Performing the Wound

Practicing a Feminist Theatre of Becoming

Niki Tulk

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000580648
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Arts de la scène

This book offers a matrixial, feminist-centered analysis of trauma and performance, through examining the work of three artists: Ann Hamilton, Renée Green, and Cecilia Vicuña.

Each artist engages in a multi-media, or "combination" performance practice; this includes the use of site, embodied performance, material elements, film, and writing. Each case study involves traumatic content, including the legacy of slavery, child sexual abuse and environmental degradation; each artist constructs an aesthetic milieu that invites rather than immerses—this allows an audience to have agency, as well as multiple pathways into their engagement with the art. The author Niki Tulk suggests that these works facilitate an audience-performance relationship based on the concept of ethical witnessing/wit(h)nessing, in which viewers are not positioned as voyeurs, nor made to risk re-traumatization by being forced to view traumatic events re-played on stage. This approach also allows agency to the art itself, in that an ethical space is created where the art is not objectified or looked at —but joined with. Foundational to this investigation are the writings of Bracha L. Ettinger, Jill Bennett and Diana Taylor—particularly Ettinger's concepts of the matrixial, carriance and border-linking. These artists and scholars present a capacity to expand and articulate answers to questions regarding how to make performance that remains compelling and truthful to the trauma experience, but not re-traumatizing.

This study will be of great interest to students and scholars of performance studies, art history, visual arts, feminist studies, theatre, film, performance art, postcolonialism, rhetoric and writing.

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781003124818-1

Everyone knows what poetry is, but who can say it?
Its nature is to be felt, but never apprehended.

(Cecilia Vicuña)

The purpose of art is not to represent reality or to aestheticize it. Art invents images and spaces. Art works like a maternal healing when it solicits against all the odds the human capacity to wonder, to feel awe, to feel compassion, to care, to trust and to carry the weight of the world. What you see doesn’t reflect reality or your own self; the image is not a mirror. When violence kills trust, art is the space where a trust in the other, and by extension of one’s being in the world, can re-emerge.

(Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger)

Performing the Wound documents a theoretical, embodied and autoethnographic exploration into those invented images and spaces where trauma and performance intersect. It does so on a quest to discover if, as Ettinger suggests, such art can be a place where trust, compassion and wonder can be reawakened after trauma. This documentation, an act of dynamic mapping of trauma-performance through a feminist lens, navigates the representation of an experience that essentially resists boundaries. The experiential aftermath of trauma feels like a liminal state, one that holds within it both active presence and dissipation. My research into articulating trauma, specifically in and through multi-modal performance, has seemed more about sketching parameters around individual and collective shadows than undertaking a linear analysis. With this in mind, Performing the Wound investigates the aesthetic rendering of those experiences—those shadows—that we cannot know, yet are drawn to try and integrate into our waking, rational lives. Peggy Phelan writes that trauma cannot be linguistically expressed, that trauma is, in effect, an experience that remains unrepresentable. “The symbolic cannot carry it,” she concludes, “trauma makes a tear in the symbolic network itself” (1997 5). If trauma cannot be represented, however, it is also true that it demands to be represented in some way—it enacts a version of itself again and again, performing itself, as if trying to find a way into disappearance; although it never really goes away, but plays into the thread and weave of who we are. This immediacy echoes Cathy Caruth, who announces the wound that insists on being heard, and yet has not found a language with which to speak. Trauma challenges our understanding and modes of expression, at the same time that it is driven to speak of what is unspeakable—a site, in effect, where words end. The invitation, the urgency, however, is to listen to that demand. It is also to discover, if they indeed can exist, aesthetic modes with which artists might articulate trauma in performance so that artists can honor this urge to share, and act as witness to, the suffering that needs relational healing with an audience. This book documents a quest of sorts to find a “language” (or languages) through which traumatic wounds might both speak and be listened to—a “new” language that might encompass trauma’s relationship with multi-faceted, neurobiological systems of knowing.

When Judith Herman published her seminal book Trauma and Recovery: Aftermath of Violence from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (2015), she documented endemic rates of rape and incest in the US. It was not that crimes of rape and incest had suddenly increased that made her study so significant; rather, she drew these traumata into visibility: she named a societal-level trauma that had already long been in existence. Similarly, research on Adverse Childhood Experiences has found that 61% of adults in the US have suffered at least one traumatic childhood experience, with those who identify as Female and/or People of the Global Majority being at greater risk for four or more such experiences. It is therefore imperative to suggest that a majority of our art-makers and audiences carry unhealed trauma that, even if it does not manifest in a psychological diagnosis, affects their imaginative and emotional lives. Gabor Maté M.D. describes this traumatic material we carry as “explosive,” sensitive to inadvertent triggers. Given the extent to which trauma affects society, and by inference, performers and their audiences, devising a practice-based set of recommendations for performing trauma-related material is both an urgent and productive challenge for those who wish to express, and perhaps even begin to mend, the broken spirit of the world through art. By introducing a matrixial, body-/feminist-centered perspective into an analysis of trauma and performance, the research offered here proposes a new direction for the study of the ways art-makers can facilitate expression of trauma. Centralizing trauma experience as normative—the order of things rather than a “disorder”—would be a paradigm shift in the arts (and society) that might assist in helping artists create spaces for performers and audiences that cultivate acknowledgement and healing—without dilution or sacrificing commitment to truth-telling. This, in effect, is the raison d’être behind Performing the Wound. This project begins with the assumption that most, if not all of us, enter the performance space carrying explosive material inside us.

