Bodies of Evidence
Bodies of Evidence
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Bodies of Evidence
CarolMartin
Carol Martin is Associate Professorof Drama at Tisch School of the Arts/NYU. Her essaysand
interviews have appeared in journals in the U.S. and abroad and have been translated into
French, Polish, Chinese, and Japanese. She curated a special series on documentary theatre in
May 2006for the Martin E. Segal Theatre at CUNY's Graduate Center. Her most recent book
is Global Foreigners, coedited with Saviana Stanescu (forthcoming, Seagull Press).
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Contemporary documentary theatre represents a struggle to shape and remember the most
transitory history-the complex ways in which men and women think about the events that
shape the landscapes of their lives. Much post-9/11 documentary theatre is etched with the
urgency of the struggle over the future of the past.
Those who make documentary theatre interrogate specific events, systems of belief, and
political affiliations precisely through the creation of their own versions of events, beliefs, and
politics by exploiting technology that enables replication; video, film, tape recorders, radio,
copy machines, and computers are the sometimes visible, sometimes invisible, technological
means of documentary theatre. While documentary theatre remains in the realm of hand-
craft-people assemble to create it, meet to write it, gather to see it-it is a form of theatre
in which technology is a primary factor in the transmission of knowledge.
Here the technological postmodern meets oral-theatre culture. The most advanced means
of replication and simulation are used to capture and reproduce "what really happened" for
presentation in the live space of the theatre. Technology is often the initial generating com-
ponent of the tripartite structure of contemporary documentary theatre: technology, text,
and body. The bodies of the performers as well as the bodies of those being represented
in documentary theatre are decisive in ways that overlap but are also different from fic-
tive theatre. In documentary theatre, the performers are sometimes those whose stories are
being told. But more often than not documentary theatre is where "real people" are absent-
unavailable, dead, disappeared-yet reenacted. They are represented through various
means, including stage acting, film clips, photographs, and other "documents" that attest
to the veracity of both the story and the people being enacted.1
How events are remembered, written, archived, staged, and performed helps determine
the history they become. More than enacting history, although it certainly does that, docu-
mentary theatre also has the capacity to stage historiography. At its best, it offers us a way
to think about disturbing contexts and complicated subject matter while revealing the virtues
and flaws of its sources. "History is hysterical: it is constituted only if we consider it, only if
we look at it-and in order to look at it, we must be excluded from it," writes Roland Barthes
(1981:65). Yet as Freddie Rokem points out: "The theatre 'performing history' seeks to over-
come both the separation and the exclusion from the past, striving to create a community
where the events from this past will matter again" (2000:xii). In practice, much of contempo-
rary documentary theatre is written contemporaneously with the events that are its subject.
It directly intervenes in the creation of history by unsettling the present.
In the interest of differentiating documentary theatre from other forms of theatre,
especially historical fiction, it is useful to understand it as created from a specific body of
archived material: interviews, documents, hearings, records, video, film, photographs, etc.
Most contemporary documentary theatre makes the claim that everything presented is part
of the archive. But equally important is the fact that not everything in the archive is part of
the documentary. This begs the crucial question: What is the basis for the selection, order,
and manner of presentation of materials from the archive? The process of selection, editing,
organization, and presentation is where the creative work of documentary theatre gets done.
2. Chris Mirto and I had this conversationon 21 January2006 after I saw his staged reading of Dionysusin '69
at the JeffersonMarketLibrary.Mirto had seen Brian De Palma'sfilm of The PerformanceGroup's 1968
production,which leavesout majorportions of the play. The film, the original performancetext, production
photographs,and Max Waldman'sstudio photographsof the birth and death ritualswere the documents
Mirto used to mount his staged reading.
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ephemeral. We know, also, that filming and recording change what is documented; the
instruments of preservation affect what's preserved.
