Performing personal trauma: towards an autoethnographic theatre in the age of #metoo
Creators: name: WALLEY, Elizabeth
Publisher: name: RMIT University
Year: 2024
Subjects: classificationCode: 360201
subject: Creative writing (incl. scriptwriting)
classificationCode: 360401
subject: Applied theatre

description: In November 2012 I witnessed a shooting murder just metres from where I stood on the street outside my home in Melbourne's inner west: a man killed a woman, or more specifically, a male killed his female partner, a category of homicide that now occurs, on average, once a week in Australia (Bryant and Bricknell). Witnessing this experience hurled me into a state of being far beyond any normal frame of reference, disrupting my emotional, psychological and physiological self with a debilitating traumatic response that compromised normal function. As a writer, actor and director, I began to consider the possibilities of dramatic representation to communicate the complex existential chaos this experience invoked, and to place my particular life experience of sexual violence and sexual harassment up to and including my witnessing of the shooting in a larger context, especially the contemporary cultural context of patriarchal violence against women. 

This creative practice-based research asks: 

How might the writer/actor/director re-present a lived experience of trauma, including as witness, such that the depth and resonance  of trauma responses are fully communicated? 
When words are insufficient and events 'unspeakable', what are the possibilities inherent in theatre as an embodied practice, to move beyond linguistics and embrace the expressive non-verbal language of the body? 
How might the emerging field of critical autoethnography inform a new approach to performing personal trauma?
What can professional theatre practice as a site of knowledge and investigation offer arts activism in the context of widespread patriarchal violence against women and girls?

The creative project at the centre of this research is an autoethnographic composition for theatre. A non-monological autoethnographic script, The Trauma Project embraces the call for an ensemble text, with multiple characters representing the traumatised self who has been disrupted by irrational physiological and emotional responses to a traumatic event. It is a dialogical document - a performance 'map' - 'a making that attempts to mark intensities' (Stacy Holman Jones and Anne Harris, "Travelling" 1), that seeks to equally privilege words and movement. This embodied act of theorising and cultural expression, as espoused by Peter Garratt (10), is informed by Tami Spry's 'performative "I"', Sarah Kane's disruptive theatre practice, aspects of the documentary and verbatim theatre traditions, trauma theory, memory studies, and my professional experience as a writer/actor/director over more than thirty years. Through this practice I create what Holman Jones describes as 'living bodies of thought' via a work that seeks to 'embody and materialize the change we seek in ourselves and our lives' ("Living Bodies" 235). 

The accompanying dissertation uses Linda Candy's practice-based research methodology, as proposed in The Creative Reflective Practitioner (2020), to situate key concepts, chart precedents of practice and present my reflexive engagement with the creative process as I experiment with dramatic form. Beyond the initial stimulus for this research - the shooting incident - my creative response exposed a personal history of gendered abuse which preceded my witnessing and informed my research and practice, expanding the cultural landscape to embrace the zeitgeist around wider contemporary issues of gender and trauma, including #metoo, Destroy the Joint and Slut Walk. I found autoethnographic approaches to performance, particularly the work of performance autoethnographer and scholar Tami Spry, conducive to exploring my central research questions and to shaping the creative work. A consideration of this methodology ultimately enabled a significant reorientation of my professional practice towards a more overtly activist theatre practice.

This research contributes to the fields of playwriting and performance studies, autoethnography and activist arts practice. In particular, it expands relational, multi-character autoethnographic performance that moves away from the monological towards a dialogical engagement with the self, offering the rational, emotional and physical aspects of self as separate but concurrent streams within the narrative; an embodied 'living' discourse.