Transgressive Storytelling or an Aesthetic of Injury: Performance, Pedagogy and Ethics

Abstract

Are uses of personal narrative in community arts projects overly romanticized? Is a critical pedagogy approach to witnessing testimony caught in a discourse of victim/oppressor/helper (educator)? This paper suggests that theatre exercises based in naturalism, when taken up by community groups and schools for use with people who have experienced violence, may evoke performances of testimony caught in an aesthetic of injury and an overly simplistic "standing in" for another. Such performances reinscribe a victim discourse that sustains the psychic residues of violent histories, codifying the very powerlessness they seek to address. How might the tools of the artist and aesthetic forms of popular theatre perform engagements with testimony that are insurgent or transgressive? This paper considers questions of power and ethics to problematize how my role as researcher and theatre/video writer impacted the way a group of refugees represented their testimonies to a Canadian born audience. Transgressive storytelling in this context considers the intimacy of speaking and listening to life histories and the vulnerability of the body as testimonial site. My theoretical approach to the re-telling of others' stories pays particular attention to the complex relationship between meaning and representation. The paper raises the danger of a superficial empathy that can result in approaching representation as a "mirror of reality," and suggests instead an intervening space of translation as transformation which takes into account the complexities of both speech and silence.