Documentary theatre emphasizes certain kinds of memory and buries others. What is
outside the archive-glances, gestures, body language, the felt experience of space, and the
proximity of bodies-is created by actors
and directors according to their own rules of
admissibility. The hidden seams of documen- Ironically, it is precisely what is not in
tary theatre raise questions about the contin- the archive, what is added by making
uum between documentation and simulation.
the archive into repertory, that infuses
Extratextual and subtextual "languages" are
what we normally think of as theatre. It is pre- documentary theatre with its particular
cisely the way interpretation is built from what theatrical viability.
is not part of the archive that brings "real life"
and believability to documentary theatre. The
testimony of the actors gives the evidence of the playwright factual verisimilitude. Ironically,
then, it is precisely what is not in the archive, what is added by making the archive into reper-
tory, that infuses documentary theatre with its particular theatrical viability.
Evidence and testimony are used in ways not unlike a court of law. The path of evidence
can be forensically constructed from the archive, as a good prosecutor reconstructs a crime.
In both the theatre and the courtroom, the evidence serves as a pretext for the testimony of
actors, of witnesses and lawyers.
Evidence is typically impersonal-material objects, laboratory reports, bank records,
etc.-while testimony involves the narration of memory and experience. The drama of
a trial, at least U.S. trials, depends on presenting evidence in the form of conflicting testi-
mony. Documentary theatre draws on this courtroom tradition of conflicting narration.
Its practitioners use the archive as evidence to create a performance of testimony; audiences
understand what they see and hear as nonfiction; the actors ostensibly perform "verbatim."
This allows an audience to forget that creating any work out of edited archival materials relies
on the formal qualities of fiction as much as on archival evidence. The real life drama of the
courtroom is no different, finally. In court, as in documentary theatre, the forensic evidence
stored in the archive is as much constructed as it is found. Not only do the police frequently
fabricate evidence, but also both the prosecution and the defense do everything they can to
credit/discredit evidence that might support/destroy their case.
Herein lies the problem. Is documentary theatre just another form of propaganda, its own
system of constructed half-truths for the sake of specific arguments? Typically its texts and
performances are presented not just as a version of what happened but the version of what hap-
pened. The intention is to persuade spectators to understand specific events in particular ways.
Even when the text is indefinite in its conclusions, audience response may not be. The occasion
of documentary theatre can be seen as a political affiliation in and of itself. The outrage at New
York Theatre Workshop's decision to postpone a production of My Name is RachelCorrie,the
story of the 23-year-old pro-Palestinian American activist crushed to death by an Israeli bull-
dozer while trying to protect a Palestinian home is a case in point. James Nicola, the artistic
director of New York Theatre Workshop, made the decision to postpone the play after canvass-
ing unidentified Jewish friends and advisors. "The uniform answer we got was that the fantasy
that we could present the work of this writer simply as a work of art without appearing to take
a position was just that, a fantasy,"Nicola commented (in McKinley 2006:2). The play aside,
after her death Rachel Corrie became a polarizing figure. Yasser Arafat lionized her as a martyr, 0
aligning her memory with that of suicide bombers (Segal 2006:1). Nicola expressed concern
that the January 2006 Palestinian election of Hamas, bent on the destruction of Israel, would
overly determine the reception of the play in the U.S. tC
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Rachel Corrie was unequivocally on the side of the Palestinians. Toward the end of the
play, she answers her mother's suggestion that Palestinian violence against Israel may justify
Israel's actions by defending Palestinian action as resistance to occupation. Corrie accuses
the Israeli government of defying the fourth Geneva Convention "which prohibits collective
punishment, prohibits the transfer of an occupying country's population into an occupied
area, prohibits the expropriation of water resources and the destruction of civilian infra-
structure such as farms [...]" (Rickman and Viner 2005:48). Corrie's story-as represented
in the editing of her emails, letters, and diary entries-presents her desire to end the suffer-
ing of Palestinians even at the cost of her own life.
The play does not mention the tunnels from Egypt into Gaza used for transporting
rocket launchers, guns, and explosives (Rothstein 2006:1). Nor is there any discussion of the
countless and continuing attacks on Israeli civilians intended not only to kill with explosives
but also to maim with packed nails and traumatize the memory of Jewish festivals. (The 1996
Purim massacre at Dizengoff Center, including the murder of children dressed up in costumes
for the holiday, and the 2002 Passover massacre at the Park Hotel in Netanya where many
of the celebrants were Holocaust survivors, and for which Hamas claimed responsibility, are
only two examples.) On both sides, the lists are long. And on both sides there are many-
Israelis and Arabs, Jews and Muslims-who work for peace every day of their lives.
