Output details

‘‘Why me?’ Trauma through a Performance Lens: Performance through a Trauma Lens

How can utilising interdisciplinary practices lead to new perspectives of performance and traumatic experience?

This research is one example of a constellation of practices and outputs that explores how narratives of trauma and truth are represented in a creative and performance context. The chapter plays with formal representations of re-telling (on the page) and places an emphasis on the manipulation of the reader as a reference to physical representations of truth/fantasy/biography in contemporary performance practice. The research is collaborative (all co-written/created with Peter Bray) and interdisciplinary, seeking to explore and unpack the interstices between performance studies and trauma/bereavement studies. This investigation productively combines these most often distinctly separate areas, as a means to interrogate and reposition notions of ‘trauma’.

Research findings have been disseminated in one international conference paper (First Global Conference of Trauma: Theory and Practice, Prague, Czech Republic 2011), one international performance (Second Global Conference of Trauma: Theory and Practice, Prague, Czech Republic 2012), one chapter in a an ebook (‘Fathers and Sons: An Autoethnographic Case Study of Bereavement and Trauma’, in Traumatic Imprints: Performance, Art, Literature and Theoretical Practice, edited by Catherine Barrette, Bridget Haylock and Danielle Mortimer, Inter-Disciplinary Press: Oxford.
ISBN 978-1-84888-085-65), and one book that I have edited, including a preface and chapter (Voicing Trauma and Truth, edited by Oliver Bray and Peter Bray Inter-Disciplinary Press: Oxford.).