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‘Did you mean post-traumatic theatre?’: The vicissitudes of traumatic memory in contemporary postdramatic performances

This article revisits the relationship between trauma and theatre, being the first to explore specifically how postdramatic forms of theatre relate to posttraumatic forms of memory. It asks whether there ‘might not be an affinity between trauma’s incommensurability, inaccessibility and ultimate resistance to narrative representation and postdramatic theatre’s anti-representational impetus’ (p.1).

The article grew out conference papers on Chicago-based company Goat Island presented at three international conferences and symposia, the IFTR/FIRT conference on "The Fictional and the Real in Contemporary Theatre", Jagellonian University, Krakow (Nov 2005), the ‘Beyond Drama: Postdramatic Theatre Symposium’, Huddersfield (Feb 2006) and the symposium on 'Goat Island: Lastness, raiding the archive, and pedagogical practices in performance', Lancaster (March 2008), as well as a Manchester panel discussion on the site-specific performance After Dubrovka by Neil McKenzie and Mole Whetherell (2007).

It appears as part of a double issue of the Australian interdisciplinary, refereed journal Performance Paradigm devoted to the topic ‘After Effects: Performing the Ends of Memory’, thus contributing to a renewed international dialogue on performance’s relation to memory.

The readings of selected performance examples by Goat Island, MacKenzie/Wetherell and Forced Entertainment propose to begin to map a continuum of the multifarious ways in which postdramatic performances may engage with the nature of traumatic memory. They do so by drawing on post-Freudian psychoanalytical theories of trauma by Jacques Lacan, Cathy Caruth and Slavoj Zizek and by critically engaging with existing work on ‘memory theatre’ by Jeanette Malkin and others. Significantly, the analysis draws attention to the phenomenon that, on one end of the spectrum, posttraumatic memories may be heavily mediatised and only vicariously experienced – leading to new forms of postdramatic ‘memory theatre’ that bear witness to the imbrications of memory, fantasy and forgetting in the age of mass media.