My Name is RachelCorrie is a very disturbing and moving play. Rachel was so young when
she died and yet had been an activist for so long. Rothstein is correct when he points out,
"Corrie's is an unusual voice, engrossing in its imaginative power, hinting at adolescent
transformation and radicalization" (2006:1). The play is finally about Rachel Corrie, not the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The last scene of the play is a video of Rachel recorded at her
Fifth Grade Press Conference on World Hunger:
My dream is to stop hunger by the year 2000. My dream is to give the poor a chance.
My dream is to save the forty thousand people who die each day. My dream can and
will come true if we all look into the future and see the light that shines there. If we
ignore hunger, the light will go out. If we all help and work together, it will grow and
burn free with the potential of tomorrow. (Rickman and Viner 2005:52)
Rachel's light did go out while enacting her political conviction. We need to know this. We
need to weep over our collective failure to make the world the place it could be. We need to
see My Name is RachelCorrie and react according to our own convictions.
Asking spectators to examine the ways in which documentary functions is very much a
part of some forms of documentary theatre. Artists such as the Lebanese Walid Raad and the
German director Hans-Werner Kroesinger create work that subverts ordinary documentary
theatre by complicating and interrogating
The paradox of a theatre of facts that archival truth. The result is a genre that can
invite contemplation of the ways in which sto-
uses representation to enact a ries are told-a form of Brechtian distancing
relationship to the real should not be that asks spectators to simultaneously under-
stand the theatrical, the real, and the simu-
lost in the enthusiasm for a politically
lated, each as its own form of truth.
viable theatre. One might ask what documentary theatre
does, what are its functions? These include:
1. To reopentrials in order to critique justice, as in The Trial of the Refuseniks(2004) by Igal
Ezraty (included in this issue), GrossIndecency(1997) by Moises Kaufman, and the trial
plays of Emily Mann, ExecutionofJustice (1983) and Greensboro(A Requiem)(1996).
2. To createadditionalhistoricalaccounts,as do I Am My Own Wife (2003) by Doug Wright
(interviewed in this issue), Talking to Terrorists(2005) by Robin Soans, Guantdnamo: "Honor
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From an email to Carol Martin from Ari Roth,
Artistic Director, Theatre J, Washington DC, 21 April 2006
Likeme, you've noted that this powerful play [My Name Is Rachel Corrie]is significant
also by what it leaves out. It leaves out the other people who've died; it leaves out some
of the reasons for the bulldozing of tunnels and homes in the West Bank and Gaza.
It also leaves out explicit references in Corrie's emails to the IDFperpetrating
"genocide" against the Palestinian people [see Rachelswords.org]. While violence
does abound in the Territories, it wouldn't be accurate to characterize it as genocidal
violence, nor should it look, smell, and feel like it in all but name. The play presents the
portrait of a defenseless population being systematically starved, terrorized, crushed,
and murdered. Who are the perpetrators? Some 60 years after the Shoah, victims and
perpetrators have seemingly switched places.
The creation of the dramatic protagonist, Rachel Corrie, is an unconscious, or very
deliberate hijacking of the symbol of Anne Frankas icon of indiscriminate violence and
victimization. Its emotional effectiveness serves to shove the icon of Anne Frankoff
the stage and replace it with a newly minted edition of our millennium's new martyr.
Shalom, Anne Frankand Ahalan, Rachel Corrie.
Bound to Defend Freedom"(2004) by Victoria Brittain and Gillian Slovo, and The Colour
ofJustice (1999) by Nicolas Kent and Richard Norton-Taylor (all discussed in this issue).3
3. To reconstructan event, as in Three Posters:A Performance/Video(2000) by Elias Khoury and
Rabih Mroud (in this issue), and even a total environment such as Plimoth Plantation.4
4. To intermingleautobiographywith history, as in Ron Vawter's part-documentary Roy Cohn/
Jack Smith (1994) in which Vawter sutures the lives of three very different gay men:
Roy Cohn, Jack Smith, and himself; in Leeny Sack's The Survivor and the Translator(1980),
built around an interview she did with her maternal grandmother, Rachela Rachman,
a Holocaust survivor; and in Emily Mann's Annulla: An Autobiography(1977), the story
of a Holocaust survivor and her interviewer.
