Understanding Documentary Theatre: Definitions, History, and Functions, Lecture notes of Theatre

Download Understanding Documentary Theatre: Definitions, History, and Functions and more Lecture notes Theatre in PDF only on Docsity! Performance Paradigm 7 (July 2011) 1 Get Real: Documentary Theatre Past and Present, ed. Alison Forsyth and Chris Megson (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) and Dramaturgy of the Real on the World Stage, ed. Carol Martin (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) Caroline Wake In her seminal essay, ‘Bodies of Evidence,’ Carol Martin defines documentary theatre as ‘created from a specific body of archived material: interviews, documents, hearings, records, video, film, photographs, etc’ (2006: 9). In other words, documentary theatre both depends on and depicts history, or at least history as it has been recorded in the archive. Yet in depicting history, documentary theatre inevitably alters and augments it and Martin identifies four historical functions for the form: (1) ‘to reopen trials’; (2) ‘to create additional historical accounts’; (3) ‘to reconstruct an event’; and (4) ‘to intermingle autobiography with history’ (12-13). In addition, she also identifies two representational tasks for the genre, namely ‘to critique the operation of both documentary and fiction’ and ‘to elaborate an oral culture of theatre’ (13). In short, documentary theatre interrogates the relationship between reality and representation through a combination of repetition (by retelling, reconstructing, re-enacting) and addition (by including formerly excluded stories, incorporating not only the archive but also the repertoire). For Martin, as for many, it is these paradoxical pairings of the actual and the fictional, the real and the representational, the personal and the political, that makes documentary theatre so complex and compelling. The figure of Martin looms large in both Get Real: Documentary Theatre Past and Present (2008) and Dramaturgy of the Real on the World Stage (2010), not only because she is an author in the former and the editor of the latter, but also because her edited issue of TDR (2006) is the foundation upon which both books are built. In the case of Get Real, editors Alison Forsyth and Chris Megson state at the outset that Martin’s ‘collection of articles mapped the conceptual parameters of a burgeoning field of theatre practice ... and we are indebted to the scholarship in her collection’ (1-2). In the case of Dramaturgy of the Real on the World Stage, three of the opening essays and one of the playscripts were first Performance Paradigm 7 (July 2011) 2 published in TDR. It’s true that the issue was a turning point for the discourse on documentary theatre: what had been a large and lively conversation in the late 1960s and early 1970s (Weiss 1968, 1971; Cheeseman 1970; Isaac 1971; Elvgren 1974) petered out somewhat in the 1980s (Filewod 1987; Paget 1987). Even when a significant number of performance practitioners started to revisit and revise the form in the 1990s, the scholarship still lagged, despite the efforts of Paget (1990), Favorini (1995) and Dawson (1999). By the time Martin’s issue emerged it had been about a decade since anyone had attempted a wider survey or deeper theorisation of the documentary form. [1] Now, five years on, and with the arrival of two new volumes, it is fair to say that we are gaining, even breaking, new ground. Get Real: Documentary Theatre Past and Present Like the documentary plays it analyses, Get Real presents a multiplicity of voices and a diversity of viewpoints. Indeed, the volume offers several definitions of the term ‘documentary’ itself. In the opening essay, ‘The Promise of Documentary,’ Janelle Reinelt argues that documentary is a relational rather than ontological descriptor, stating that: ‘documentary is not in the object but in the relationship between the object, its mediators (artists, historians, authors) and its audiences’ (7). On this basis, she proposes extending the category to include Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, because although it is a memoir, it shares ‘the truth-claims of non-fiction and the reliance on personal documentation in addition to personal voice’ (20; emphasis added). In view of this expansive gesture, it is not surprising that Reinelt dismisses the term “verbatim” as unnecessarily narrow, saying that it ‘needlessly ups the ante on the promise of documentary’ (14). For Alison Jeffers, however, it is precisely the term’s specificity in ‘designat*ing+ a … technique whereby the exact, albeit edited, words of the subjects are inserted into the play’ that makes it necessary (92). Nevertheless, Reinelt does concede the term ‘tribunal theatre’ because ‘at least *it+ accurately