For all its breadth, study of the artistic expression of trauma has mostly occurred in literary and film studies—with notable exceptions in the visual arts in the work of art historians Kristine Stiles and Jill Bennett, for example. Trauma scholar Patrick Duggan attests that: “While trauma has long been the subject of scholarly attention in many other fields, very little has been written on the subject in the context of theatre and performance” (2). Caruth offers provocative analyses of Alain Resnais and Marguerite Duras’ 1959 film Hiroshima mon amour and the writings of Paul de Man. Shoshana Felman investigates the poetry of Paul Celan, as well as Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985), in the light of the complexities inherent in the act of giving—and witnessing—testimony. Bracha L. Ettinger analyzes her own painting. As part of the more recent postcolonial re-examining of trauma studies, Indo-Persian, UK-based scholar Ananya Jahanara Kabir explores laments and communal songs. Overall, however, work at the intersection of postcolonial theory and trauma studies has focused on the written word. As Duggan attests, attention to performance in trauma studies is limited. Performing the Wound opens a conversation that pulls in work done in visual arts and “traditional” trauma studies, and folds these into an experiential analysis of a range of works transcending traditional definitions of “theatre,” broadening the case studies to encompass a range of intersecting modalities that reflects the trans- and interdisciplinary work that is a large part of contemporary theatre and performance.

Throughout this book I work from a broad view of what defines theatrical practice, with the intention, and understanding, that interdisciplinarity is a realm in which many contemporary theatre-makers operate. Theatre is not always inside designated rooms: the Black Box, the Studio, the Main Stage. It exists in other invented spaces: the installation, for example, inside whose space we co-exist with non-human, material or filmic elements that are “live” in that shared space with viewers—and increasingly, in our pandemic and post-pandemic society, virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) worlds. To be considered theatre, I suggest that there should be a fundamental component of live interaction in a work. Performance sites need some version of this live-ness to function as theatre spaces, in that these sites are incomplete without their living, breathing audience interacting with the experience, performers (human and non-human) and each other. Theatre seen this way is expansive in its possible definitions, the related semantics complex. Accordingly, throughout this book I use “theatre,” “performance” and “art” interchangeably: terms that could be seen as competing or contradictory. I do so out of a desire to keep traditional disciplinary borderlines porous, as they are in much contemporary practice—the ongoing practice, the becoming, of inventing images and spaces.

With this in mind, I set out to discover the language/s of the wound that speaks, with the understanding that “language” does not just mean spoken, written or sung words, although the artists in the following chapters are, alongside other media, deeply embedded in writing. Language, however, expands beyond text to include light, disembodied sound, textiles, gesture, communal gatherings, and artifacts. I have sought artists in whose work I recognized Ettinger’s matrixial zone, artists able to craft ways to encounter trauma without didacticism, shock value or voyeurism, those whose art played the role of subject with whom I could experience relationship. In this book, then, I examine the work of Ann Hamilton, Renée Green, and Cecilia Vicuña. Each engages in a multi-media, or “combination” performance practice; this includes the use of site, embodied performance, material elements, film, and written text. The specific works I have chosen to focus on involve traumatic content, including the legacy of slavery, child sexual abuse and environmental degradation. All three artists, in their works, construct an aesthetic milieu that allows an audience agency as well as inviting multiple pathways into engagement with the art. Each work facilitates an audience-performance relationship based on the concept of ethical witnessing/wit(h)nessing, in which viewers are not positioned as voyeurs, nor made to risk re-traumatization by being forced to view traumatic events re-played realistically on stage. This approach also allows agency to the art itself, in that an ethical space is created where the art is not objectified or looked at, but joined with.

It is important to note that, with the exception of Vicuña, these artists do not posit their practice as deliberately creating a feminist poetics around trauma-telling. I have chosen, however, specific examples of their work that do involve content regarding traumatic memory and recovery, and I argue that these works activate methodologies that render how the theoretical framing in trauma theory, along with a discussion of feminist performance ethics, might be experimented with in practice. Through close study, I articulate a poetics of performance, rooted in a response to trauma that involves a collusion of space, materials, textuality and embodiment. In short, I have sought to discover ways beyond the rational through which woundedness might speak.

