Sentences from the Archive

Abstract

We don’t know what the next sentence should be. (Schwartz 2002: 260, on September 11 2001)

The creative field has long been considered a social space that is ideally placed to reflect and intervene in the social world. Creative practice is frequently used as a means to address the effects of trauma: psychologists and other therapists engage their patients in drawing, writing and performing trauma as a way to exorcise the demons of the past, and recast personal history as a more bearable narrative. On a macro scale, many creative practitioners see it as part of their role, as artists, to tackle trauma, disaster and human rights infringements, and present exhibitions, suites of poems, movies and theatre productions that deal with the sorrows and disasters of life. A vast body of such creative works exists; a considerable body of critical writings on and analyses of such works exist. This paper adds to the latter, by looking at theatre productions that explicitly tackle major social trauma: specifically, the trauma of the September 11 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, and the traumas that followed.