Performing Archives: Documentary Theatre, Transition and Adaptation to a New Lifestyle in Romanian Society

"The change of political regimes and the long period of transition that followed afterwards brought dramatic, even tragic shifts in common people’s lives, who were born and raised in the Eastern Bloc. These experiences, which were strikingly common in Eastern European countries, have left significant marks in nowadays society, which historians and artists alike are trying to analyze and explain to their audiences, in a personal and accessible form. This article aims to analyze the manners in which recent history themes, like the period of transition, economy and the essential lifestyle changes which came as a consequence, are researched and handled in Romanian documentary theatre. As follows, two theatre productions of this kind will be presented. They were considered to be a real success in the independent theatre scene in the past five years and their specificity is the shared socio-political context between stage and audience. Keywords: documentary theatre, archives, transition, recent history, non-Aristotelian theatre, independent theatre, consumerism, society. "

A Study on the Possibility of Liberal Theatre Class Employing Documentary Theatre Focusing on Die Ermittlung and The Acting Motivation

Documentary theatre is not only notable for its trends among contemporary theatre, but also for its various characteristics, many of which can connect learners' lives and society, as well as draw upon their critical cognition and convergent thinking skills. This article notes the educational implications found in documentary theatre, and discusses the possibility of liberal theatre courses employing documentary theatre. Classes like this convey knowledge of the theatre and is attempts to learn through it. In addition, various practical activities can be carried out by utilizing the convergence properties of the theatre, and from these activities learners can experience something quite aesthetic in nature that they otherwise might have missed. In this sense, this paper focuses on Die Ermittlung and The Acting Motivation. In traditional documentary theatre, Die Ermittlung, which deals with social issues, can provide an opportunity to critically recognize social problems. On the other hand, from the auto-documentary theatre we have The Acting Motivation, which expands the concept of documentary theatre that was previously discussed, and also reflects on the lives of young people and the society they must relate to. Not only can learners acquire knowledge of the theatre, but they can also reflect on society and themselves through its productions. In addition, the step-by-step activities attempted in conjunction with this class aim at helping students solve problems, and to express themselves using a theatrical-based imagination. The purpose of the final step of the program--the appreciation and reflection process--is to integrate learning with individual experiences, and to further find new questions. Through these discussions, the possibility of using documentary theatre as a practical model for convergence education and another class models is presented.

Infecting the Welfare State – The Swedish Play Kurage and the “AIDS Crisis”

The article focuses on the Swedish documentary theatre play Kurage (2020) in which three protagonists look back on how Sweden handled the “AIDS crisis” in the 1980s. In doing so, the play challenges the narrative of exceptional social conditions in Sweden and delivers a queer perspective on welfare state politics. Specifically, in the aesthetic conception of the play, the complex relation between welfare state and illness comes to the fore. I argue that Kurage not only builds on persistent metaphors of illness in literature but also expands epidemic narratives and thus exposes mechanisms of exclusion and marginalization in the welfare state. Finally, the article investigates in what ways pathology, medical institutions, or in a more general way: the understanding of medicine as a “neutral” science play a part in eliminating bodies, writing them out of the body politic and thus allowing for suffering and disappearing.

FROM TESTIMONY TO HETEROGLOSSIA: THE VOICE(S) OF LAMENT IN WE ARE THE PERSIANS!

We are the Persians! was a contemporary adaptation of Aeschy-lus’s The Persians presented in June 2015 at the Athens and Epidaurus Festival. Performed by displaced people from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh, and directed by Yolanda Markopoulou, the piece grew out of the Station Athens group’s five-year theatre workshops. Extracts from the original play were intertwined with performative material brought to the project by the participants: from real-life testimonies to vocal improvisations, poems, and songs in different languages. High-lighting the historical thematic of the play, this adaptation was presented as a documentary theatre piece, and the participants as ‘modern-day heralds’ who provided on stage ‘shocking accounts’ concerning ‘contem-porary wars’ (programme notes, 2015). After briefly revisiting the main body of literature on the voice of lament in ancient drama and in Aeschylus’s The Persians in particular, but also after discussing the recent stage history of the play in Greece, I conduct a close reading of this adaptation. Based on semi-directed interviews and audiovisual archives from both the rehearsals and the final show,I argue that the participants’ performance cannot be limited to their auto-biographical testimonies, which identify their status as refugees and/or asylum seekers. By intertwining Aeschylus with their own voices and languages, they reappropriate and reinvent the voice(s) of lament in ancient drama. In this sense, I suggest that We are the Persians! can be read as a hybrid performance of heteroglossia, which disrupts and potentially transforms dominant ways of receiving ancient drama on the modern Greek stage.