Foundational to the investigation in this book are the writings of Bracha L. Ettinger, Jill Bennett and Diana Taylor—particularly Ettinger’s concepts of the matrixial, carriance and border-linking. These artists and scholars expand on and articulate answers to questions regarding how to make performance that remains compelling and truthful to the trauma experience, but not re-traumatizing. Ettinger, the theorist from whom I draw most consistently, has developed a way of understanding the shared space between performer and audience/viewer as a uterine space: two subjects move between and around each other in a web of interdependence that allows both to appreciate, to truly see, each other; both, in doing so, are profoundly changed. She uses the womb as a metaphorical basis for developing an ethical phenomenological space in which to encounter trauma in art, terming it the matrixial zone, and argues that this feminist and maternal metaphor can apply to all genders: we each exist because we were carried, therefore we have it in ourselves to carry others. Ettinger expresses such subjectivity thus:

I am thence I was carried. I carry therefore I am a being-toward-birth, at every moment possibly creative of a joint space. I don’t intend any necessity to carry a child. I intend care-carrying as a symbolic human value patterned—or rather mattered—upon the linking-with the mother, whatever gender you identify yourself with. I have always already been wit(h)nessed by an-other, a m/other, and the sublimation of singular borderlinkages suggests possible schemas and routes. The world is gone. I must carry you. Caring-carrying-sustaining-bearing-lifting-subjectivizing in and out of the poem, in and out of the painting, in and out of our-selves, in the matter, in the psyche, in the soul, in the spirit, in social acting-for one another; starting from com-passion and wit(h)nessing, transported in matter, and arriving at a human action and at witnessing. Such schemas are in us and in the cosmos.

(Kaiser and Thiele 108)

In this zone, two “I”s exist in relation to each other inside a space of nurturing and ethical wit(h)-nessing. The matrixial embraces a constant and fluidly shifting, non-hierarchical relational space that dissolves the subject-object dichotomy so embedded with Lacanian ways of seeing and perceiving. In encountering art that comes out of trauma, instead of a subject contemplating an object (the art), the experience is an encounter of dual subjectivity: I regard another I—and this democratizes the space. Instead of regarding an-Other, I regard an-other, who is the same but different from myself. Ettinger terms this movement between self and small-o other as “borderswerving,” where, as Griselda Pollock explains, “the unremembered, traumatic dimension of the Matrix is not about fusion/loss, but about shareability and co-emergence” (48). In that sense, the exchange between these two Is alters both of them, without one subsuming the o/Other. The matrixial is not a site of dominant power dynamics, but of an ebb and flow—a myriad of webs that hold two subjects both together and apart. Ettinger maps out a way of making, sharing and viewing art that invites people into an experience of trauma that allows their own wounds to resonate in ethical and compassionate response.

Ettinger’s ideas offer a framework to describe a space of encounter that—in listening and seeing the other’s trauma—compassionately awakens our own wounds. What an audience experiences in performance may resonate with their own stories, as at the same time they feel connected with what they witness. This is part exchange, part joining, part one carrying another. In fact, the carriance that Ettinger writes about can only happen if there is a coming together. This is what is ethical about such performance—all are consensually joined in each other’s wounds, carrying, strengthening one another. Within that environment of transaction and exchange, there is a joint healing work of the witness and survivor:

The listener, therefore, by definition partakes of the struggle of the victim with the memories and residues of his or her traumatic past. The listener has to feel the victim’s victories, defeats and silences, know them from within, so that they can assume the form of testimony.

(Felman and Laub 58)

It is in a matrixial space such as Ettinger describes, where audience and art are enabled to “carry” one another, that such knowing from within is made possible.

Ettinger explains how the phenomenological site of experiencing art can also be a site for moving humanity into a place where trust can be renewed, even re-invented. She argues that this re-invention needs to happen, because of the ongoing trauma so prevalent in our world. “The subject-matter in the painting’s inner space carries, transports, and transmits, evokes, and creates an image, which is a space of encounter-event,” she says. “When I wrote ‘[t]he heart is wound and space, wound-space,’” she continues, “I meant the heart of the painting as well as mine” (Ettinger quoted in Kaiser and Thiele 104). The heart of the art contains both the trauma and also a space in which to encounter that pain. Here exists a “wound-space,” encased in a uterine site of co-carriance. Here, two (or more) equals contact each other through a myriad of psychic threads; these multiple “I”s are separate, yet involved with each other. To be thus joined in such a space (think again of mother and baby contained together in the one body) allows for both agency and a letting-go. Mother and child are joined by cords, by blood vessels, yet they are separate beings dependent on each other’s wellbeing in order to survive—they both, in this sense, carry each other: co-carriance. Both will, additionally, be changed by the experience; they will emerge different from how they began.

A performance shaped by Ettinger’s aesthetics is not one that expresses the trauma in such a way that the content parades itself in front of a subject. It is, instead, a sphere in which the wound and the witness can co-exist: moving apart, around and together. This is what Ettinger calls “border-linking-border-spacing” (118). There is the possibility of indirect, as well as direct, contact. The word “contact” is not used in the military understanding of the term—that an idea shoots itself at you and you have to duck, defend, or be injured by taking it into your body. The art and the viewer carry each other, in and through an understanding that it is in losing oneself (or the ego) that one may then enter what feels like a new world, one where something is being brought into being that was not there before. In this site of ongoing becoming, trust is once more possible—“To trust you need to loosen and forget the ego-self. Then a world reap...