Emma Willis (Auth.) - Theatricality, Dark Tourism and Ethical Spectatorship - Absent Others-Palgrave Macmillan UK (2014)

Theatricality, Dark Tourism and Ethical Spectatorship
Theatricality, Dark Tourism

and Ethical Spectatorship
Absent Others
Emma Willis
© Emma Willis 2014
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For the ‘absent others’ to whom this book responds
Contents
List of Illustrations ix
Acknowledgements xi
Notes for the Traveller: Introduction to

the Journey Ahead 1
A small act, a question 2
Evolution of memory 4
Itinerary 9
Otherwise 16
1 Landscapes of Aftermath 17
Dark tourism: a peculiar entertainment 18
Tourism and theatrical affect 30
Pilgrim, witness, bystander, observer: the roles
of the spectator 35
Ethics and ‘the inter-human drama’ 43
2 Performing Museums and Memorial Bodies:

Theatre in the Shadows of the Crematoria 56
Sachsenhausen, Auschwitz, Dachau: a personal journey 57
Theatre of the void 68
Theatrical affect and the presence of the dead 75
Akropolis and ethical memory: the role of the audience 86
3 Vietnam: ‘Not the bullshit story in the Lonely Planet’ 101

Doing the twist in this dirty little war 102
Cu Chi: ‘Vietnam’s answer to Disneyland’ 110
Meta-theatre 120
Curtain call 127
4 ‘Here was the place’: (Re)Performing Khmer Rouge

Archives of Violence 129
Facing the past: Tuol Sleng and Choeung Ek 130
Catherine Filloux’s Photographs from S-21 143
Broken face: Rithy Panh’s S21: Khmer Rouge Killing Machine 150
Demonstrations of difficulty 158
vii
viii Contents
5 Lost in Our Own Land: Re-Enacting Colonial Violence 161

Setting the scene 163
The performance 168
Memorials of dissent 179
6 ‘The world watched’: Witnessing Genocide 188

Maria Kizito: understanding the connectedness
of the world 190
Murambi: the affect of the dead 200
Finally 210
7 Phantom Speak 215
Works Cited 221
Index 231
List of Illustrations
0.1 Dark Tourists, Wellington, New Zealand, 2008 (Photograph:

Philip Merry, courtesy of Rifleman Productions) 5
1.1 Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Washington DC, 2012
(Photograph: Emma Willis) 22
1.2 ‘Killing Tree’, Choeung Ek, Cambodia, 2008 (Photograph:
Emma Willis) 22
1.4 A tourist views Ai Weiwei’s Names of the Student Earthquake
Victims Found by the Citizens’ Investigation, Hirshhorn
Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC, 2012
2.1 Tourists at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Poland, 2007
2.4 Tourists at Dachau, Germany, 2010
2.7 Artur Żmijewski, 80064, 2004 (Still image courtesy
of the artist, Foksal Gallery Foundation, Warsaw, and
Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich) 81
3.1 War Remnants Museum, Vietnam, 2008
3.2 Cu Chi Tunnels, Vietnam, 2008 (Photograph: Emma Willis) 111
ix
x List of Illustrations
3.3 Cu Chi Tunnels, Vietnam, 2008

3.4 Cu Chi Tunnels, Vietnam, 2008
3.5 We Are Proud to Present… by Jackie Sibblies Drury.
Director: Eric Ting. Actors, L–R: Jimmy Davis,
Phillip James Brannon, Lauren Blumenfeld, Erin Gann
(under Lauren’s arm), Grantham Coleman. Soho Rep,
New York, 2012 (Photograph: Julieta Cervantes) 125
4.1 Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide, Cambodia, 2008
4.4 Choeung Ek, Cambodia, 2008 (Photograph: Emma Willis) 140
4.5 Choeung Ek, Cambodia, 2008 (Photograph: Emma Willis) 142
4.6 Photographs from S-21 by Catherine Filloux. Director:
Thenn Nan Doeun. Actors: Roeun Narith and Morm Sokly.
Phnom Penh, Cambodia, 2001 (Photograph: Mak Remissa,
courtesy of Asia Motion) 145
5.1 Lost in Our Own Land, performed in Christchurch,
New Zealand, 2008 (Photograph: Emma Willis) 172
6.1 Maria Kizito by Erik Ehn. Director: Emily Mendelsohn.
Actor: Esther Tebandeke. La MaMa, New York, 2012
(Photograph: John Eckert) 192
6.2 Kigali Genocide Memorial, Rwanda, 2013 (Photograph:
Emma Willis) 203
7.1 Peter Weiss’s The Investigation at Staatstheater, Nuremberg
(Congress Hall, Nazi party rally grounds), June 2009,
awarded the Nuremberg Theatre Award in October 2010,
director: Kathrin Mädler (Photograph: Marion Buehrle) 216
Acknowledgements
This book builds upon the fine work done in the areas of theatre and
ethics, and theatrical spectatorship cited throughout the following
pages. I would like to begin by acknowledging those scholars whose
thinking inspired and challenged my own. Some of those same writers
also led me to the work of Emmanuel Levinas. His philosophy has been
invaluable as a provocation to both think otherwise and of the other.
Within the book I have also ventured into a terrain that is new to me –
tourism studies, in particular the emergent field of dark tourism – and
I acknowledge those writers cited for their thoughtful analysis, which
I have drawn upon in expanding the theatrical perspective.
I gratefully acknowledge the support, guidance and encouragement
of the various readers of this project in its entirety at its different stages
of life: Murray Edmond, Tom Bishop, Megan Evans, Sophie Nield
and Helena Grehan. I would particularly like to thank Murray and
Tom for their tireless and generous support of the project in its early
stages. I would also like to thank the readers of sections of the book
at various times: Jared Wells, Amber McWilliams, Kerryn Olsen, Evija
Trofimova, Kirby-Jane Hallum, Maria Prozesky, Rand Hazou and Grant
Bollmer. I also gratefully acknowledge the financial assistance of Massey
University, Education New Zealand and the University of Auckland in
providing research resources.
The seed for this project came from an earlier creative work that
inspired it. I would especially like to thank Malia Johnston, my partner
in making Dark Tourists, and all of the creative team involved includ-
ing: Eden Mulholland, Paul Young, Peter Daube, Sean MacDonald, Julia
Milsom, Clare Lissaman, Mia Blake, Paora Taurima, Sally Stockwell,
Paula van Beek, Martyn Roberts, Vanda Karolczak, Michele Powles,
Rachel Atkinson, Sian Tucker and Philip Merry. I would also like to
thank Creative New Zealand, Auckland Arts Festival and the New
Zealand Fringe Festival for their support.
Further warm thanks to those who have spoken with me about their
work, including: Catherine Filloux, Erik Ehn, Carol Karemera, Emily
Mendelsohn and Mike Tamaki.
An earlier version of Chapter 4, ‘“Here was the place”: (Re)Performing
Khmer Rouge Archives of Violence’, was published in 2013 in Performing
Archives/Archives of Performance (ed. Gunhild Borggreen and Rune Gade)
xi
xii Acknowledgements
entitled ‘“All this is left”: Performing and re-performing archives of

