Trashed

Abstract

Our performance piece, entitled Trashed, initially grew from three central questions 1) What is the role of testimony in recording history and/or current affairs? 2) What role can theatre play in communicating personal testimony? and 3) How does a person (or people) perform testimony? To explore these questions, we took on the following personal testimony: A young man in high school was giving blood and 45 minutes in, the administrators re‐read his form, realized he had checked the box saying he had had sex with a man (since 1977) and promptly took his bag of blood and dropped it in a garbage can. We were all struck by this story and particularly by the image of blood in a garbage can; however, as five heterosexual women we were unsure if and how we could communicate the testimony to an audience. Working from the idea that our responsibility to the issue is our “ability to respond,” our performance piece became a manifestation of these abilities. We chose to use movement‐based clown to enter and explore the material from a neutral space—clown negates specific characteristics such as gender or social orientation. Combining objective fact with clown allowed us to visually represent the issue, our confusion surrounding the issue and our physical disconnect with the issue as performers. Our hope is to achieve a performance that serves the original testimony emotional justice while allowing an audience to engage with the related issue on multiple levels.