The War Mentality and The Brechtian Legacy

The present article aims to illustrate the way in which the two world wars and their socio-political effects have produced significant changes in the collective consciousness and in the means of perceiving and constructing the Brechtian aesthetics. Starting from the idea that the entire work of the German playwright can be interpreted as being under the influence of social crises, the stake of this article is to briefly present a few elements on which the cultural heritage, that we can encounter today in the area of the postdramatic theatre, was based on. Whether we are speaking about the new British, German, American or Romanian dramaturgy, or about documentary theatre artists, - who, along with their involvement in the stage process, also play an important social function -, this heritage has an essential part in the development of the spectators’ critical thinking; it also represents the essence of the direct communication between stage and audience.

HIV/AIDS, Harm Reduction, and Neoliberal Containment Strategies in Contemporary UK Documentary Theatre

Using Peter Darney’s play 5 Guys Chillin’ as a case study, this essay explores how documentary theatre may operate as a distinctly neoliberal public health measure when it comes to reducing the risk of HIV transmission related to subcultural practices such as chemsex. The subject of countless sensationalist and tacitly homophobic headlines in recent years, chemsex has generated a kind of moral panic around gay subcultures in recent years, with several journalists and filmmakers erroneously condemning the practice as the main driver of HIV in the UK. Although Darney has described the play as an attempt to tackle such demonisation, 5GC inadvertently ends up restating pathologizing narratives surrounding chemsex via what Roger Foster has termed an ‘ethic of authenticity': the notion that one can reach happiness by adapting to normative ways of living and neoliberal health diktats. Combining Foster’s critique of neoliberal therapeutic culture and the fiction of “wellness” with Herbert Marcuse’s theories surrounding so-called ‘one-dimensional society’, this essay seeks to explain how 5GC paradoxically perpetrates its ethos of anti-prejudice by pathologizing interview subjects as victims of a subculture intent on rejecting its own societal oppression.

Travelling intimacies, translation and betrayal in a creative geography

In 2019, we collaborated with German theatre artists to co-create Between Worlds: Outsourcing Dementia Care, an immersive, multi-media piece performed in Newcastle and Berlin. This performance work animated and staged our interviews conducted with the owners of and caregivers working in private care facilities recently built in northern Thailand to provide dementia care for overseas guests from across the Global North. This creation process also drew from interviews we conducted with the family members who had chosen this option for their loved ones with dementia. Incorporating elements of documentary theatre, movement and cinematic projection, Between Worlds was designed to bring audiences into an intimate space, drawing them close to the complexities of the outsourcing of dementia care in order to prompt public conversation and reflection on dementia care in both Thailand and the Global North. Here, we consider the performance of the play and the method that our theatre collaborators used to render transparent the process of translation within performance. We critically assess the outcome to question the possible betrayals implicit in creative and social science work and in the doing of cultural geography.

Describing Pain in Mary Raftery's Documentary Play No Escape

Documentary theatre is a genre in which real sources and events are used and edited to become the form of dramatic texts and performances. The personal experiences narrated in No Escape (2010), a documentary play by Mary Raftery, have shocked many people, due to the play’s multiple graphic descriptions of child abuse which took place in industrial schools and orphanages in Ireland. This article analyses how pain is presented in No Escape, by contrasting the language used, in their respective lines in the play, by authorities, victims, and representatives of the institutions. Pain, as a physical and psychological sensation, is a subject that still needs to be examined further in discussing the history of Ireland, to provide scholars and society with an opportunity to reflect upon this subject – and, perhaps, achieve healing.