Khmer Rouge violence’, and is republished here with kind permission
from the publishers, Museum Tusculanum Press.
This monograph incorporates critical writing from a variety of sources
and I gratefully acknowledge the following publishers and authors for
permission to reprint from their work: Elsevier for Kelle Caton’s ‘Taking
the Moral Turn in Tourism Studies’ in Annals of Tourism Research 39.4
(2012), Philip Stone’s ‘Dark Tourism and Significant Other Death:
Towards a Model of Mortality Mediation’ in Annals of Tourism Research
39.3 (2012), Philip Stone and Richard Sharpley’s ‘Consuming Dark
Tourism: A Thanatological Perspective’ in Annals of Tourism Research
35.2 (2008), Christopher J. Holloway’s ‘The Guided Tour: A Sociological
Approach’ in Annals of Tourism Research 8.3 (1981), William Miles’s
‘Auschwitz: Museum Interpretation and Darker Tourism’ in Annals of
Tourism Research 29.4 (2002), E. C. Fine and J. Haskell Speer’s ‘Tour
Guide Performances as Sight Sacralization’ in Annals of Tourism Research
12 (1985), Philip L. Pearce’s ‘Tourist Guide Interaction’ in Annals of
Tourism Research 11.1 (1984), Erik Cohen’s ‘The Tourist Guide: The
Origins, Structure and Dynamic of a Role’ in Annals of Tourism Research
12 (1985), John P. Taylor’s ‘Authenticity and Sincerity in Tourism’ in
Annals of Tourism Research 28.1 (2001), Alison J. McIntosh’s ‘Tourists;
Appreciation of Maori Culture in New Zealand’ in Tourism Management
25 (2004); Verso for Judith Butler’s Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning
and Violence (2004); Oxford University Press for Paul Lederach’s The
Moral Imagination (2005); Stanford University Press for Jill Robbins’s
(ed.) Is it Righteous to Be? Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas; John Hopkins
University Press for Laura Edmondson’s ‘Genocide Unbound: Erik Ehn,
Rwanda, and an Aesthetics of Discomfort’ in Theatre Journal 61 (2009),
Mariane Hirsch’s ‘Surviving Images: Holocaust Photographs and the
Work of Postmemory’ in The Yale Journal of Criticism 14.1 (2001), and Jill
Dolan’s ‘Performance, Utopia, and the ‘Utopian Perfomative’’ in Theatre
Journal 53.3 (2001); John Lennon for ‘Journeys Into Understanding’
in The Observer (2005); Taylor & Francis for Lisa Fitzpatrick’s ‘The
Performance of Violence and the Ethics of Spectatorship’ in Performance
Research 16.1 (2011), James Slowiak and Jairo Cuesta’s Jerzy Grotowski,
Routledge (2007), Michael Taussig’s Mimesis and Alterity, Routledge
(1993); University of Kansas Press for Jon Erickson’s ‘The Face and the
Possibility of an Ethics of Performance’ in Journal of Dramatic Theory
and Criticism, Spring (1999); Cambridge University Press for Laura Cull’s
‘Performance as Philosophy: Responding to the Problem of Application’
in Theatre Research International 37.1 (2012), and Magda Romanska’s
Acknowledgements xiii
‘Between History and Memory: Auschwitz in Akropolis, Akropolis in

Auschwitz’ in Theatre Survey 50.2 (2009); Indiana University Press for
Emmanuel Levinas’s Basic Philosophical Writings (1996); MIT Press for
Josette Féral and Leslie Wickes’s ‘From Event to Extreme Reality: The
Aesthetic of Shock’ in TDR 55.4 (2011), Jerzy Grotowski’s ‘Holiday’
in TDR 17.2 (1973), Jerzy Grotowski, Richard Schechner and Jacques
Chwat’s ‘An Interview with Grotowski’ in TDR 13.1 (1968), Nicholas
Mirzoeff’s ‘Invisible Again: Rwanda and Representation after Genocide’
in African Arts (2005), Ludwik Flaszen’s ‘A Theatre of Magic and
Sacrifice’ in Tulane Drama Review 9.3 (1965) and ‘Vietnam’ in TDR 13.4
(1969); University of Wisconsin Press for Josette Féral’s ‘Theatricality:
The Specificity of Theatrical Language’ in SubStance 31.2/3 (2002); Duke
University Press for Achille Mbembe’s ‘Necropolitics’ in Public Culture
15.1 (2003); Caroline Wake for ‘The Accident and the Account: Towards
a Taxonomy of Spectatorial Witness in Theatre and Performance
Studies’ in Performance Paradigm 5.1 (2009); Springer for John Caruana’s
‘The Drama of Being: Levinas and the History of Philosophy’ in
Continental Philsophy Review 40 (2007); Yale University Press for Paul
Ricouer and Matthew Escobar’s ‘A Reading of Emmanuel Levinas’s
“Otherwise Than Being or Byond Essence”’ in Yale French Studies 104
(2004); Wiley for Wes Avram’s ‘On the Priority of “Ethics” in the Work
of Levinas’ in Journal of Religious Ethics 24.2 (1996); Rosica Colin for Jean
Genet’s Reflections on Theatre and Other Writing, Faber (1972); Philip Berk
for ‘The Therapy of Art in “Le Malade Imaginaire”’ in The French Review
4 Spring (1972); John Hunt for ‘Folly in the Garden’ in The Hopkins Review
1.2 (2007); Grzegorz Niziolek for ‘Auschwitz – Wawel – Akropolis. An
Unseasonable Montage’ in Didaskalia 91 (2010), and Agnieszka Żabicka
for translation of that article; Bloomsbury Publishing for Jennifer
Kumiega’s The Theatre of Grotowski, Methuen (1987); Stan Darling for
‘Cultural Experience at Ferrymead’ in The Press (2010), Sharon Mazer
for permission to quote from her conference paper ‘“But Still Our Song
is Sung” – Staging Vitality in the (Post) Colonial Frame at Te Matatini
Māori Performing Arts Festival’ given at the New Zealand School of
Music (2012); Nicholas Mirzoeff for ‘The Empire of Camps’ in Situation
Analysis 1 (2002); Theatre Communications Group for Erik Ehn’s
‘A Space for Truth: Meditations of Theatre and the Rwandan Genocide’
in American Theatre March (2007); Jeff Stewart for ‘Being Near: Visiting
the Rwandan Genocide Memorial Site at Murambi, Gikongoro’ in
Performance Paradigm 3 (2007); Laurie Beth Clark for ‘Coming to Terms
with Trauma Tourism’ in Performance Paradigm 5.2 (2009); Alexa Wilson
for ‘A Storm to Feel at Home In’ on Theatreview (2007); Lyne Pringle
xiv Acknowledgements
for ‘Ensemble Cast of Starts Create a Galaxy of Images’ on Theatreview

(2008); Richard Howard for his review of Te Houhi for TheBigIdea (2011).
I would also like to thank the various news publications and online
outlets for their kind permission and assistance: New Zealand Herald
for permission to quote Bernadette Rae and Amanda Cropp, Art 21 for
permission to quote Alfredo Jaar, Daniel-libeskind.com for permission
to quote Daniel Libeskind, ABC News for permission to quote Richard
Gizbert, exindex for permission to quote Artur Żmijewski, Human Rights
Watch for permission to quote from their website, Tamaki Maori Village
New Zealand for permission to quote from their website, Christchurch
City Public Libraries for permission to quote from their website and Erik
Ehn for permission to quote from the Soulographie website.
This book also incorporates a number of images for which I am
grateful. Thanks to: James Ensing-Trussell, Philip Merry and Rifleman
Productions for images of Dark Tourists; Foskal Gallery Foundation,
Warsaw, for images of Artur Żmijewski’s 80064; Asia Motion and Mak
Remissa for images of Photographs from S-21; John Eckert and Emily
Mendelsohn for the production image from Maria Kizito; Julieta
Cervantes and Soho Rep for the production image from Jackie Sibblies
Drury’s We Are Proud to Present a Presentation About the Herero of Namibia
formerly known as Southwest Afrika, from the German Sudwestafrika,
between the years 1884–1915. Full citations of all sources are given at the
end of the book.
I would like to thank my editor, Paula Kennedy for her enthusiasm,
and Peter Cary and other staff at Palgrave Macmillan for helping me
bring this project to its conclusion. I would also particularly like to
thank Penny Simmons for her assistance.
Finally, I would like to deeply thank and acknowledge my family,
particularly my parents Michele Napier and Michael Willis, my partner
Jared Wells, friends, colleagues, SGI members and Dr Daisaku Ikeda,
who have all supported and encouraged me throughout this process.
Notes for the Traveller:
Introduction to the Journey Ahead
If the humanities has a future as cultural criticism, and

