Searching for Common Ground: Performance, Testimony, and Small Acts of Repair
Summary
Building on the theoretical framework established in Section One, Section Two uses three key case studies to illustrate some of the ways that theatre artists in the twenty-first century have grappled with the pressing issues at stake in memory studies, including questions of truth and authenticity, debates about the ethics and politics of memory, and the inescapable tension between memory and history. We start by asking whether performing memory and history can be reparatory and then go on to reflect on contestations over memory and the significance of the emergence of reparations as a key term with which to think about the wrongs of the past and the possibilities of repair. Then we move to the works selected for analysis – Lola Arias’s Minefield/Campo minado (UK/Argentina 2016), Yael Ronen’s Common Ground (Germany/Bosnia and Herzegovina 2014), and Robert Lepage’s The Seven Streams of the River Ota (Canada 1994–1998). These performances speak to the global currency of memory in theatre today when considered individually, and only more so when placed side-by-side. In examining the aesthetics, ethics, and politics of these works, Section Two thus aims to identify some of the strategies that theatre artists have recently used to explore memories of war, conflict, and contested pasts.
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