Channels of Witness: Space, Abstraction, and the Commemoration of Genocide

Abstract

����� ��� Soulographie just finished its run at La MaMa in New York. The project is twenty years of dramatic writing on genocide, spread across seventeen plays, presenting an array of perspectives (victim, perpetrator, witness, bystander) in various styles (from narrative time-lines to abstract puppetry), directed in cities ranging from Kampala (Uganda) to Warsaw (Poland) to San Francisco, Minneapolis, San Diego, Washington DC, Providence, Bronxville (New York State), and New York City (Brooklyn and Manhattan), staged by seventeen directors, supported by an extensive team of producers, dramaturgs, designers, managers, and other collaborators. 1 Genocidal crimes are constructed to be unspeakable and they are maintained that way, defended from an accountability to the fabric of reality and historical memory. The ambient method of production stands against this strategic inaccessibility by approaching from all sides at once. Genocidaires booby-trap their hundred paths into the human soul; we have to find a hundred others. Memorial theatre as a species of dissent and chthonic retrieval is multifarious: held in common by makers (including audiences) and disciplines. I wrote the plays and coproduced. Soulographie persists as a collective, after the production; we sustain a commitment to large scale, collective, theatre-ofwitness projects. 2