cultural criticism has a task at the present moment, it is no
doubt to return us to the human where we do not expect to
find it, in its frailty and at the limits of its capacity to make
sense. We would have to interrogate the emergence and
vanishing of the human at the limits of what we can know,
what we can hear, what we can see, what we can sense.
Judith Butler, Precarious Life 151
To fully understand the moral imagination we will need

to explore the geographies of violence that are known and
the nature of risk and vocation, which permits the rise of
an imagination that carries people toward a new, though
mysterious, and often unexpected shore.
Paul Lederach, The Moral Imagination 39
I think that the human consists precisely in opening itself

to the other of the other, in being preoccupied with his
death.
Emmanuel Levinas, Is It Righteous to Be? 124
In the first of the epigraphs above, Judith Butler lays down a challenge
to scholars of the humanities. She asks us to turn our attention to
the very figure of the human from which we derive our name and to
interrogate what our responsibilities for the protection of the human
might be. Such a task requires, as life-long mediator and peace-builder
Paul Lederach writes, harnessing the power of imagination. Lederach
urges us to think beyond violence, to think what might be otherwise.
1
2 Theatricality, Dark Tourism, Ethical Spectatorship
Emmanuel Levinas, like Lederach, urges us to think beyond ourselves,

stating that ethical work means to ‘envisage […] a time without me,
to aim at this world without me, to aim at a time beyond the horizon
of my time’ (Basic Philosophical Writings 50). Such ‘thinking beyond’
involves a re-visioning of the given, which he suggests is the role of
metaphor. Metaphor’s ‘absent contents’ point to what is beyond the
given and ‘makes perception possible’ (36). Together the collective
voices of Butler, Lederach and Levinas speak to the need for both
creativity and compassion in the face of the acts of violence that each
writes in response to. This book takes up the task of replying to these
authors through offering an expanded understanding of the role that
theatricality has to be play in making available to us the lost voices of
absent others in order that they may urge us beyond the horizon of our
own time and experience.
A small act, a question
The seed for this book came from the small act of turning on the radio.
One Saturday morning in 2006 I listened to scholar Malcolm Foley talk
about something called ‘dark tourism’, which he described as travel to
sites of death and disaster. He spoke about bus tours through the deva-
station of post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans, crowds at New York’s
Ground Zero, and the increasingly popularity of Auschwitz as a stop on
the tourist trails of Europe. At a museum to the development of nuclear
technology in New Mexico, he said, tourists were able to sit inside a
simulator that contained a large red button: if they pressed the button
they would ‘witness’ the effects of the detonation of an atomic bomb.
Immediately I was intrigued by the political and ethical implications of
what he described and also by the designation of a specialized field of
research. Although visiting sites of death and disaster is not necessarily
a new phenomenon – nobility sat ‘ringside’ at the Battle of Waterloo
(Lennon) – interest has piqued in recent years. Since the publication
first of a special issue of the International Journal of Heritage Studies in
1996, and then, Dark Tourism: The Attractions of Death and Disaster, by
Lennon and Foley in 2000, the volume and profile of scholarship has
steadily grown. In 2012, for example, Richard Sharpley and Philip Stone
published the edited collection, The Darker Side of Travel: The Theory
and Practice of Dark Tourism. Spanning the various articles, books and
conference papers are multiple approaches to naming and defining the
phenomenon. Tony Seaton, in an article for the 1996 special issue of the
International Journal of Heritage Studies, argued for the term ‘thanatourism’,
Notes for the Traveller 3
drawing from the word ‘thanatopsis’, suggesting the tourism under

scrutiny was part of a historical continuity of human contemplation of
death. The work of Philip Stone and Richard Sharpley (2008) and Stone
(2012), has sought to explain the motivations for dark tourism and
builds upon Seaton’s premise, suggesting that it is because death has
become sequestered within contemporary society that tourists, search-
ing for the kind of ontological security absent in modern life, now seek
it out at sites such as concentration camps. In 2012 Stone established
the Institute for Dark Tourism Research at the University of Lancashire,
which continues to promote academic and commercial research in the
area as well as working towards boosting its public profile. The term
is now also used in the media and by travel guides such as The Lonely
Planet series. The Guardian online has a dark tourism tag within its
travel section, which includes articles such as, ‘Forget Disneyland kids,
we’re off to Colditz’, ‘Checking into the Bangkok Hilton’ and, ‘Strange
and unsettling: my day trip to Chernobyl’.
Scholarship is not confined to the discipline of tourism studies,
however. Authors such as Lucy Lippard, Laurie Beth Clark and Brigette
Sion have sought to examine deathly tourism from humanities-based
critical perspectives. Lippard describes the phenomenon as ‘tragic tourism’.
With a focus on memorials, she suggests that sites of remembrance are
‘the battlegrounds in a life-and-death struggle between memory, denial
and repression’ (119). Like James E. Young she expresses ambivalence
about memorials that at once both keep past tragedies visible in the
present and at the same time render their histories mute. Furthermore,
she points out that while tourists might be comfortable seeking out
distant and foreign tragedy, it is much more difficult to confront
histories of violence and death that are closer to home (119). Laurie
Beth Clark’s work employs the term, ‘trauma tourism’, which, for her,
expresses the tension between the perceived ‘sacred’ quality of trauma
and ‘profane’ aspect of deathly tourism. While defending tourism as
‘a “reasonable” response to traumatic histories’, Clark’s terminology
touches upon the perceived moral or ethical distance between the his-
tories memorialized and tourism’s approach, which seeks to endlessly
replay the traumatic event. She writes: ‘as a culture we will endlessly be
drawn back, again and again, to the sites of trauma until the underlying
issue is resolved’ and suggests that the tension between desired closure
on the one hand, and disclosure on the other, is ‘at the internally con-
tradictory core of the practice of trauma tourism’. Brigette Sion’s forth-
coming edited volume, Staging Violent Death: The Dark Performances of
Thanatourism (2014), variously considers issues of memory, exhibition,
return and identity politics to unpack the phenomenon from an explicitly

performance-based context. The work of these scholars is less interested
in broad questions of ontology, as pursued by Stone and Sharpley, or
heritage management, as discussed by Tunbridge and Ashworth (1996),
but rather with the social and political specificity of a particular kind of
contemporary spectatorship as well as the aesthetic relationships that
structure it.
As I sat at home and listened to Foley talk, a series of questions
unfolded: why our attraction to dark pasts and tragic histories? What
is it that we hope to see and understand at such sites? What are the
moral and ethical obligations incurred through belated ‘bystanding’
and simulated engagement? There seemed to be a desire to connect, to
be involved, to understand and to feel at these sites and, I felt, a sort of
theatricality at play. I wondered why calamity might invite theatrical
response. What kind of theatre was this? The examples above indicate
a spectrum of modes of ‘attending’ to the past, from reverent acknow-
ledgement to vicarious participation. How could such spectatorship be
redeemed, I wondered, if at all? And why should I seek to redeem it?
Because, I reflected, the kinds of sites that Foley described were precisely
the sort of places that I was drawn to myself. My chance encounter with
Foley’s interview was to lead to me on a long journey of enquiry that
resulted in a series of travels, the writing of this book and a major stage
work. My experiences as tourist, scholar and artist are all contained
within this text.
Evolution of memory
The theme of Dark Tourists – the growing trend for holidaymakers to

