Performance and War

One of the most unusual statistics in the study of performance and war is that aesthetic activity often increases in times of conflict. In this article I am interested in extending the consideration of performance and war to aesthetic projects that were located far removed from the actual place of conflict, but deeply connected with the affective impact of war. As an illustration of performative practice, the examples demonstrate the ways in which place making can play with documenting and representing war experiences in different ways. The two examples, This is Camp X Ray, in Manchester (a temporary installation) and the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial in Washington D.C. were designed in separate contexts for very different purposes; they nevertheless provide an understanding of the kinds of choices that artists make in representing the affective ‘truths’ of war experience. In both cases, the artists were interested in creating spaces that would make the wars more visible for an audience, and provide a tangible place in which experiences of war could be re-conceived and an affective connection made.

This dissertation offers a transnational study of theatre and performance that responded to the recent conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and beyond. Looking at work by artists primarily from Arab and Middle Eastern diasporas working in the US, UK, Canada, and Europe, the study examines how modes of performance in live art, documentary theatre, and participatory performance respond to and comment on the power imbalances, racial formations, and political injustices of these conflicts. Many of these performances are characterized by a deliberate blurring of the distinctions between performance and reality. This has meant that playwrights crafted scripts from the real words of soldiers instead of writing plays; performance artists harmed their real bodies, replicating the violence of war; actors performed in public space; and media artists used new technology to connect audiences to real warzones. This embrace of the real contrasts with postmodern suspicion of hyper-reality—which characterized much political performance in the 1990s—and marks a shift in understandings of the relationship between performance and the real. These strategies allowed artists to contend with the way that war today is also a multimedia attack on the way that reality is constructed and perceived. The dissertation traces the historical antecedents of these aesthetics in postmodern criticism of prior generations of political performance and shows how these artists struggled to discover new aesthetic strategies to criticize war, racism, and violence.