PERFORMING TRANSLOCAL MEMORY: TESTAMENT AND TESTIMONY IN CONTEMPORARY THEATRE AND PERFORMANCE
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Testimonies: Crisis of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, Shoshana Felman makes the point that a witness is called upon wherever there is crisis of truth and evidence (p. 6). If we migrate with this assumption from the courtroom to the stage, we encounter what Karen Malpede calls "Theatre of Witness" or what Erdmann calls "Theatre of Testimony", which describes many contemporary plays and performances dealing with the representations of the Middle East. This article engages with contemporary theatre’s obsession with remembrance and the way the stage dramatizes the act of "bearing witness" in plays such as Wajdi Mouawad’s Scorched, Judith Thompson’s Palace of the End, and in multi-media performances such as Wafaa Bilal’s Shoot an Iraqi, and “…and Counting”. These plays and performances construct memory as a dual process of retrospective spatio-temporal narrative accounts, combined with physically enacted mnemonic flashbacks. This paper argues that the “memorialist turn” in theatre is a process of double disavowal that problematizes the witnessing of trauma and the trauma of witnessing, focusing on how the individual tries to remember or reconstruct what happened in the realm of the “real”, while escaping into the fantastical when the demands of bearing witness become severe. Finally, this paper addresses the modalities of perception of the audience bearing witness to witnessing, arguing that theatre does not construct the real or re-construct it for the audience, on the contrary if estranges it, not unlike Brechtian alienation, revealing an exchange that is both realist and anti-realist, artistic representation and reproduction of actuality, spectacle and mimesis, marking the relationship between the translocal forms of memory and the performative possibility of an aesthetic openness toward otherness.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.036 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.012 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".