Bodies in Suspension: The Aesthetics of Doubt in Honour Bound

Abstract

As with the bitterly ironic words, Work Makes Man Free, above the gates of Auschwitz, the gates of the prison at Guantanamo Bay are adorned with a sign saying, Honour Bound to Defend Freedom. From this text, theatre director Nigel Jamison took his title for a dance theatre work that explored the conditions under which Australian citizen David Hicks could be imprisoned at Guantanamo without trial. Hicks’s case was one of the most prominent to expose the political and ethical gaps in human rights discourses under the new regimes of torture imposed by the US government on the post-9/11 global mediascape. Utilizing dance, digital technology and verbatim theatre, Jamison began Honour Bound with a simple proposition: he saw the image of ‘this human figure spinning and turning in a void’ and, with Garry Stewart, tried to activate the sensory deprivations of a body denied expression by what Giorgio Agamben has called ‘a zone of exception’ (Phillips, 2006).KeywordsAustralian GovernmentGeneva ConventionSensory DeprivationMilitary TribunalAustralian CitizenThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.