Performances can evoke affective responses in the audience

What is it about?

A growing body of performance work in Northern Ireland explores the traumatic traces of the ‘Troubles’ in everyday life. This work is like a counter-melody to the marketing of the region’s natural beauty and newly minted normality, and the government’s neoliberal assertion that ‘Northern Ireland is open for business’. In the professional theatre recurring images of buried objects, drowning, and watery canals beneath the city streets attest to the fragility of the Peace Process by creating unstable cities over underground rivers, lurking Leviathans, threatening revenants. In the community sector these concerns are given more literal expression, encouraging people to address the triumphs and failures of the Peace Process directly. The Theatre of Witness Project is one of a number of community-based performance projects that seek to address the legacy of the ‘Troubles’. Other projects bring professional arts practitioners to work with material gathered through community-based research, like Smashing Times’ Thou Shalt Not Kill (2013), which toured schools and community centres and included a post-performance workshop, and The Pride (2010) and Crows on the Wire (2013) by Blue Eagle Productions in Derry. This increasingly popular form works with first-person narratives and personal testimony (particularly to traumatic events) to produce monologue performances in which the protagonists of the action recount their experiences. This paper argues that performances of this kind allow the audience to engage affectively with the performers and their stories.

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Why is it important?

The essay is concerned with Northern Irish theatre and culture now, and the work that is done using theatre to address the legacy of the conflict. Almost twenty years have passed since the Good Friday Agreement, and the society is remarkably different from a generation ago. The arts are significantly engaged in addressing the traumatic memories of those who were caught up in the conflict, and in educating those who do not remember the conflict about its history, its consequences, and the importance of continued engagement in the Peace Process.

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