5. To critique the operationsof bothdocumentaryandfiction, as does Walid Raad's Atlas Group
(discussed in this issue) in which the archives are real, simulated, and invented.
6. To elaboratethe oral culture of theatre in which gestures, mannerisms, and attitudes are
passed and replicated via technology, as does Anna Deavere Smith's process in which she
uses tape recordings of her interviewees to both become possessed by them and to allow
a separation between the actor's self and the other (see Martin 1996:192).
The paradox of a theatre of facts that uses representation to enact a relationship to the real
should not be lost in the enthusiasm for a politically viable theatre. Documentary theatre's
blurring of the real and the represented is just as problematic as television's ambiguous
"reenactments," "docudramas,"and "reality"shows. It is part and parcel of the mediatization
of everyday life. Where does one type of performance leave off and another begin? No doubt
the phrase "documentary theatre" fails us. It is inadequate. Yet at present it is the best phrase
available. In the U.K., documentary theatre is known as "verbatim theatre" because of its
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penchant for direct quotation. However, verbatim theatre does not necessarily display its quo-
tation marks, its exact sources. "Verbatim" can also be an unfortunately accurate description
of documentary theatre as it infers great authority to moments of utterance unmitigated by
an ex post facto mode of maturing memory. Its duplicitous nature is akin to the double-dealing
of television docudramas.
Because so much documentary theatre has been made in order to "set the record straight"
or to bring materials otherwise ignored to the public's attention, we ought not ignore its
moral and ethical claims to truth. It is no accident that this kind of theatre has reemerged
during a period of international crises of war, religion, government, truth, and informa-
tion. Governments "spin" the facts in order to tell stories. Theatre spins them right back in
order to tell different stories. Poststructuralist thought has correctly insisted that social real-
ity-including reporting on social reality-is constructed. There is no "really real" anywhere
in the world of representation. Depending on who you are, what your politics are, and so on,
documentary theatre will seem to be "getting at the truth" or "telling another set of lies."
Representation creates multiple truths for its own survival; oral, textual, and performed
stories invite repetition, revision, and reconfiguration.
Theatre, after all, combines the emotional weight of storytelling with truth-telling and
a sense of experiencing something happening right in front of our eyes. At the same time,
theatre is miragelike. It disappears as you get closer to it, and as you submit it to rigorous
examination. Documentary theatre's seemingly stable telling and retelling in the context
of the ephemeral medium of theatre points to how quickly the past can be broken and
reassembled. Official memory laws announce both the importance and political liability
of memory in determining historical truth.5 Even when the laws are apparently objective and
accurate, legislating historical truth raises suspicion because it dictates opinion and forecloses
freedom of speech. Nonlegislative memory regulation-such as some forms of documentary
theatre-is ostensibly designed to offer the opportunity to reexamine and reconsider evidence
and opinion and exercise freedom of speech. In practice, documentary theatre can be as
prescriptive as it is provocative in the way it functions as its own domain of memory.6
5. France's1990 Gayssot law made denying the Holocaust a crime. Many countries-including Germany,
Switzerland,Austria, Belgium, and Poland-followed suit with similar memory laws.
6. In "AnotherKind of Metamorphosis"I wrote about contested memory:"Memory,when given its time and
space, is often anguishing. So distressingare parts of Poland'ssocial and religious memory that a team of
historiansat the Institute of National Remembrancehas to help determinewhat national memory might be.