seek out destinations of disaster, war, genocide or assassination [...]
raises the question of whether this amounts to empathy or voyeurism.
(Bernadette Rae, ‘Ak07: Dark Tourists at the Aotea Centre’)
This is what I saw: miles of salt, a retreating sea, the last bird to
leave… humans in piles, exhausted… a small white peace crane in
a pocket, a bird on a shoulder… a swirling plastic house and an old
rickety shed on wheels with four heads in the window… a transistor
on a ladder that yearns to be cradled… a rag doll sunbathing, one
bird squawking ‘I’m an endangered species!’ and his mate saying
‘Evolve! Evolve!’, a bird flying in formation with itself… a woman
looking for the ‘spot where it happened’, then mauled with two
hammers… brothers taking turns hanging in a plastic room, dying in
each others arms… a singing man, a bird being eaten, a side show…
a bevy of falling coats, the dead being picked over… 3 women sun-
bathers in a field of old coats… the ‘evolution of our memories’…
a white paper bird in the palm of a headless hand.
(Lyne Pringle, ‘Ensemble Cast of Stars’)
My first response to dark tourism was not in fact this study, but a per-
formance work called Dark Tourists (Auckland 2007, Wellington 2008;
see Figures 0.1 and 0.2). I include a brief evocation of certain aspects
of the work here as a backdrop against which to sketch out some of
the book’s central concerns. Working as a co-director/dramaturge in
collaboration with choreographer Malia Johnston and with a cast of
dancers, actors and a musician, we began with a question that followed
from the terrain Foley marked out: what is it that draws us to the suf-
fering of others? We explored images of sites such as Auschwitz and
also the more recent (at that time) images of bikini-clad sunbathers
on the debris-strewn beaches of Thailand after the 2004 Boxing Day
tsunami. As much as we were interested in how we try to ‘get inside
the skin’ of other people’s experience, we were also interested in the
Figure 0.1 Dark Tourists, Wellington, New Zealand, 2008 (Photograph: Philip
Merry, courtesy of Rifleman Productions)
seeming disconnection between tourists and others’ suffering, which

the Boxing Day images strikingly illustrated. More than being about
loss, the work was about being at a loss. This was something I felt at
many of the sites I visited – not the sadness that comes from seeing
something profoundly moving, but rather the unease of not knowing
how to respond. I was alone in almost all of my travels. I realized the
importance of talking about what one has seen, recreating it in words –
forging the distance that gives perspective – when I was not able to do so.
Such uneasiness was reflected in the characters of Dark Tourists, who
were marked by isolation, helplessness, loss and longing.
Whilst the theatre works to be discussed in later chapters are con-
cerned with specific cultural traumas, Dark Tourists used dance, theatre
and music to explore, at a more abstract level, the relationship that
spectators forge with distant suffering. How does or should such suf-
fering shape our subjectivity? The quality of the relationships that the
characters in the work formed with the absent others who haunted it
was distinctly ambivalent. Indeed, it is far easier to polemicize some-
thing like dark tourism – as either self-serving voyeurism or socially
responsible witnessing – than it is to speak of its fraught, contingent
and contradictory aspects. The image in Dark Tourists that perhaps
best captures this ambivalence, and which is on the cover of this book,
featured a dancer, naked but for a jacket, prone and arched backwards
over a tall ladder. She was both a washed-up body – human debris –
and at the same time, an outsider trying to understand the image by
imitating it. The tableau was the culmination of a series of encounters
between characters and what might be called ‘archival’ objects. The
aforementioned dancer had already performed a scene with a pile of old
shoes (Figure 0.1). Throughout the work, each of the performers had
similarly vivid relationships with props, which were characterized by an
emphasis on tactile engagement. They carefully picked up empty coats
and tried them on, marking out movement phrases as if tracing a map of
human history animated by the remains. These objects at once signified
the absence of their previous owners as well as creating associations with
the familiar images of shoes, suitcases, hair and so on, as are displayed
at sites such as Auschwitz. Within the work both space and objects were
responded to as if bodies. This produced a melancholy affect marked by
a series of displacements: body from body, voice from body, body from
space and body from history. In performance, the image of the dancer
draped over the back of the ladder was a clear aestheticization of pain,
lit to emphasize the form of the body, drawing particular attention to
its structure, whilst at the same time highlighting its vulnerability. The
disturbing gesture was both a memorial act and an attempt to under-

stand the other’s experience through embodying it: or, as Freddie Rokem
describes it, by inscribing history onto the body (‘On the Fantastic’ 50).
But what knowledge might these acts of inscription produce?
In the first instance, such ‘re-presencing’ of history counters absence.
Indeed, at most of the dark tourism sites discussed in this book it is
absence that most potently ‘speaks’ to spectators. Through affecting
or pretending a dialogical terrain where the dead are given affective
presence, these sites activate a dramaturgy of spectral bodies. They
show a consumed landscape that has borne, in Heiner Müller’s words,
the ‘disappearance of Man’ (91), through invoking the disappeared
(or exited), to whom we are asked to give our attention and acknow-
ledgement. The ghosts summoned have a flickering quality; they
appear and disappear, speak and are mute. Walking through Tuol Sleng
Museum of Genocide in Cambodia, for example, where there are so
many photographs of the faces of former prisoners, one passes by some
of them with little engagement, while others seem suddenly to cry
out. They invite our contemplation whilst simultaneously pointing to
a breach in our ability to understand. They ask us to bear the pain of
this breach, to continue to turning towards them for every instance of
turning away. In Dark Tourists, bodies were caught in this interplay of

appearance and disappearance, entering and exiting. In his discussion
of postdramatic theatre, of which Dark Tourists might be considered
an example, Hans-Thies Lehmann comments, ‘the figure of the other
in theatre always has a reality only of arrival, not presence […] we may
call this essence of the theatrical figure its representability’ (172). The
image of someone who arrives, enters, but is not yet present – is in a
continual state of arrival – is a dialectic that reflects the double move-
ment of the spectator who turns towards, away from, and once again
towards the face of the other. What Lehmann argues, as will I, is that it
is theatricality – here meant as the affect of presence – that makes such
alterity perceptible: ‘life never attains such a representation but in being
articulated theatrically its “representability” appears’ (173). By way
of its double movement, such theatricality exceeds the frame of con-
ventional dramatic representation. In regard to dark tourism, it is the
‘always arriving and yet never present’ aspect of the bodies of the past,
when successfully evoked, that makes them most powerful in the claim
that they place upon us. Such an, ‘always arriving’ suggests the call of
the other and its ceaseless aspect. What I propose throughout the book
is that it is theatricality that often underpins such an affect of arrival.
An ethics of spectatorship to such sites might be said to begin with
the acknowledgment that, despite an arrival that is never completed,
and a lack of presence, we are nonetheless located within a shared
ethical space. That is, by our own emplacement – our appearance – we
acknowledge our responsibility towards the disappeared, towards those
who have exited. Furthermore by our presence we are dramaturgically
implicated in the ethical and representational breaches that mark the
sites. Near the end of Dark Tourists, a character who has survived a
calamity evokes an image of tourists who have arrived in the aftermath:
They pluck the crusted ground for souvenirs. Leaving, their pinch of
loss becomes bird in hand. New born, soft, jerking, wings are brush-
ing the lines of their palms. My brother and I are watching. On the
horizon one thousand birds slip through foreign salty fingers. Look
how they take flight. It is the evolution of our memories.
The tourists appropriate and reinvent the remnants of history that they
have sought out. Such imagined objects, delicate birds, are ethically
fragile, as is all transmission of memory. In the cases that follow, both
theatrical works and historical sites, I ask what we might make of the
theatrical nature of our attempts to animate the past in order that we
might feel its force in the present. What kind of care do we need to take
with memories that are not our own?
Itinerary
The chapters of this book, which provide a mapping of its ‘geographies

