what is being performed and witnessed is the presence of the audience. Without an audience, as theatre-maker Teya Sepinuck argues, there is no testimony.93 So we attend the theatre to be reminded of our own existence.
Is this always the case? Is the same call upon the audience being made by Beckett as it is by a documentary play in which women testify about having been raped? In fact, can we even say that a memory play necessarily calls an audience to action? (Are there plays that ask for our passivity? Plays that do not, perhaps, even require an audience?)
In writing this book, it has been difficult to resist the word “should” (audiences should do particular things). In discussions about how we might witness injustice it is easy to slip into moralizing. Indeed, it’s hard to resist using the term “we” (even when that imagined communal identity stretches across national and temporal boundaries) simply because of the rhetorical imperative invoked by the moral imperative of witnessing.
Allen Feldman is suspicious of many memory performances that depend on the inevitable “moralizing periodization” of postevent depictions of violence, pain or injustice.94 These moral positions may call for simplified reactions and affects. One particular pitfall of this trend is that the emotive nature of so many witness plays means that audiences may feel they are being called on to react emotionally rather than intellectually. There is thus a tight line for theatre makers to walk, so that, in Hirsch’s terms, the work of art can “touch us without paralyzing us . . . galvaniz[ing] memory in the interest of activist engagement for justice and social change.”95 The sustained focus of this book is thus on the aesthetic strategies chosen by theatre makers: how they create witnesses, how and why they call on audiences to behave in particular ways. Paramount here is whether, as Peters puts it, performances of witnessing “call for our aid [or] our appreciation; our duty [or] our pleasure.”96 If the audience is allotted subjectivity, then does that also hold true for the onstage witness? Because, as Feldman argues, “no matter how empathic the gaze” of the audience member, the process of witnessing is inevitably often an objectifying one. This brings us to the risk of witnessing—that the witnessing dividend accrues not to the person being witnessed, but to the person consuming.97
The Real Inequality
Perhaps these questions of consumer power actually divert attention away from the real subjects of disempowerment—those being represented. We cannot assume that just because someone, or their story, is represented on stage that they have power as witnesses. As many critics of discourses around victimhood argue, power is distributed unequally between those who are represented and those doing the representing. The important question about power and exploitation does not center on the consumer, but pivots on how often, in fact, the subject of the performance is exploited. In the desire for authenticity, “the real,” and stories of personal hardship, the experiences of survivors of abuse, victims of sexual violence, and protestors against injustice, become market commodities. As Jasbir Puar argues, performances of empathetic or charitable selfhood are used by gatekeepers to accrue symbolic cultural and social capital without any proper recompense or benefit to the survivors themselves.98 This is not to be undersold, as Allen states, “the cultural production of memory depends increasingly” on the “intensification of immaterial, precarious and forced labour.”99 A witness’s labor may be rewarded by consumer interest in their stories and the validation and potential support this generates, but the real benefit is to the gatekeepers’ profit margins and the already-privileged consumers’ performance of being a good citizen. Precarity in the marketplace is thus not solved, but actually worsened, by some performances of witnessing.
In an ideal world, we can hope to set against the inequalities and disempowerments engendered by the competitive, top-down, and profit-driven nature of the marketplace, the citizen consumer’s desire to exercise their critical faculties, and to see change enacted—and the possibility that they may further enact those changes themselves outside the boundaries of both theatrical and remembrance cultures, thus shifting the balance of power in the marketplace. As Jill Dolan encouragingly argues, we must believe in “the potential of different kinds of performance to inspire moments in which audiences feel allied with each other, and with a broader, more capacious sense of a public, in which social discourse articulates the possible rather than the insurmountable obstacles to human potential.”100
It is also important to note the possibility for work that does not speak on behalf of the survivor, but that is made by the survivor. This book includes discussion of performances in which different stakeholders get to speak—from victims of physical, sexual, and state violence who script and perform their own narratives, to activists who campaign for social justice. Overall, however, it is important to acknowledge that most of the culture we consume is made by one group, about another group. The stakes of aestheticizing another’s pain, and the risk of appropriating suffering, are thus very real concerns, and I set out to examine them in the context of power and capital. Appropriation does not have to be a destructive process; there is potential for audience witnesses to make the problem their own without, in the process, appropriating the moral capital of the victim/survivor.
It is vital that we acknowledge the inequalities—social, political, and economic—of the marketplace and the ways that market practices entail the silencing of the memories of particular social groups in order to amplify and bolster others, or that exploit the suffering of some in order to generate economic and social capital for those who already hold power. However, so that we do not despair, we also need at the same time to remind ourselves that these inequalities do not preclude the potential for positive change. Indeed the starkness of the market inequalities around not just social issues, but also memory issues, may call on the audience to do the opposite—to become activists. In this reading, we can salvage precarity as a potential ground for new political subjectivities and solidarity, though, as Rosalind Gill and Andy Pratt acknowledge, that is itself “a precarious project,”101 one that risks not only instrumentalizing the disenfranchised, but further burdening this cohort with insatiable expectations of their immaterial labor.
The Witness to Pain
Identifying that the audience is being called on does not quite answer the question of what it is that a theatre audience is being asked to witness, or indeed why audiences are being cast in the role of witnesses at all. As suggested by Fitzpatrick above, the rise of the term witness is linked to the rise of trauma: albeit witness theatre offers audiences a range of experiences, more and more audiences are being asked to witness pain. Indeed, Sepinuck argues that this has reached such a level that many potential theatrical witnesses fear they have not “suffered enough” and that they should therefore not testify as their stories do not “count.”102 Indeed, in some instances it may be that consumers are simply attracted by, and marketers exploit, what has become a “trauma brand.” This brand is linked to positive social values, such as empathy and the production of social relations, but it is also at risk of flattening and commodifying personal experiences, leading us to ask more questions of how trauma operates in performance. Is our concept of witnessing linked exclusively to painful memory? Do we expect, or even demand, performances of suffering? Is this the real impact of the consumer?
And what is the effect on the audience of being asked to witness pain—either firsthand (in the case of autoperformance) or secondhand (via actors)? It is troubling to consider these effects because, as Michal Givoni asserts, witnessing so often entails being “overtaken by a performance of trauma and loss.”103 Givoni is referring here to firsthand witnessing where an individual testifies to their own experience of trauma—but if we expect an audience to enter into a collaborative witnessing relationship, and to remediate the testimony they have heard, does this description of witnessing not also apply to the audience?
I am wary of the idea of secondary trauma because it is important to recognize the distance between the event and the secondhand witness and hence the relative safety of that second witness—nevertheless, in transferring the responsibility of witnessing from performer/testifier