Right now Radzilow of sixty years ago bleeds in the brains of its citizens, as it should. Taunted, beaten, tor-
mented, stabbed, and burned alive were the Jewish women, children, and men. Yet the monument commemo-
rating the massacreis wrong: the wrong date, the wrong perpetrators.Bishop StanislawStefanekof Lomza
says the people of the regionwere innocent. In a compelling performativeact, ReverendHenryk Jankowski
agreeingwith Stefanekmade a model of the charredbarn where 500 Jewish people were burned alive and
placed it in his church to remind congregantsof the false accusationsagainst them. A model of a charred
barnwhere 500 were murderedas a reminderof innocence? Why would anyone want to disguise a symbol
of murderas a symbol of innocence?This must be what the Catholic Church means by the 'mysteryof God"'
(2001:288-91; publishedin Polish).
7. In 1992 Anna DeavereSmith performedFiresin the Mirrorat the Public Theatre in New York.In the play,
Smith told the storiesof the Crown Heights riots after an accident involving a rebbiwhose car struck and
killed Gavin Cato, a black child, which was followed by a retaliationmurderof a young Jewish scholar,
YankelRosenbaum.Firesin the Mirrorshifted our understandingof the ways in which social justice can be
theatricallyconceptualizedand staged. PredatingSmith's work is that of Emily Mann who also addresses
social justice. To date, Mann'sdocumentaryplays are:AnnullaAllen: TheAutobiographyofa Survivor(1977;
Theatre CommunicationsGroup, 1985), Still Life (1980; Dramatists Play Service, 1982); Executionoffustice
(1984; AmericanTheatreMagazine, 1985), Having Our Say: TheDelany Sisters'First100 Years(1995; Theatre
.ci Communications Group, 1996), Greensboro(A Requiem)(1996; Theatre Communications Group, 1997).
Annulla and Still Lifewere createdfrom interviews.With ExecutionofJusticeand Greensboro(A Requiem),
Mann expandedher documentarytechnique by adding letters, recordings,films, videos, court records,histori-
(.) cal records,interviews,and newspaperaccounts to her interviews.
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Late-20th-century documentary theatre tended to privilege local and national narratives.7
Things changed after 9/11. With the U.S. government using its enormous military and
covert power in many parts of the world and shrouding its operations at home (the Patriot
Act, Homeland Security) an increasing number of documentary theatre works began to
address global crises across national borders. How should we look at the murders of Stephen
Lawrence and Matthew Shepard, the abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantainamo, Lebanese
car bombings, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the
sexual abuse scandals in the Roman Catholic Church? How can we regard all this as theatre?
Clearly there is no single ideology or style of presentation that best responds to these questions
or typifies documentary theatre. As I write, I am sure the form continues to morph.
Finally, what is real and what is true are not necessarily the same. A text can be fictional
yet true. A text can be nonfictional yet untrue. Documentary theatre is an imperfect answer
that needs our obsessive analytical attention especially since, in ways unlike any other form
of theatre, it claims to have bodies of evidence.
References
Barthes,Roland
1981 CameraLucida. New York: Wang and Hill.
Martin, Carol
2001 "AnotherKind of Metamorphosis."In Konteksty, edited by Wlodzimierz Staniewski
(in Polish),208-91. Sztuka:Instytut SztukiPolskiejAkademiiNauk.
Martin, Carol,ed.
1996 A Sourcebookof Feminist Theatre and Performance:On and Beyond the Stage.
London:Routledge.
McKinley,Jessie
2006 "Play About Demonstrator's Death Is Delayed." New YorkTimes, 28 February:E2.
Rickman,Alan, and KatharineViner
2005 My Name is Rachel Corrie. London: Nick Hern Books.
Rokem,Freddie
2000 Performing History: TheatricalRepresentationsof the Past in ContemporaryTheatre. Iowa City:
University of Iowa Press.
Rothstein, Edward
2006 "Too Hot to Handle,Too Hot to Not Handle."New YorkTimes,6 March:E1.
Schechner, Richard
1985 "Restoration of Behavior." In Between Theatreand Anthropology,35-116. Philadelphia:
Universityof PennsylvaniaPress.
Segal, David
2006 "War Cries and Theatre's Contested Ground." WashingtonPost, 9 April:N1.
Taylor, Diana
2003 The Archive and the Repertoire.Durham: Duke University Press.
Wangh, Steve
2002 Email to author, 10 June.
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