of violence’, are organized around alternating discussion of tourism and
theatre, which, where relevant, incorporates a personal voice by way of
my reflections as traveller. These less formal notes are offered as both
acknowledgment of the distance of my viewing position – cultural, geo-
graphical and generational – and as a way of allowing the affect of being
a tourist to infiltrate the account. This is because, while the book con-
siders spectatorship as a subject, I acknowledge the problems that arise
from speaking of ‘the spectator’, or ‘the tourist’. Similarly ‘the audience’
is more an abstract idea than a concrete reality – an imagined singularity.
My personal experiences of visiting sites and attending some of the works
discussed are bought into contrast at times with other accounts. In so
doing I hope to foreground the distinctions of experience from person
to person. At the same time, I suggest that individual audience members
and tourists, although marked by differing motivations, levels of engage-
ment and experience, are finally enjoined, in most instances, in the
collective (inasmuch as it happens concurrently) act of spectatorship.
What is most important to me is the sense in which, as Levinas himself
remarked, ‘the spectator is an actor’, meaning that spectatorship is in
no way innocent or absolved of responsibility.
The first chapter ‘sets the scene’ for the journey that follows. It con-
siders the scope and character of dark tourism, its theatrical aspects
and the ethical questions that it generates. Subsequent chapters have a
travelogue-like quality, moving from place to place, drawing on critical
sources and personal reflection, and clustering discussions of ideas
around those places. The itinerary spans a broad geographical terrain:
Sachsenhausen, Dachau and Auschwitz concentration camps in Europe,
museums and memorials in Vietnam and Cambodia, sites in Rwanda,
and a New Zealand example. Theatricality is examined at these sites in
two ways. Firstly, I explore how each of them is staged and the ways in
which tourists are invited to be audience to such staging. Secondly, and
more importantly, I demonstrate what it is about these sites and their
histories that motivates theatrical responses to them. I particularly focus
on how the sites encourage affective attention through the invocation
of absent voices, drawing on the sense in which Giorgio Agamben
suggests that, ‘in the non-place of the Voice stands not writing, but the
witness’ (Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive 130). That is,
as suggested above, memorials invoke the ghosts of witnesses who are
imagined to press their claims upon visitors.
Sachsenhausen, Auschwitz and Dachau are the first sites considered.
These former concentration and labour camps variously represent
those who died through a combination of archival objects and architec-
ture, accompanied by both verbal and written narrative commentary.
The memorials evoke a sense of place and heighten this affect by
positioning archival objects as surrogate witnesses who testify to the
past. In staging their histories, the sites ask visitors to participate as
attentive audience members who are willing to listen. War tourism in
Vietnam offers a rather less reverential version of memorialization.
Whilst Vietnamese loss is foremost in the accounts of the museums
and attractions on offer, the tension between this grave historical
record and vestiges of the popularization of the War in American
culture generates an odd sense of kitsch. At Cu Chi, for example, tourists
are invited to crawl through Viet Cong tunnels and to shoot rifles.
This is a kind of interactive dramatization of history where tourists are
encouraged to ‘play a part’. The deeply sombre Tuol Sleng Museum of
Genocide and nearby Choeung Ek (also known as ‘The Killing Fields’)
in Cambodia, offers a stark contrast to the Vietnamese examples. In
room after room, the Museum displays headshots of those admitted
to the prison and who died there. The plaintive faces of those tortured
at the prison are all the more poignant for not showing the pain that
would follow their being photographed. They show us an image of
the human at the very moment of having their humanity denied.
The Aotearoa/New Zealand Māori tourist performance, Lost in Our
Own Land, is the most explicit example of the intertwining of theatre
and tourism given in the book. The three-hour spectacle restaged a
colonial era conflict known as the Musket Wars. The performance, in
place of the more common hāngi and haka culture show, put on stage
the pain provoked by colonial settlement and made the argument for
its continuing effects in the present. At Murambi Genocide Memorial
Centre in Rwanda, close to a thousand lime-preserved bodies of the
dead (of the many thousands who were murdered at what was formerly
a school) are laid out as visceral evidence of genocidal violence. That
those who died are both present and absent gives the memorial its
powerful charge. In examining Murambi I reflect upon the significant
distinctions between such affectively arresting displays and theatri-
cal performances, and discuss the limitations and ethical problems of
making memorial objects themselves ‘perform’.
The theatrical performances, brought into relation with the histories

and sites considered collectively, offer rich material for examining expli-
citly theatrical responses to the representation of experiences considered
variously unrepresentable and unknowable. I discuss a number of works
in relationship to memorialization of the holocaust: Jerzy Grotowski’s
Akropolis (1962–67); Charlotte Delbo’s involvement in a performance
of Molière’s The Hypochondriac, staged by prisoners interned in one of
·
Auschwitz’s satellite camps; artist Artur Z mijewski’s video work 80064
(2004); and a recent experimental production of Peter Weiss’s The
Investigation (2010), performed in the Congress Hall on the Nazi party
rally grounds in Nuremberg. The works’ distinctive characters underline
an important argument in the book, which is that it is not a particular
theatrical aesthetic that might be considered most ethical, but that
the ethical aspect of theatre can be located in its responsive character.
Indeed, Delbo’s staging of Molière demonstrates the power of a conven-
tional dramatic text staged in an unconventional setting.
In my discussion of War tourism in Vietnam I focus in particular
on my guided tour of Cu Chi. Alongside this account I consider two
meta-theatrical dramas: Adrienne Kennedy’s An Evening with Dead Essex
(1973) and Jackie Sibblies Drury’s We Are Proud to Present a Presentation
About the Herero of Namibia Formerly Known as Southwest Africa, From the
German Sudwestafrika, Between the Years 1884–1915 (2012). Kennedy’s
play concerns a director and group of actors rehearsing a docu-drama
about a real historical figure, African-American former US Marine, Mark
Essex, who gunned down nine people in the early 1970s. While he never
served in Vietnam, his killings were strongly associated with the anti-
War movement. Sibblies Drury’s play about the colonial genocide of
the Herero people employs a similar metatheatrical device to Kennedy’s
and shows a group of young actors trying to figure out both how to tell
the history of the Herero and to reflect on what it means for them in the
present. The absences that the plays mark are doubled: Essex and the
Herero are both absent from the stage and from the broader historical
record. In both plays theatrical alterity creates a similarly doubled effect
where the distinctions between actor and role, on-stage and off-stage
are destabilized in order to unsettle the certainties of the audience.
I suggest that such deliberate unsettlement also marks certain tourist
activities, drawing upon my Cu Chi tour to illustrate this.
In response to the Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide in Cambodia
I discuss two works. Catherine Filloux’s one-act play, Photographs from
S–21(1998) imagines two of the photographs’ subjects come to life after
a day of being looked at by visitors. Through dramatizing the famous
images, Filloux foregrounds the out-of-frame ghosts that haunt them,