delimits the materials used in the performance it categorises’ (14). While Reinelt does not offer a definition, Megson does later in the book, stating that it ‘consists of the meticulous re-enactment of edited transcripts of state-sanctioned inquiries that address perceived miscarriages of justice and flaws in the operations and accountability of public institutions’ (195). Performance Paradigm 7 (July 2011) 5 focuses on a single artist, or rather company, in Tricycle Theatre, examining one of their earlier works Half Life, which in retrospect now appears somewhat anomalous in terms of its approach. Finally, Yvette Hutchison looks at different verbatim plays, indeed different verbatim forms, that have emerged in post-reconciliation South Africa. In many instances, the author argues for a particular production to be valued over another. For example, Casey criticises Ngapartji Ngapartji for focusing on stories of suffering rather than survival. In doing so, she argues, the play promotes a ‘pathology of oppression’ and enacts a form of ‘epistemic violence’ (136). In contrast, she praises The Career Highlights of the Mamu for placing traumatic stories within a longer history of endurance and resilience, thus ‘expressing Indigenous epistemologies rather than *simply+ using the stories’ (137). Similarly, Upton argues that Tricycle Theatre’s Bloody Sunday produces a ‘sympathetic portrayal of the victims of injustice rather than an interrogation of judicial responsibility’ and instead of ‘deconstructing *the judicial] process … the dramaturgy of the play simply re-constructs it’ (187-88). In this way, ‘the production le*aves+ itself no scope to explore its own ideological process’ (188). Upton prefers plays that examine the limitations of the judicial process and solicit stories from subjects who were not invited to testify in that initial context. While Casey and Upton criticise their case studies for reproducing the subjects within them as victims, Favorini finds himself with the opposite problem in Mann’s Greensboro, which presents such a neutral account of the massacre that it ‘feels unfinished, leaving no coherent impression other than of invincibly ignorant racism’ (163). In other words, by repeating the words of the perpetrators of the crime, the play risks reproducing their problematic politics (163). In fact, politics is the common denominator in all of these assessments, as the vocabulary of “oppression,” “violence” and “ideology” would seem to indicate. Specifically, these writers are concerned with the politics of form—an intriguing and important shift for a discourse that has recently tended to focus on ethics at the expense of politics. In the book’s final chapter, Derek Paget identifies two strands of documentary theatre, which he calls the ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ approach. Of course, many plays are a hybrid of these forms but it seems to me, as it does to Paget, that there are important differences between finding and repeating the words of the powerful, which are already Performance Paradigm 7 (July 2011) 6 on the record, and soliciting the words of the marginalised. To borrow from social scientists, it is the difference between ‘researching up’ and ‘researching down’ (Bartunek and Louis 1996). Of course, another way of distinguishing between these two forms would be to call one documentary theatre and the other verbatim, but this would bring us back to Reinelt’s original objection and the absence of a broader taxonomy or framework within the discourse. Perhaps the general point here is that different documentary forms do different kinds of cultural work. The mention of culture prompts me to think about the cultures represented within the book and to wonder about just how diverse they are. The majority of case studies are from the United Kingdom and the United States, with additional examples from Canada, South Africa, Australia, Lebanon and Israel. Examples and authors from the so-called ‘global south’ are almost entirely absent. Unfortunately this is true not only of this volume but of the discourse more generally and in view of documentary theatre’s concerns with marginalised voices, it is deeply problematic, not only in ethical but also in theoretical terms. As Pal Ahluwalia has argued recently, it is no accident that many of the major French thinkers from the twentieth century were either born in or were otherwise deeply entangled with Algeria (2010). This absence has ramifications not only for the present discourse, but for the future’s as well, for what is analysed and recorded now will affect what is remembered in the future. In Diana Taylor’s terms, some of this work is entering the archive, or what Megson and Forsyth term the ‘emergent canon of published playscripts’ (1), while other work will remain in the repertoire (Taylor 2003). This is not to say that it will disappear altogether, simply to say that these plays may not have the chance to influence the conversation as much as some others might. Dramaturgy of the Real on the World Stage The complex issue of documentary theatre’s own archive and repertoire is presumably part of the impulse behind Carol Martin’s edited book Dramaturgy of the Real on the World Stage. The book consists of two sections: the first of six theoretical essays and the second of seven playscripts, each with an introductory note. The three opening essays, by Martin, Reinelt and Wendy Hesford, each appeared in the TDR issue. Nevertheless, Performance Paradigm 7 (July 2011) 7 republishing can provide a prompt for rereading and it is a pleasure to revisit these particular pieces. Martin’s essay, the aforementioned ‘Bodies of Evidence,’ is of course clear and concise, but I wonder whether it might have been better placed in Get Real. That way, the essay that appears there, which includes an analysis of Elias Khoury and Rabih Mroué’s Three Posters, could appear alongside the Three Posters script in Dramaturgy of the Real on the World Stage. Reinelt’s essay is also approaching classic status within the discourse, dealing as it does with one of Tricycle Theatre’s most famous productions The Colour of Justice. If ever you need an essay to illustrate Victor Turner’s famous figure of eight, Reinelt’s essay is it—elegantly explaining how the social drama feeds into the stage drama, feeds into the social drama and so on. Hesford’s essay places the documentary play Guantánamo alongside an exhibition of documentary photographs from the same place, arguing that while they may at first appear ‘as two disparate performance*s+ … *they+ are actually complementary aspects of the traumatic real’ thus suggesting ‘a correspondence between the documentary spectacles of war and theatre’ (48). The next three theoretical essays are fairly brief (six to eight pages as opposed to 10-16 page essays at the beginning of the book and the 16-20 page essays in Get Real) but they provide an important shift of focus, by moving the discussion from the Anglo-American context to Poland, Germany and South Africa. Agnieszka Sowioska’s article (translated by Benjamin Paloff) offers an excellent history and summary of documentary theatre as it has evolved in Poland. There, documentary practices include ‘verbatim’ and ‘paradocumentary theatre’ as well as the ‘theatre of fact’ and the ‘televised theatre of fact,’ where documentary plays were broadcast on national television (71-74). Further west, in Germany, Florian Malzacher considers the paradoxical practice of ‘scripting realities’ in the work of Rimini Protokoll, i.e. how the company works to structure and contain reality and how reality resists such limitations, spilling onto the stage in its own way anyway, such as when the ‘everyday experts’ forget their lines. Hutchison’s article reads as an abbreviated version of her essay in Get Real, examining many of the same case studies, though her theoretical emphasis shifts from concepts of “verbatim” to concepts of “truth.” Performance Paradigm 7 (July 2011) 10 Dawson, Gary Fisher. Documentary Theatre in the United States: An Historical Survey and Analysis of Its Content, Form, and Stagecraft (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1999). Elvgren, Gillette A. ‘Documentary Theatre at Stoke-on-Trent’, Educational Theatre Journal 26.1 (1974): 86-98. Favorini, Attilio (ed.). Voicings: Ten Plays from the Documentary Theater. (New Jersey: Ecco Press, 1995). Filewod, Alan. Collective Encounters: Documentary Theatre in English Canada. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987). Isaac, Dan. ‘Theatre of Fact’, TDR: The Drama Review 15.3A (1971): 109-135. Kondo, Dorinne. ‘Shades of Twilight: Anna Deavere Smith and Twilight: Los Angeles 1992’ in Connected: Engagements with Media, ed. George E. Marcus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). Martin, Carol. ‘Bodies of Evidence’, TDR: The Drama Review 50.3 (2006): 8-15. Nichols, Bill. Introduction to Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001). Paget, Derek. ‘“Verbatim Theatre”: Oral History and Documentary Techniques’, New Theatre Quarterly 3.12 (1987): 317-336. ——. True Stories: Documentary Drama on Radio, Screen, and Stage (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990). Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). Performance Paradigm 7 (July 2011) 11 Weiss, Peter. ‘Fourteen Propositions for a Documentary Theatre’, World Theatre 17.5-6 (1968): 375-389. ——. ‘The Material and the Models: Notes Towards a Definition of Documentary Theatre’, trans. Heinz Bernard. Theatre Quarterly 1.1 (1971): 41-46.