Documenting War: Theatrical Interventions by Emily Mann and Heather Raffo

Abstract

In her study on war photography Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), Susan Sontag poses a crucial question about the possibilities of art when confronted with the instantaneous and ubiquitous mediatization of war in Western culture: how to represent the pain of others so that it can still affect the spectator, so that it can trigger our empathy, shock us into recognition, and, above all, mobilize us to act against war? Western theater artists have responded to this challenge of representing pain in a culture inundated by daily visual floods of violence and suffering in various ways. Some, like Sarah Kane, have chosen to immerse the spectator in an Artaudian Theater of Cruelty in order to prompt catharsis; others, like Jonathan Kalb and Caryl Churchill, have preferred radical abstraction and Brechtian alienation in order to provoke thought (see Saal). I am here interested in another possibility of regarding and representing pain, which in its great emphasis on factuality and truthfulness owes much to the mimetic approach addressed by Sontag in her study of war photography: documentary theater.