interrogating the relationship between seen, unseen and spectator.
Rithy Panh’s documentary, S21: Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (2003),
brings together former Tuol Sleng workers – guards, torturers and a
photographer – with two formers victims. The film emphasizes the
affect of the Tuol Sleng building through a highly theatrical attention
to the relationship between artefacts and historical actors, and incorpo-
rates haunting sequences in which guards, from memory, re-enact their
former duties. The documentary movingly demonstrates the difficulty
of reversing historical strategies of violent effacement. Both works
juxtapose what Diana Taylor describes as ‘archive and repertoire’ and
I ask what meaning is generated when the imperatives of each come
into conflict with one another.
Because Lost in Our Land is itself a theatrical work, albeit performed
within the context of cultural tourism, the comparative performance
examples are framed somewhat differently than in other chapters. I refer
in brief to a broad range of theatrical and dance performances including:
Rore Hapipi’s Death of the Land (1976), Hone Kouka’s Waiora (1996),
Lemi Ponifasio’s early presentation of Tempest in 2007, and Te Houhi
(2011), a dancetheatre choreographed by Maakaa Pepene for Māori con-
temporary dance company Atamira. My emphasis in reference to these
works is on how issues concerning the relationship between land, self-
determination and sovereignty are expressed through the manipulation
of theatrical space and I ask how effectively incorporation of audiences
into specifically Māori spaces challenges spectators.
In Maria Kizito (2008), American writer, Erik Ehn, attempts to allow us
to ‘be with’ former Catholic nun, Maria (qtd. in Edmondson, 70). Kizito
was found guilty of complicity in the murder of hundreds of victims
who sought refuge in the monastery at Sovu during the 1994 Rwandan
genocide. Ehn’s play uses a poetic structure to balance the evocation of
Kizito’s thinking with the voices of those who gave testimony at the
trial. By moving between different theatrical styles that variously shift
the audience from insider to outsider perspectives, Ehn interrogates
what it means to be a bystander in a world in which violence such as
Kizito’s is not only carried out, but also known about and watched. In
focusing on a perpetrator of violence, Ehn asks of his audience a differ-
ent kind of identificatory relationship than that formed through watch-
ing an account of a survivor’s story, and I consider what is distinct about
this from an ethical perspective.
Within and between each of the book’s chapters, sites and performance
works are bought into relation with one another as a way of examining
the role of the spectator and analysing the theatrical strategies employed
for acknowledging loss. The two sets of examples are not so much
compared to one another as used to demonstrate a similar theatrical
responsiveness, which occurs across a range of examples. Theatricality
is understood, as Samuel Weber puts it, as a ‘medium’, which I suggest
is characterized by a dialectic of absence and presence. It is foremost in
this sense that the word ‘theatrical’ is applied to the analysis of memo-
rial sites. In regard to theatre, theatricality is used to denote the affective
particularity of the performances described – the meaning that is gener-
ated by their ‘liveness’. In some cases I draw on my own experiences as
spectator, in others I am drawn to speculate based on archival materials.
Such representations, theatrical and tourist, at their most ethical, fulfil
a complex function: they ensure that the unrepresentable does not
disappear, by paradoxically demonstrating its very unrepresentability.
These representations do not show us the past as much as make evident
the distance between that past and the present of the spectator. Alain
Resnais remarked of his cinematic responses to Auschwitz (Night and Fog)
and Hiroshima (Hiroshima Mon Amour) that ‘what has to be filmed is the
impossibility of filming it’, explaining ‘I came to see that all you could do
was suggest the horror, that if you tried to somehow show something very
real on the screen, the horror disappeared so I had to use every means
possible to set the viewer’s imagination in motion’ (Resnais). Freddie
Rokem, with particular reference to Holocaust theatre, similarly states that
such performances should ‘make it possible for the “naïve” [spectator] to
understand, and at the same time show that he or she probably never
really will’ (‘On the Fantastic in Holocaust Performances’ 41).
The ethical claim that the absent other makes upon us inhabits a kind
of ‘audible silence’, its terms are inassimilable and yet it requires a very
real response. It is in the dialectic tension that arises from this position-
ing of the spectator as audience to the unspeakable that I suggest a point
of ethics emerges. This ethics is affective and theatrical in character,
and calls for an embodied attention to silence, suggesting that from
such attention, the distant voices of absent others may be ‘heard.’ I am
also particularly interested in the distinction that Lisa Fitzpatrick in her
discussion of the relationship between theatrical witness and an ethics
of spectatorship makes between knowledge and action: knowledge as
‘communicated to the spectator, by the performance’, and action as ‘by
the spectator, in response to the performance’ (59). Need measurable
actions be taken in order for the act of spectatorship to be thought of
as ethical? What forms might such action take? Might the work of the
figure Jacques Rancière calls the ‘emancipated spectator’, whose action
is as ‘translator’ (The Emancipated Spectator 13) of the experience they

encounter, be considered as ethical?
To expand upon the idea of ethics in relation to spectatorship, both
tourist and theatrical, I introduce the work of Emmanuel Levinas.
Aspects of Levinas’s work, such as face-to-face encounter, alterity, saying
and said, and substitution invite theatrical comparison, and I suggest
that such comparison can be used to consider the ethical dimensions
of the examples discussed. In this regard my analysis builds upon work
in the field of theatre and ethics by Nicholas Ridout (2009), James
Thompson (2009), Helena Grehan (2009), Jon Erickson (1999) and Alice
Rayner (1993), and in particular takes up Erickson’s suggestion that
the theatrical event may provide a series of substitutive ‘faces’ that have
ethical force (13). In doing so I give attention to the concepts of mimesis
and identification, which are explored in relation to acts of political,
ethical and moral imagination. Laura Cull has discussed the problems of
programmatically applying philosophical frameworks to the interpreta-
tion of performance and urges that scholars go ‘beyond application’ (23).
This project concurs with Cull’s basic argument; indeed, Levinas’s scep-
ticism regarding artistic practices makes any wholesale application of
his ethical framework untenable. Absent Others neither seeks to prove
the theatricality of Levinas, nor that dark tourism might fit within a
Levinasian paradigm. Rather, Levinas provides an important ethical
backdrop against which issues of responsibility generally, and theatrical
responsiveness in particular, are examined. The urgency in his claims
continues to provide valuable provocation in a global environment
within which a sense of responsibility for the welfare of others, regardless
of social or political contexts, is sorely lacking. As Grehan notes,
‘Levinasian ethics moves the focus from the subject to the other, and
demands that the subject responds to the other’ (19). In the cases
discussed, this requires an imagination (or perceived invocation) of the
absent other, which is where Levinas’s philosophy useful. The analysis
that follows brings theatricality and Levinas’s ideas into conversation
with one another in order to show that a theatrical analysis inflected by
Levinas’s thinking is able to effectively illustrate what is at stake within
the examples of spectatorship.
While the ethical ideals of Levinas form a backdrop to the book’s
discussion, his philosophy is set in contrast with other approaches to
thinking through the relationship between ethics and aesthetics. At
the outset Jacques Rancière’s challenge to ‘the ethical turn’ is consi-
dered. Rancière has fiercely critiqued what he terms as ‘the endless
work of mourning’ played out in pervasive testimonial aesthetics that

are grounded in economies of unrepresentability (Dissensus 200). He
rejects the account of the ethical turn as a humanist practice of resist-
ance enacted by holding to account the political and aesthetic: that is,
by judging such practices based on the concept of moral value. Instead,
for Rancière, the discourse of contemporary ethics emerges from, and is
practised in service of, the normalization of political violence – from a
rhetoric of ‘infinite justice’ (187). Where Levinas’s arguments are deeply
philosophical, Rancière’s are politically engaged and in this sense help
to provide a framework for identifying the values in operation, aesthetic
and political, in terms of both the sites discussed and works considered.
The distinctive takes on ethics by Levinas and Rancière are just one
of a series of ‘oppositions’ staged throughout the book. The central
dialectic is that of absence and presence, which is considered both in
relation to theatrical performance and tourist experience. Other pairs or
dialectics include: voice and silence, affect and intellect, representation
and the unrepresentable, mimesis and the ‘withdrawal of representation’
(Lehmann 172), ghosts and archives. Considered together these form
an undulating landscape, marked by doing and undoing in equal mea-
sure, whose horizon shimmers with the limit point that Butler describes.
To write of the unrepresentable and to speak of the unknowable other is
to be always already compromised. One is drawn to speculate, to dance
around the edges of things, and to rely on substitutes. In this sense, the
quest of the book mirrors the spectatorship that is its subject.
As the text unfolds I employ various lenses to scrutinize this specta-
torship: Paul Ricouer’s discussion of mimesis, Diana Taylor’s distinction
between archive and repertoire, Alice Rayner’s meditation on theatrical
ghosts, Rebecca Schneider’s exploration of re-enactment, Matthew
Reason’s discussion of archives, and Jerzy Grotowski’s theatrical
philosophy, amongst others, variously inform the accounts given. In
its interdisciplinary focus on spectatorship, the book positions itself as
a response to recent interest in the relationship between human rights,
creativity, and the role of critical and aesthetic theory in addressing
ideologies of violence. It is also a reply to Helena Grehan’s call for
continuing work in the area of exchange between performance, specta-
torship and ethics (8). By applying a theatrical analysis that spans both
aesthetic performances and tourist sites, the interdisciplinary study
presents a case for the role that theatre has to play within cultural
practices concerned with the fragility of the human, with a particular
emphasis on theatrical imagination.
Otherwise
The histories memorialized by both tourist sites and performance works

