"This book is a collection of essays by playwrights, directors, devisers, scholars, and educators whose praxis involves representing, theorizing, and performing social trauma. Chapters explore how psychic catastrophes and ruptures are often embedded in social systems of oppression and forged in zones of conflict within and across national borders. Through multiple lenses and diverse approaches, the authors examine the connections between collective trauma, social identity, and personal struggle. We look at the generational transmission of trauma, socially induced pathologies, and societal re-inscriptions of trauma, from mass incarceration to war-induced psychoses, from gendered violence through racist practices. Collective trauma may shape, protect, and preserve group identity, promoting a sense of cohesion and meaning, even as it shakes individuals through pain. Engaging with communities under significant stress through artistic practice offers a path toward reconstructing the meaning(s) of social trauma, to make sense of the past, understand the present and re-vision the future. The essays combine theoretical and practical work, exploring the conceptual foundations and the artists' processes as they interrogate the intersections of personal grief and communal mourning, through drama, poetry, and embodied performance"--

This book is a collection of chapters by playwrights, directors, devisers, scholars, and educators whose praxis involves representing, theorizing, and performing social trauma. Chapters explore how psychic catastrophes and ruptures are often embedded in social systems of oppression and forged in zones of conflict within and across national borders. Through multiple lenses and diverse approaches, the authors examine the connections between collective trauma, social identity, and personal struggle. We look at the generational transmission of trauma, socially induced pathologies, and societal re-inscriptions of trauma, from mass incarceration to war-induced psychoses, from gendered violence through racist practices. Collective trauma may shape, protect, and preserve group identity, promoting a sense of cohesion and meaning, even as it shakes individuals through pain. Engaging with communities under significant stress through artistic practice offers a path towards reconstructing the meaning(s) of social trauma, making sense of the past, understanding the present, and re-visioning the future. The chapters combine theoretical and practical work, exploring the conceptual foundations and the artists’ processes as they interrogate the intersections of personal grief and communal mourning, through drama, poetry, and embodied performance.

Trauma-tragedy investigates the extent to which performance can represent the ‘unrepresentable’ of trauma. Throughout, there is a focus on how such representations might be achieved and if they could help us to understand trauma on personal and social levels. In a world increasingly preoccupied with and exposed to traumas, this volume considers what performance offers as a means of commentary that other cultural products do not. The book’s clear and coherent navigation of complex relation between performance and trauma and its analysis of key practitioners and performances (from Sarah Kane to Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, Harold Pinter to Forced Entertainment, and Phillip Pullman to Franco B) make it accessible and useful to students of performance and trauma studies, yet rigorous and incisive for scholars and specialists. Duggan explores ideas around the phenomenological and socio-political efficacy and impact of performance in relation to trauma. Ultimately, the book advances a new performance theory or mode, ‘trauma-tragedy’, that suggests much contemporary performance can generate the sensation of being present in trauma through its structural embodiment in performance, or ‘presence-in-trauma effects’.

This book explores the use of drama or theatre texts about, as approaches to, or methodologies for, interventions in conflict and post-conflict contexts. It maps the role of drama/theatre in the centre and in the aftermath of overt and direct conflict, traces how the relationship between drama/theatre and conflict is shaping the socio-cultural, political, and aesthetic landscapes of these contexts, and engages with drama/theatre as methodologies to address or forge new relationships around conflict. As such, it deals with the transformative abilities of drama/theatre in contexts where conflict or violence is overt or covert in its effects, expressions and modes of social control in a range of geographical constituencies. It includes chapters predominantly from South Africa, but also from rural Nigeria and New Zealand, reflecting work on conflict in prisons, tertiary and secondary education, cities, villages and families. It also contains two new original play scripts, both resulting in acclaimed performances: Hush, on family violence in New Zealand, and The Line, on xenophobia in South Africa.

In his thesis paper, entitled: Theatre of Trauma , MFA Directing candidate Nathan Singh uses his three years of graduate school to further develop his theories of a theatre of trauma. He uses class-work, productions and the philosophies/works of other theatre-makers to articulate how theatre is a powerful outlet to show survivors processing different types of trauma. In doing this, he has expands his vision and aesthetic on directing (or generating) works about trauma and human suffering. He also investigates how theatre can help heal and/or reclaim trauma. In the first part, he shares his background on how to got to The Theatre School at DePaul University. The work he was doing in Los Angeles, both theatrically as a freelance director and personally in therapy, was subconsciously pushing him towards the topic of trauma. In his first year of grad school, he learned text analysis that helped track the journey of characters, directed a play about Repressed Memory Syndrome, learned about (and was influenced by) directing theorists who were tackling social and societal trauma in their work, and generated postdramatic theatre pieces that combined images with different types of emotional scars.

