting his own story, the theatre project prevented him from taking the step psychoanalyst Dori Laub describes as the re-externalization of the event. Laub says this reconstructing of history can take place "only when one can articulate and transmit the story, literally transfer it to another outside oneself and then take it back again, inside" (Felman & Laub 69). Taussig describes how Navajo sand paintings are said to help people not through their looking at the pictures, "but by their placing their body in the design itself" (57). Our project gave Tom no design to step into.

In a similar vein, Sue Jennings explains her choice to use theatre in her therapeutic practice because its main process "is that of dramatic or aesthetic distance, which paradoxically allows us to experience reality at a deeper level" (22). The language of theatre can produce the quality of "double seeing" that permits the state Augusto Boal calls metaxis: "the state of belonging completely and simultaneously to two different, autonomous worlds: the image of reality and the reality of the image . . . In order for metaxis to come about, the image must become autonomous. When this is the case, the image of the real is real as image" (43-44, italics in original). When an image is created to work with, it forms a kind of container, allowing the theatre space itself to hold contradictory material without insisting upon its resolution. If successful, such an image permits the "self-othering" to which Laub refers, allowing the speaker to see trauma as "outside herself."

I have referred to the moment when Tom first told the story of his torture as, in Benjamin's sense, "a moment of danger" (255). Perhaps that moment was an opportunity none of us were able to take up. How could we together have [End Page 187] grappled with and entered the images that were "flashing up"? What is at stake is a notion of the power of the image to provide a containment of its own.

Theatre is a powerful and popular vehicle through which people can speak their stories, have fun, and learn to work with others. However, if the importance of moving personal stories to "form" is not understood, or the leader insufficiently experienced in creating the forms of such a theatre, then participants can be subject to what Luce Irigaray calls "the danger of unmediated relations becoming a source of pathology" (77). In such cases, as in the story of Tom as I am relating it, there is no external image for the participants to step into, and they are caught recycling a story they may wish they had never remembered. Ideally, popular theatre can act as an object of symbolic exchange; histories and memories can be translated, heard, and, if not made sense of, at least taken into a narrative shared within some kind of community.

Acts of witnessing may be possible through a theatre that sets out to pose questions and not to provide answers, and/or one that employs fantasy, epic theatre, ritualistic celebrations, parable and the many forms that "rescue theatre from its human, psychological prostration" (110). Such a theatre may provide a larger-than-life drama that is also a container, one that "keeps the person's identity intact, but also give[s] a form for them to interact with" (110). Through such aesthetic forms, the story and the act of the trauma are marked in such a way as to be visible and yet, at the same time, not utterly pinned down. The form then speaks of trauma, but remains open to possibilities of resistance, to different ways both trauma and agency are and can be known. Risky stories in popular theatre must be able to be told in public spaces and understood as events situated within history, remembering that the artists who solicit and shape such stories need to listen not only for damage, but also for hope and resistance. We should attend to Laura S. Brown's caution against defining trauma in terms that "create a social discourse on 'normal life' that then imputes psychopathology to the everyday" (l03). Such a project challenges me as popular theatre artist to consider my own relationship to trauma and the stories with which I engage. In order to be able to hear resistance, possibility, and examples of hope in action, I have to be able, at the very least, to imagine them myself.

The forms of popular theatre I like to "imagine" carry the dangerous task of facing both teller and listener with the terrible literality of the emergency that demands to be named and known, while including the unanswerability of truth, through whose elusive nature the guilty too often remain free. This theatre demands the recognition of inevitable separateness and absence, while holding central what can be named and judged. Such a theatre proceeds hopefully, with hope understood not as a dream but a choice, attempting "to tell the truth, without being absolutely sure" (Boal 39).

Julie Salverson is a playwright, producer and educator. She is currently in the PhD program at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education in Toronto.

Notes

1. Elisabeth Ellsworth has written about the role of silence, speech, and the interplay of identities as they operate in the classroom in her critique of critical pedagogy in "Why Doesn't This Feel Empowering? Working Through the Repressive Myths of Critical Pedagogy."

2. When I speak of witnessing I am referring to an act through which an incident of violence is understood as significant and is responded to by someone other than the direct victim of that violence, an act ultimately perceivable by the survivor as actual changed conditions in the world around him or her, e.g. the conditions that encourage people to drink and drive become conditions that discourage such behavior. My work with the concept of witnessing is informed by my collaboration on a research project at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education with Claudia Eppert, Christine Louise Hiller, Sharon Rosenberg, Florence Sicoli and Roger I. Simon.

3. There is an evident paradox here: gesturing towards what can't be pinned down, holding open space within structures of naming for what Peggy Phelan calls the unmarked space, an immateriality or the "'hole in the signifier'" which is lost in the "full fling forward into representation" (Phelan 10).

4. Are the Birds in Canada the Same? is a play about the experience of three refugees to Canada, one from Central America, one from the former Yugoslavia and one from Sri Lanka. The development of the play involved some refugees from other locations, and was produced by Flying Blind Theatre Events, with executive producer The Jesuit Centre for Social Faith and Justice in Toronto. The play was developed through a process of improvisation and discussion, directed by Aida Jordao, and written by Julie Salverson from stories by Jorge Barahona, Mima Vulovic, Aida Jordao, Colin MacAdam and others. It was performed in May, l994 for refugees and refugee advocates. A video adaptation of the play was produced in 1995.

5. Writing his Theses on the Philosophy of History in the 1930s, trying to understand the rise of fascism, Benjamin wrote the following: "To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it 'the way it really was' (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. Historical materialism wishes to retain that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to man singled out by history at a moment of danger. The danger affects both the context of the tradition and its receivers. The same threat hangs over both: that of becoming a tool of the ruling classes. In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it."

6. Cathy Caruth has edited a valuable series of essays that explore trauma and memory. She says "for those who undergo trauma, it is not only the moment of the event, but of the passing out of it that is traumatic; . . . survival itself, in other words, can be a crisis" (9).

7. If so, this would mark what Adorno calls the end of the dissenter and a world in which "[t]he Other must go under for the people to become one" (qtd. in Cornell 48-49).

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