are indictments of human failure. They provide examples of the denial
of the most fundamental rights of existence on so large a scale that
entire societies are implicated in the enactments of violence. These
histories are not aberrations, but rather extreme examples of endemic
violence that has in fact become normalized within discourses of
nationhood, justice and, paradoxically, within claims for the right to
exist. Scholarship that is able to span different disciplines and social
spheres, in order to address the most pressing challenges that face us
in articulating a renewed vision of ‘global citizenship’ that counters
such violence, is critical. This book is but one small contribution to this
work; however, I hope that it adds to the efforts to secure the future of
humanities as critic and conscience, whose collective insights both hold
to account those forces that seek to deny the value of human life, and
at the same time dare to imagine a society that is otherwise.
1
Landscapes of Aftermath
Tourism is an ideal metaphorical context for the messy col-

lision of Self and Other in life […]. It is a practice in which
self-gratification, self-exploration, and social engagement
all take centre stage, often at the same time; hence we can
use it as an exemplary context for thinking through ques-
tions about our relationships to ourselves and others and
about the responsibilities we may hold on these fronts,
Kellee Caton, ‘Taking the Moral Turn in
Tourism Studies’ 1921–2
Rather than a debased or trivial engagement, tourism

names a performance of alterity. Tourism is one of the
ways we make sense out of parts of the world not previously
known to us, and of the experiences in our own world that
are ‘inconceivable’.
Laurie Beth Clark, ‘Coming to Terms with Trauma
Tourism’
The spectator is an actor.

Emmanuel Levinas, Basic Philosophical Writings 39
Whilst this is foremost a book about theatre and theatricality, it rests

upon the consideration of a particular kind of tourist practice, which
I characterize as ‘audience to absence’. Both theatre and dark tour-
ism are haunted by absence and, each in their own manner, traffic in
substitutes that attempt to make such absence present, to make it felt.
This chapter explores a series of questions that lay down the terms of
enquiry for subsequent chapters: What is dark tourism and what might
17
motivate it? In what sense is it theatrical? How might we understand

the various roles that tourists take on in relation to the sites discussed?
What kinds of theatrical practices speak to the dialectic of absence and
presence that this book seeks to read in ethical terms. As Kellee Caton’s
comment above, drawn from her survey article, makes clear, an elabora-
tion of what is at stake in the instances of tourism examined has ethical
implications for the broader analysis of spectatorship at hand. Laurie
Beth Clark, also quoted above, similarly suggests that tourism is one of
the ways in which we attempt to approach and understand otherness.
This chapter takes up the questions that dark tourism generates and
considers them from an explicitly theatrical perspective. Theatricality,
for this purpose, is understood as an animating force that traffics in
paradoxes and contradiction: it calls into presence that which is absent,
whilst at the same time always revealing the incompleteness of the
invocation.
Dark tourism: a peculiar entertainment
To begin with I would like to define the field and its terms more fully
than I did in the Introduction. The accessible and familiar nature of
the examples discussed by Lennon and Foley in their millennial text,
Dark Tourism, ranging from memorials to historical re-enactments, and
including museums, Nazi death camps, and assassination sites, as well
as the catchy descriptor – dark tourism – gave a recognizable name to
a diverse and sociologically complex phenomenon. Subsequent analy-
ses of ‘death and disaster’ attractions have included everything from
the benign and kitsch – The Clink museum in London, ghost tours of
haunted buildings, Prohibition-era gangster hot spots in Chicago; to
the reverential – concentration camp memorials and sites of recent loss
such as the 9/11 Memorial in New York; to the morally problematic –
the Body Worlds exhibition and thrill-seeking war-zone tourism. Tony
Seaton, in his explanation of what he calls ‘thanatourism’, offers five
different categories of distinction: ‘travel to witness public enactments
of death’ (240), ‘travel to see the sites of mass or individual deaths after
they have occurred’ (241), ‘travel to internment sites of, and memorials
to, the dead’, ‘travel to view the material evidence, or symbolic repre-
sentations of death’ (242), and ‘travel for re-enactments or simulation
of death’. Richard Sharpley rather more lyrically categorizes ‘divisions of
the dark’ as: ‘perilous places’, ‘houses of horror’, ‘fields of fatality’, ‘tours
of torment’ and ‘themed thanatos’ (11). The various examples given in
this book focus largely on memorial sites that mark mass deaths, but
Landscapes of Aftermath 19
also include elements of re-enactment and symbolic representation.

I have employed the term ‘dark tourism’ because of the broad congrega-
tion of various types of spectator engagement that it gathers together.
Whether called dark tourism, deathly tourism, thanatourism (Seaton),
the dissonant heritage of atrocity (Tunbirdge and Ashworth), tragic tour-
ism (Lippard) or trauma tourism (Clark), the contemporary attractions
of deathly spectacles and sites is usefully read, as Seaton contends in
terms of a historical continuum. In an article for The Observer, Lennon,
as cited in the previous chapter, writes: ‘The Battle of Waterloo in 1815
was observed by nobility from a safe distance and one of the earliest
battlefields of the American Civil War (Manassas) was sold the next
day as a visitor attraction site’ (qtd. in The Observer). One might go
still further back in history to find precursors if not explicit examples
of gruesome spectatorship, such as gladiatorial clashes, public execu-
tions and so on. Seaton suggests that such ‘thanatoptic presentations’
concerned with the ‘contemplation of death’ made death ‘a highly
normal and present element in everyday life’ (237) and as such served
as moral public (Christian) instruction. Significantly, as emphasized by
his deployment of the term ‘presentations’, deathly spectacles from the
‘deadly charades’ of Roman naumachaie, massive re-enactments of naval
battles in which captured prisoners played out their parts to the death
(Kyle, 54), to the persistence of public executions in the millennia that
followed, to the anatomical theatres of Stuart England, demonstrate an
explicitly theatrical character. Indeed, Seaton makes particular note of
the popular medieval Dance of Death tradition. In a study of late medi-
eval and early modern theatrical depictions of dismembered bodies,
Margaret Owens cites an alleged incident in sixteenth-century France,
where a criminal’s execution was publicly staged within a performance of
the biblical story of Judith (24). In a related example from the same
historical period, Erika Fischer-Lichte describes a scenario where:
Spectators would crowd around the corpse after an execution in

order to touch the deceased’s body, blood, limbs, or even lethal cord.
They hoped that this physical contact would cure them of illness
and generally provide a guarantee for their own bodily well-being
and integrity.
(14–15)
Seeking out the dead, early modern spectators hoped that they might
grasp something of the mysterious darkness, into which they had
witnessed the formerly living disappear, and that this contact might
have a transformative effect. These various historical precedents show a

spectrum of motivations and contexts but also demonstrate a consistent
theatricality across the range.
Seaton makes three important distinctions between these historical
antecedents and contemporary thanatourism: movement from religious
to secular contexts, a change of emphasis from the public and commu-
nal to the private and individual, and the development of tropes rooted
in romanticism that associated pleasure with pain and death (237–8).
The example of Waterloo acts as a curtain-raiser to contemporary dark
tourism insofar as the proto-modern figure of the flâneur wandered onto
the sidelines of an event that concerned him or her only as a peculiar
entertainment and can be seen precisely as thanatoptic as argued by
Seaton. Unlike the Roman naumachaie, which were explicitly staged
as public performances, or executions that served a public, political
and social function, front-row seats on the battlefield were not in
any sense a necessary part of the event itself. If we are to think about
contemporary dark tourism that might parallel Waterloo, then danger
tourism, tourism through sites of natural or man-made catastrophe,
and slum tourism (‘poorism’) provide examples. Such tourism can be
understood as both marginal, in the sense meant by Elizabeth Burns
when she writes: ‘The theatrical quality of life […] seems to be experi-
enced most concretely by those who feel themselves on the margin of
events […] because they have adopted the role of spectator’ (11), and
at the same time highly immersive and affective. Tourists are plunged
into the world of the other and at the same time derive pleasure from
the experience precisely because of its alterity – the sense in which that
world is not their own. Alex Garland provides an example of this in his
novel, The Beach:
I wanted to witness extreme poverty. I saw it as a necessary experi-