Without William Shakespeare, we wouldn’t have literary masterpieces like Romeo and Juliet. But without Henry Condell and John Heminges, we would have lost half of Shakespeare’s plays forever! After the death of their friend and mentor, the two actors are determined to compile the First Folio and preserve the words that shaped their lives. They’ll just have to borrow, beg, and band together to get it done. Amidst the noise and color of Elizabethan London, THE BOOK OF WILL finds an unforgettable true story of love, loss, and laughter, and sheds new light on a man you may think you know.

This insightful book explores the impact of traumatic experiences on the constitution of narrative identity. Editors Edmundo Balsem‹o Pires, Cl‡udio Alexandre S. Carvalho, and Joana Ricarte bring together multidisciplinary experts to examine the epistemic and ethical-political value of narrative memory, demonstrating its significance in forming essential aspects of the self and collective identity.

Scholarship of Spanish and Latin American culture has noted the ways that cultural products respond to the regions' legacy of violence and crisis. These studies have attempted to identify how culture reflects violence and functions as historical memory. A fairly recent field of research dedicated to understanding cultural production related to the Holocaust has argued for reading these cultural products as mediations of social trauma. Building on this scholarship and adding insights from three areas of psychological research (cognitive, clinical and psychoanalytic), this dissertation suggests that we may best be able to understand the way that culture interacts with historical violence if we read culture as the product of a society experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder. In this way, theatre is understood as playing a key role in the ways that society responds to trauma. The theatre, conceived as a public experience of culture, is a particularly powerful source for recognizing how societies understand large-scale crisis. Isolating the traumas of Spain's Civil War, the dictatorships of Pinochet in Chile and the military Junta in Argentina this dissertation suggests that theatre enacts four key traumatic tropes: memory, avoidance, repetition compulsion, and witnessing. The first chapter of this study will define post-traumatic stress disorder and contextualize it in terms of the traumas, or the wounds, suffered by Argentina, Chile, and Spain. Lastly, it outlines a set of features that post-traumatic culture exhibits. The rest of the chapters deal with specific texts that differ in their time, location, and style to see how they adhere to the post-traumatic guidelines outlined in the first chapter. The second chapter examines Ariel Dorfman's La muerte y la doncella and Alfonso Sastre's Escuadra hacia la muerte. The third chapter features "El desconcierto" by Diana Raznovich and Lo crudo, lo cocido, lo podrido by Marco Antonio de la Parra. The post-traumatic reaches it pinnacle in the final two works: Informacion para extranjeros by Griselda Gambaro and El arquitecto y el emperador de Asiria. In conclusion, I argue that theatrical representations of these four aspects of trauma help the nation assimilate, understand, by active remembering, their nation's traumatic past.

This book investigates contemporary British and Irish performances that stage traumatic narratives, histories, acts and encounters. It includes a range of case studies that consider the performative, cultural and political contexts for the staging and reception of sexual violence, terminal illness, environmental damage, institutionalisation and asylum. In particular, it focuses on 'bodies in shadow' in twenty-first century performance: those who are largely written out of or marginalised in dominant twentieth-century patriarchal canons of theatre and history. This volume speaks to students, scholars and artists working within contemporary theatre and performance, Irish and British studies, memory and trauma studies, feminisms, performance studies, affect and reception studies, as well as the medical humanities.

With 70% of the world’s population expected to live in urban environments by 2050, cities are poised to become the most significant spaces to shape personal and communal identity. As contemporary cities become “event destinations” a dialogue is emerging between the performing arts and the urban context and social fabric. Inspired by the principles of Psychogeography, this collection of essays highlights the performative aspects of cities as landscapes of creative inspiration where curiosity, imagination, playfulness, and the energy of the street combine with contemporary performance practices to create immersive public art experiences. Written by an international cohort of scholar-artists, these essays offer arts practitioners, urban specialists, and general readers a practical guide to experiencing the cityscape as the Artscape.