In today’s workshop, we engaged with the practice of the Theatre of the Oppressed, which gave us an opportunity to physically, spatially, and visually study trauma, power, and relationality. Led by the wonderful George Emilio Sanchez, the workshop was an opportunity to get to know each other and explore the topics of the class through an embodied inquiry. In conjunction with the text “Theatre of the Oppressed” (Section 4) by Augusto Boal, the workshop forced me to think about the somatic practice which I have been developing, and which I hope to make accessible for wider circles of people. I started wondering about how I can do what I do better, and perhaps introduce more play into the exercises which I have constructed. Questions about the relationship between art-making, university, embodied knowledge, and playfulness arouse for me at the end of the workshop, alongside a sense of gratitude for being able to experience such a fantastic workshop in a context of a university.

In “Remembering, Repeating, Working-Through”, Freud discusses the relationship between different phases of experiencing trauma, the compulsion to repeat, transference as a necessary element of processing trauma, and resistance. What I found particularly curious and new about this text is the mention of hypnosis as precursory and significant to a large part of Freud’s work. This made me remember the incredible dance show “A Divine Comedy” by Florentina Holzinger, which starts with a group of audience members being hypnotized on stage by a professional practitioner.

Caruth’s text offers an incredibly interesting account of the temporality of trauma. She claims that trauma cannot be fully experienced in the moment it occurs, so it keeps returning in forms of flashbacks, nightmares, intrusive thoughts, and others. According to Caruth, trauma has no place, as it is not fully experienced neither in the present, nor in the past. But perhaps trauma has no time – like a ghost, it’s neither fully there, not fully here. I am very interested in the “Obscenity of Understanding” by Lanzmann, and I find myself very moved by the way in which the impossibility (and obscenity) of understanding is described.