“Please Look at Yourself”: Insecurity and the Failure of Ethical Encounter in Autobiographical Performance

Abstract

Encounter between “I” and “You” is a central feature of autobiographical performance as the performer attempts to communicate an intimate sense of what it means to be a particular self to a second-person assemblage of curious witnesses. Ostensibly, the intention is that through this performative encounter, knowledge is imparted and the stranger becomes less strange. RARE, created by playwright Judith Thompson and an ensemble of disabled performers with Down Syndrome, stages just such an encounter between the audience and the autobiographical real. Using the lens of disability performance theory, this analysis of RARE considers how all autobiographical performance is entangled in questions about how the encounter with the real is shaped and to what end. The ethical instability of the situation combined with the risks of failed transmission invite the question: Why do we watch? Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s description of the source of fear in intercultural encounter with the stranger as founded in hybridity, this article traces several points of hybridity in RARE. First, RARE presents a thematic thread that reifies popular perception of Down Syndrome as itself characterized by an uncomfortable hybridity between child and adult, between dependence and independence. Second, the production’s staging choices present the performers’ bodies as hybrid, challenging mimesis with irrepressible presence. Finally, it will be shown that the autobiographical form in performance itself expresses a hybridity that unsettles theatricality. Ultimately, autobiographical encounter does not authentically illuminate what it means to be another, but instead confronts the means of encounter, generating productive self-reflexive disruption of ingrained biases about both autobiography and strangers.