According to the Oxford Dictionary, performance is a noun that means either “an act of staging or presenting a play, concert, or another form of entertainment” or “the action or process of carrying out an action, task, or function.” In other words, every day or artistic performance means body action, embodiment. However, for Augusto Boal, performance, like all his theater, lies in a blurred zone between art and life. For him, performances would be all human activities organized spectacularly and carried out by “actors” aware of the organization, even though they may ignore its meanings and reasons. Thus, performance would be a conscious action. That is why the possibility of a revitalizing intervention arises in the Theater of the Oppressed – the violence that exists in reality is transposed and transfigured. And this happens through a spectator who goes from being a passive receiver to a protagonist.
In this sense, performativity is inherent to every act of remembering. For Freud, remembrance is a way of reorganizing the present based on the integration of the past, a process for working through traumatic experiences. Trauma is precisely an event that cannot be elaborated and integrated through memory. Memory is the narrative of the past constructed from the present; it is the continuous reinscription of the past, which never wholly passes, as it is always recomposed through remembrance. And because the trauma is not integrated into memory, it is repeated unconsciously by the traumatized person, reproduced not as a memory but as an action.
Corroborating this statement, Bessel van der Kolk explains that trauma paralyzes the person and their growth, as their life is organized as if the events were still in force in an immutable way as if the traumatic past contaminated every present event. After trauma, the world begins to be experienced by a different nervous system. The energy of the traumatized person is used to suppress inner chaos, resulting in a series of physical symptoms.
Cath Caruth states that trauma can be understood both as a person’s response to an event outside the spectrum of usual human experience – and PTSD would be its symptom – and as the event itself. (It would be better to use terms such as “overwhelming” to qualify this type of event, as the traumatic experience can be pretty standard for certain social groups). The author states that the impact of trauma as a concept and category has shifted the boundaries of understanding pathology and its “cure.” Trauma generates a crisis of truth that goes beyond the individual issue of healing to the point of access to our own historical experience, for whom access to truth is not simple. The traumatic experience is, at the same time, testimony to the traumatic event and the impossibility of direct access to it. Trauma is not limited to the moment of the event; it bequeaths an existence of crisis to the traumatized person, “the survivor itself (…) can be a crisis” (CARUTH, p. 9). And this existence deeply marked by trauma is passed down through generations, as Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory shows us.
“Memories are linked between individuals,” says Hirsch, for whom memories are events framed by belief systems of a particular group and formatted into a narrative. For her, memory is an umbrella term encompassing several subdivisions, such as those proposed by Jan Assmann: collective remembrance can be communicative or cultural. Communicative memory is “biographical” and “factual.” It is located within a generation of contemporaries who witness an event as adults and who can transmit their bodily and affective connection to that event to their descendants. Hirsch also cites the author Aleida Assmann, who divides communicative memory into individual and social, while cultural memory can be understood as cultural or political. Memory would thus be an affective link to the past, a presentification of History through an affective and incorporated experience (HIRSCH, p. 33).
History can be transformed into memory through, to use, Paul Connerton’s term, cognitive and affective “acts of transfer”, which will allow it to be shared across individuals and generations. For Connerton, society’s collective memory is a cultural (not individual) faculty transmitted in practices and traditions. Accordingly, images and knowledge gathered from the past are shared and sustained by ritual performances (commemorative ceremonies) and performative memory (bodily practices). He says commemorative ceremonies prove to be commemorative only to the extent that they are performative. Here, the term performativity appears as incorporation, as we commonly consider inscription (documentation) the privileged form of transmission of a society’s memories and underestimate the mnemonic importance and persistence of which is embodied. However, Connerton claims these distinctions are merely heuristic, as every act contains both practices to some extent.
In this sense, it is interesting to think about the use of different artists of inscription in their processes when using incorporation. For example, some theatrical performances that use documents to tell individual stories have the potential to represent a collective. In this way, biographical material would be understood as a tool to unveil social structures and processes of memory construction and deconstruct or problematize hegemonic narratives.
Researcher Carol Martin in her book Dramaturgy of the real on the world stage affirms the ability of these performances that deal with actual documents to form memories in spectators about events that they did not witness. More than the knowledge of facts by the audience, there is a power in the incorporation of the inscription by the performer that leads to the creation of memory. I ask whether the concept of postmemory would be a possible way to understand this power.
Postmemory is a generational structure of transmission that reactivates and reincorporates more distant political and cultural memories, reinvesting them in resonant forms of individual and familial mediation and aesthetic expression. It is, therefore, the experience of people who did not directly experience traumatic historical events but shared and prolonged the memories of those who experienced them. Therefore, it is also a consequence of this remembrance of an inter and transgenerational memory. Postmemory is, therefore, directly linked to the emotional bonds between those who tell the story and those who inherit it. Even more, postmemory is based on empathy, imagination, projection, and creation.
The performative-theatrical event takes place in a playful space of imagination and creation. The knowledge on the part of the viewer that they are witnessing the incorporation of documentation of real trauma triggers the viewer’s empathy. Sharing the experience through the materiality of the encounter with the performer would bring the possibility of creating this bond of affection. Therefore, I ask whether the tension in the relationships between life and art in this coexistence context would enable the construction of a space of belonging through the link established between audience and performer that could mirror the postmemory structure in transmitting a traumatic event.
For Judith Lewis Herman, trauma is an affliction of the disempowered. Therefore, work on it is not just an individual psychological problem but a question of social justice. It is the social movements – such as those for the abolition of slavery, female emancipation, and racial equality – that will create the context in which it will be possible to name and, from this, be able to elaborate the notion of trauma. Initially, Herman proposed three stages of recovery from trauma focused on individual survival – establishing safety for the victim, enabling the attribution of meaning to the trauma (which can be understood as “working through” in Freud), and affirming one’s present life and social ties. In her book Truth and Repair, she focuses on society’s responsibility, whether in the perpetuation or recovery of trauma, because if it is a social problem, its recovery cannot be considered a private matter. She called this “fourth and final stage” of recovery “justice.”
Performing trauma in art can be a form of collective elaboration and affirmation of social bonds. At the same time, this form of artistic construction would allow “Some extraordinary survivors, recognizing that their suffering is part of a much larger social problem, can transform the meaning of their trauma by making their stories a gift to others and by joining others to seek a better world” (HERMAN, p. 9). For Herman, trauma is a social problem caused by an ecology of violence in which crimes against subordinate and marginalized people are tolerated or made invisible. In this way, performing stories of characters who are politically invisible for class, gender, or race is also a way of claiming greater social visibility in the face of the erasure to which these groups have been historically subjected.
The art could also allow the community to leave its position as “passive bystanders” and become “implicated subjects.” This call for implication finds an analogy with Boal’s spectators, who call on everyone to act and take responsibility for social constructions. Of course, for those who experienced the trauma, artistic reenactment would be a way of making their community “implicated subjects” after the original traumatic event. However, as we have seen, its effects continue in the present; trauma accompanies the victim and requires constant elaboration. On the other hand, as these individual traumas speak about repeated social structures, this would be a possible way of making each of us an “implicated subject” against structures that support the systematic repetition of the violence that generates these traumas.