In chapter 2, the discussion turns to autoperformance plays, a form of documentary verbatim work in which the performer is the firsthand witness. The chapter highlights how I Once Knew a Girl (2010), by Theatre of Witness in Northern Ireland (2010), and Nirbhaya (India and UK, 2013), by Yael Farber and the ensemble at once show how victims can be empowered to perform their own stories, and also illustrate the risk of empathy as a dramaturgical strategy that commodifies the victim and enables the too-easy consumption of their suffering. These plays further illustrate the value of considering funding streams—public subsidy via grants, online marketing campaigns—demonstrating the tension for producers between creating platforms for marginalized voices and creating prestigious and instrumentalized cultural products.
Chapter 3 develops the analysis of the staging of witnessing, both within and outside institutionalized memory contexts, focusing on three plays based on and around the concept of truth and reconciliation commissions: Ubu and the Truth Commission by Jane Taylor and Handspring Puppet Company (South Africa/UK, 1997), Claudia by La Conquesta del Pol Sud (Spain/Argentina, 2016), and Death and the Maiden by Ariel Dorfman (Chile/UK, 1990). Through these plays, I consider how testimony, as a particular form of cultural capital, becomes a tradeable commodity and the dimension that transnational witnessing adds to the market. Chapter 4 shifts the focus to modes of witnessing, to consider active listening as a way that audiences can engage in witnessing as a performance of immaterial labor. Discussions of Twilight—Los Angeles, 1992 (US, 1994) by Anna Deavere Smith, Come Out Eli (UK, 2003) by Alecky Blythe, Annulla (An Autobiography) (US, 1985) by Emily Mann, and Krapp’s Last Tape (Ireland/France, 1958), Footfalls (Ireland/France, 1976), and Come and Go (Ireland/France, 1965) all by Samuel Beckett, ultimately suggest how dramaturgical strategies around listening may resist the commodification of the firsthand witness.
Taking theatre out of the auditorium in chapter 5’s consideration of site-specific theatre allows us to look at other forms of resistance—and the full role of the audience as “prosumer” and collaborator in the construction of meaning. This chapter focuses on Proximity Mouth (Ireland, 2015) by Dominic Thorpe, the work of Dublin-based company ANU Productions (in particular their Monto cycle, Ireland, 2010–14), and audio performance walks Quartered: A Love Story (N. Ireland, 2016) by Kabosh Theatre Company; Echoing Yafa (Palestine/Israel, 2014) by Miriam Schickler; and And While London Burns (UK, 2007) by Platform. Each of these productions requires the audience to step out of the comfortable role of passive consumer and suggests the role of space and movement in the creation of mnemonic capital.
Finally, the conclusion considers the #MeToo movement as a new form of collective memory performance, and analyzes how in Ireland, feminist theatre movements such as “Waking the Feminists” and “Speak Up and Call It Out” show the activist power of mobilizing mnemonic capital in progressive ways, staging painful pasts for political ends rather than consumer empathy. This chapter responds to many of the ethical questions raised in the book about the consumption of others’ pain, asking us to notice how collective movements often require enormous labor from individuals, and finally considering how to balance the need to address inequalities in power and capital with the need to withdraw at times from the marketplace in order to preserve a sense of self.
Throughout the book, my analysis focuses on how producers exploit scripted and production strategies in the hope of directing audience attention to painful memory in particular ways, thereby shaping their behavior as both consumers and witnesses. I consider how audiences may have multivalent reactions and what the possibilities are for the citizen consumer to act in transgressive ways to become audience-witnesses and perhaps even activists. Witnessing memory of painful pasts is, in this iteration, not just a performance, but a performance of responsibility that occurs within, and draws attention to, the power strata of the marketplace.
NOTES
1. Carmen-Francesca Banciu and La Conquesta del Pol Sud, Land Full of Heroes (2019), unpublished script courtesy of La Conquesta del Pol Sud.
2. Dori Laub and Shoshana Felman, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History (London: Routledge, 1992); Paul Celan quoted in Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 89.
3. See Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death (London: Sage, 1993), 85 and passim, for definition of hyperreality.
4. “Our BE Festival Review Round-up,” What’s On Birmingham, accessed October 12, 2019, https://www.whatsonlive.co.uk/birmingham/news/our-be-festival-review-round-up/44721.
5. Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot, in The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber, 1986), 50.
6. Beckett, Waiting for Godot, 86.
7. George Berkeley, A New Theory of Vision and Other Writings (London: J M Dent, 1938), 114–15.
8. Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney, quoted in introduction to Performing Memory in Art and Popular Culture, ed. Liedeke Plate and Anneke Smelik (London, New York: Routledge, 2013), 4.
9. Anna Reading, “Seeing Red: A Political Economy of Digital Memory,” Media, Culture & Society 36, no. 6 (2014): 748–60, see esp. 753.
10. John Brewer and Frank Trentmann, eds., introduction to Consuming Cultures, Global Perspectives (Oxford: Berg, 2006), 4.
11. Anna Reading, “The Female Memory Factory: How the Gendered Labour of Memory Creates Mnemonic Capital,” European Journal of Women’s Studies (2019): 1–20, see esp. 4.
12. Jonathan Bach, What Remains: Everyday Encounters with the Social Past in Germany (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 3.
13. Anna Reading and Tanya Notley, “Globital Memory Capital: Theorizing Digital Memory Economies,” in Digital Memory Studies: Media Pasts in Transition, ed. Andrew Hoskins (London: Routledge, 2018).
14. Matthew Allen, “The Poverty of Memory: For Political Economy in Memory Studies,” Memory Studies 9, no. 4 (2016): 371–75, see esp. 371.
15. Jen Harvie, Fair Play (London: Palgrave, 2013), 8.
16. I am grateful to Anna Reading for her use of this term, discussed during the “Activist Memory” workshop at Columbia University, November 2–3, 2018.
17. Pierre Bourdieu, “Forms of Capital,” in Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, ed. John G Richardson (New York: Greenwood, 1986). For a discussion of the influence of these forms of capital on tourist consumer decisions, see Erdinç Çakmak, Rico Lie, and Tom Selwyn, “Informal Tourism Entrepreneurs’ Capital Usage and Conversion,” Current Issues in Tourism (2018): 2250–65.
18.