Postdramatic Stress: Performance in the Aftermath of War

Elise Morrison, Nov. 5, 2019 2-3pm. 220 York Street, Room 100.

 

Post-dramatic performance in the aftermath of war describes performances whose practitioners and audiences have prior knowledge of the war(s) that have come before, are versed in the dramaturgies and narratives employed in the preparation and enactment of war, and have chosen deliberately to step beyond those habitual expressive structures into imaginative and embodied new vocabularies of peace. Centered on research conducted on a recent trip to Hiroshima and Okinawa, two communities that experienced such severe devastation in WWII that civic life has been defined by the aftermath for the 75 years since, Morrison discusses examples of artist-activists who submit martial interfaces and received narratives of war to “post-dramatic stress,” utilizing interactivity and participatory world making within the space of a performance as a means of facilitating “performative ethics” and “moral imagination” for local and international communities.

Elise Morrison is an Assistant Professor of Theater and Performance Studies at Yale, where she teaches courses such as Feminist Theater, Theater History, Embodied Communication, and Digital Media in Performance. Her book, Discipline and Desire: Surveillance Technologies in Performance was published by University of Michigan Press in 2016. In 2015 Morrison edited a special issue on “Surveillance Technologies in Performance” for the International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media (Routledge, 11.2) and has published on this topic in the International Journal of Performance Art and Digital Media (IJPADM), Theater Magazine, and TDR. She is an associate editor for IJPADM and a consortium editor for TDR.