Different Ideas Around The Presentation Of Trauma On Stage
Theatre is a safe space, emotions are expressed, trauma is lived, and art is a therapy. There are two types of people in theatre, the actor and audience. Staging trauma or violence would require reconsideration of these two people. One may have experienced the trauma or both. Trauma has been staged mostly metaphorically in most cases such as rape and/or traumatic violence. In this essay I would be talking about staging trauma and how it has been staged but first I will put into understanding what is trauma, the courses of it, the results and how all that has and is represented on stage.
Socio-psychological process
“An adequate definition of trauma would require the inclusion of both the objective and subjective components of a traumatic experience” (Vedat Sar & Erdinc Ozurk 2006:7). Trauma is a threatening experience may be caused by witnessing or going through that intimidating experience. Trauma can be whatever a person has found triggering whenever they think of it, such as death of loved ones, crime, rape, domestic abuse, substance abuse and/or violence.
Vedat and Erdinc believes trauma is a threatening experience which turn an adaptive process to a maladaptive (2006:7). People can change characters because of trauma, even changing their style of living or even worse take their own lives if help is not provided. Trauma is caused by different events which occurs to one’s life or even by experiencing them from afar. For an example, a person can witness crime that could be anything (murder, rape) seeing gangster killing a person or each other, that could cause trauma.
Trauma can cause a person to have nightmares that will lead to an unhealthy lifestyle. If trauma is not dealt with at an earlier stage, a person can get breakdown, bipolar, depression and anxiety and those are sicknesses if I may put it that way, that can lead one to take their own life. People deal with trauma in different ways, such as going to a counselling center, others speak with the people they trust the most and others find comfort in their religion. Going to church and praying to God, talking to the Ancestors, doing Yoga etc. As said dealing with trauma differs, in most black families, death can be interrupted in many forms. One yes, it is a traumatic experience especially when that loved one was never sick. Two, if more than two family members passes within few days, weeks or months there needs to be a ritual that must be done.
I remember losing so many close people in my life this very same year. About seven people that were close to me passed away but one death that left me traumatic, my brother’s death. Although in my family they knew that something was wrong within the family but decided to treat the matter “normal”. We were told by a ‘thwasa’ (traditional healer) that someone in the family ‘unomlambo’. ‘Umlambo’ means river, a river is where someone who is being initiated to be a traditional healer will live and wash/baptized there. When someone has ‘umlambo’ it means they need to accept their calling as a traditional healer. I could not understand why people were dying over being a traditional healer, by this one person. In such cases like this one, you would not get healed from being traumatized but hate your tradition though others will get healing knowing that the ancestors are speaking.
People can be traumatized by their rituals and religions. Experiencing supernatural powers, seeing Angels or an ancestor live, being on trans and hear voices. I remember I shared this with the writing class. I was once in church, we were singing and worshiping, I will never forget this day. I was in trans then I saw demonic like creatures /figures then suddenly, they were fighting me, as I was about to lose the fight a man that looked like Jesus, but his face was not the one we see in the paintings. He came to me and opened my hands after that I fought with the demons and defeated them. As a Christian that was supposed to be a beautiful experience, but I was traumatized.
Presenting trauma and violence on stage
In the Drama we were privileged enough to have the time and talk to Chuma Sephuthela who played Thozama on Karoo Moose. She spoke about how staging trauma and/violence should be changed. She mostly referred her comments on her experience on Karoo Moose. “The play was a realism which turned into magical world”, She referred that to how Thozama in a Kasi would be friends with a moose and why would a moose be in a place like that. She said play scripts when it comes to staging trauma and violence are always metaphoric and continues to say there is no time to be polite. Audience should feel what happens to the bodies that are being violated in front of them rather than spending time on analyzing the metaphoric proportion. She believes that if we must be raw and stream everything on stage she I in support on that hundred percent. If I am getting what she meant by that, that would be taking the screen/film approach which is showing everything as it is on stage.
Yes, I know TV is different from theatre but Chuma’s argument of saying ‘we should be raw’ that would be killing the beauty and purpose of theatre and why it’s such a unique type of screening. I once watched a movie called An American crime which is based on a true story. It is about a 16-year-old girl who was physically abused by her guardian to a point where she died. I could imagine what her family went through when they saw the movie. No one wants to see people getting raped on stage, the metaphor used directors is a safe approach. Van Graan’s cited in Marc Maufort (2015:243) says that we are a troubled society realistically, traumatized by our past and the violence we are experiencing today. So how do we then stage trauma and present it to the troubled society?
Theatre role is to provoke debate, challenge personal comfort zones and evoke emotions (Marc 2015:243). In many circumstances, metaphor is the way go to present a realism play. Let’s take Karoo Moose as an example, how Thozama was violated by men close to her. Khola, the man who initiated all of this, grabs Thozama and puts her in the middle of the room where she puts her inside the basin with water. He takes off his belt, already the audience that gives the audience an idea of what is going to happen. It’s either he is going to use that belt to hit her or he is making an easy access for his manhood that he is going to use. Khola covers Thozama with a net and takes a soccer ball passes around to the men where they have turns by kicking it towards Thozama. That is violation alone without analyzing or translating it to what it is which is rape.
Some plays use text to stage trauma and violence. I was casted in last year’s YDS pieces, Eclipsed written by Danai Guira, directed by Leni Netshiavhela. Though the violence was not portrayed on staged but embodies and vocalized, you could still feel the audience’s response towards what was happening on stage. The play was basically about women who found themselves surviving during the second civil war in Liberia where they were made wives by the rebels. There is a lot in text that could trigger people especially when an actor shows and not tell. Both text and action play a huge part in how you want to stage trauma.
Theatre as therapy
There are two people in theatre, the audience and the actor and both are important. As an actor you put yourself in the character’s shoes and to Stanislavski method: Magic if. May you have a similar or experienced the same trauma as the character, you deal with your problem through the character but it is tricky because how then are able to deal with this character without triggering your own trauma? One of the articles I found online by Laura Edmondson, talks about the civil war in Uganda where rebels used to abduct children train them to be soldiers that will fight the Ugandan military and they will force these kids to kill their relatives (2005:451). She talks about the silencing of Northern Uganda after the war and how World Vision rehabilitation center (which was a movement or counselling of some sort) as a method of self-promotion on global stage. She continues to use ‘drama as a marketing tool’ (Laura 2005:453). World Vision took these kids after the world war to teach them dance, drama and music. They used drawings to express to illustrate the traumatic experience. They would perform in front of former captives, international aid community (Laura 2005:455). They took part in performing and using drama as therapy.
Arts Therapy in Uganda played an important role but they believed that children should come to terms with their traumatic past by talking about them with the counselor, though art therapy was esteem primarily (Laura 2005:457). Vedat and Erdinc (2006:8) argues that trauma is not limited or identical with harmful events and that the term Post traumatic stress disorder is misleading because trauma is a longitudinal socio-psychological process. According to Vedat and Erdinc (2006:10) without instantaneous resolution of the trauma experience, the subject will trigger and open the wounds which will make things worse in the process. Trauma does not need experience, people are traumatized by other people’s experiences. I asked one of my friends in my res how they would like theatre makers to stage trauma, she said directors should stage it how they want to tell their stories and what do they want to tell the audience.
References:
- Lara, F. (2009). Karoo Moose. Caledonian Road London: Oberon Books Ltd.
- Maufort, M. (2015). Theatre, Drama and Performance in Post-Aparthied South Africa. New York: University of Bruxells.
- Sar V, O. E. (2006). Journal of trauma practice. what is trauma and dissociation, 8-10.