ence for anyone who wanted to appear worldly and interesting.
Of course witnessing poverty was the first to be ticked off the list.
Then I had to graduate to the more obscure stuff. Being in a riot was
something I pursued with a truly obsessive zeal, along with being
tear-gassed and hearing gunshots fired in anger. Another list item
was having a brush with my own death.
(163–4)
The emphasis in Garland’s text is not on acts of observation or witnessing

that generate testimony and that might contribute to social change, but
on the personal value to be extracted from standing on the sidelines
of what Susan Sontag calls the ‘pain of others’ (Regarding the Pain of
Others). The protagonist’s desire for affective experience also reflects
what is discussed in tourism and business spheres as ‘the experience
economy’, a term coined by Pine and Gilmour in their 1999 book of
the same name. The example illustrates a collision of contemporary
mobility, mediatization and the neoliberal political paradigm, where
the spectacular gratification of the individual is placed at the centre of
economic and social life. The scenarios described by Garland are at the
extreme end of the dark tourism scale and are quite markedly different
from reverentially framed experiences such as visiting former concen-
tration camp sites. However, the critique that the more thrill-seeking
types of dark tourism generate overlaps with the ethical issues that arise
at memorials, such as Murambi in Rwanda, for example, which I do
discuss, where preserved bodies of the dead are the main exhibit.
What characterizes most of the examples in this book, however, is
precisely the other’s physical absence from the scene, and it is because of
this defining absence, I suggest, that theatricality imbues the scenarios
discussed. This is a different kind of dramatic scenario from the objectify-
ing spectacles referred to above and one that relies on theatrical alterity
rather than full-scale dramatic immersion. At such scenes, affect is gen-
erated by the lack (or missing) of an objectified other and as a means
of making them ‘present’ in order that their suffering might be more
fully contemplated. Whereas Garland’s protagonist wants to experience
violence and suffering first hand, memorial sites in particular are often
charged with absenting explicit violence from the remembering scene.
When one visits the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC,
for example, it is the names of the dead and only those names that are
rendered visible (Figure 1.1). At Choeung Ek in Cambodia, violence is
described rather than depicted (Figure 1.2). Because of their containment
of violence, such memorials become spaces of contemplation where vio-
lence is either imagined rather than shown, or else deferred altogether.
The issue of motivation – why dark tourist attractions appeal –
dominates much of the literature, particularly the work of Stone and
Sharpley. If, as Seaton suggests, one of the principle motivations of tou-
rism generally has been ‘a quest for The Other’, (238), then the question
here is why the suffering other, whose depiction may in turn cause pain
for the spectator? Clark gives a helpful qualification of the difficulty of
the task:
The range of visitors […] varies widely to include victims, survivors

and their families; those who are politically or ethnically allied;
Figure 1.1 Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Washington DC, 2012 (Photograph:
Emma Willis)
Figure 1.2 ‘Killing Tree’, Choueng Ek, Cambodia, 2008 (Photograph: Emma Willis)
students and scholars and intentional and accidental visitors. They

bring with them a wide range of expectations, hopes, goals and
needs, and an extraordinary variety of desires and behaviors. They
may be seeking redemption, reconciliation, or revenge. They may
come in solidarity with or in opposition to the professed politics of
the site. They may be well prepared regarding the political and social
history or they may be completely naïve.
The quest to draw conclusions as to visitor motivation is therefore

challenged by the varied contexts from which spectators are drawn,
which in turn affects the meaning that they gain from their experience.
Lucy Lippard, similarly to Clark, notes: ‘We have no way of knowing
what other people are feeling when they visit those redolent places.
False reverence may be paraded; deep sadness may be hidden’ (119).
Indeed, the desire to illuminate motivation stems from the very ambiva-
lence and uneasiness that characterizes the enterprise, which may be
interpreted equally as reverential acknowledgement or voyeuristic
rubber-necking. It is important to acknowledge that for those working
from within tourism, there is much motivation to explain the impulse
for visiting dark tourist sites in constructive terms. Tunbridge and
Ashworth, for example, in their discussion of ‘the heritage of atrocity’,
explicitly focus on ‘the qualities of any atrocity that render it usable’ as
a heritage site (104). They remark upon effective management strate-
gies, noting the impact, for example, of: ‘the unusual or spectacular
over the rather more commonplace’. They further identify guidelines
for framing historical narratives: ‘victims should be characterized
by innocence, vulnerability and non-complicity’, while perpetrators
should be ‘unambiguously identifiable, preferably as a distinguishable
group, different from the victims, and ideally also from the observer for
whom the event is interpreted’ (104–5). It is difficult therefore for stud-
ies that focus on the management of dark tourism sites to ask questions
such as that proposed by Lippard when she asks, does ‘tourism itself
[have] any relevance to the depth of memory that monuments hope to
induce’ (129)? Does the desire of heritage tourism to make visible and
coherent the invisible and incomprehensible render it inadequate to
the task of remembrance? The desire to explain the motivation for dark
tourism is not easily disentangled from what is at stake in promoting its
profile both publically and academically.
While this book does not primarily concern itself with visitor motiva-
tion, the pretext for the occasion of dark tourism is important to any
attempted ethical reading of the interactions and experiences that take
place at the various sites discussed. Therefore I would like to introduce

two particular paradigms that help frame the terms by which dark
tourism is commonly explicated: the ontological, which includes the
contemplative, personal and even mystical; and the political, which is
concerned with how such activity is understood in relation to narra-
tives of power. These frames remain salient throughout the book and
span the ethical analysis, serving to bring into contrast, for example,
the perspectives on ethics of Levinas and Rancière. In their 2008 article,
‘Consuming Dark Tourism: A Thanatalogical Perspective’, Stone and
Sharpley suggest, as noted in the previous chapter, that dark tourism is
motivated by the sequestration and secularization of death in contem-
porary society and serves the human need to confront and contemplate
themes of mortality. They offer a conceptual model that proposes a
paradoxical interplay of presence and absence, which they suggest
governs the relationship between individual, society and death in
contemporary Western culture. Their model builds upon the arguments
of Seaton, who writes that until the beginning of the twentieth century
deathly presentations were much more normalized within everyday
life. Stone and Sharpley suggest the withdrawal of ‘thanatoptic presen-
tations’ therefore creates a lack, which dark tourism responds to and
which marks it as a contemporary phenomenon. They characterize this
lack as an erosion of former models of ontological security in relation
to death – the decline of religion and so on – which in term leads to
an over-emphasis of death in popular culture. The insecurity and dread
generated by the decline of ontological security, they argue, motivates
individuals to seek deathly experience out in order that they may gain
insight from the encounter. Dark tourism therefore ‘allows individuals
to (uncomfortably) indulge their curiosity and fascination with thana-
tological concerns in a socially acceptable and, indeed, often sanctioned
environment, thus providing them with an opportunity to construct
their own contemplations of mortality’ (Stone and Sharpley, 587).
Reading Stone and Sharpley’s work one cannot help but reflect on its
Bataille-esque character, particularly in its configuration of the relation-
ship between modernity, death and the sacred. In ‘The Practice of Joy
Before Death’, Bataille attempts to articulate a mode of being or living, in
which without literally giving way to death we confront it and in some
way feel its force (Visions of Excess 235–7). Similarly, in the introduction
to Death and Sensuality, he argues that it is only through a closeness
to death that we can attempt to overcome the ‘discontinuous’ nature
of our lives: ‘It is my intention to suggest that for us, discontinuous
beings that we are, death means continuity of being’ (13). This practice is,
as Benjamin Noys argues, essentially an aesthetic one, which uses

substitution and imagination in order to cut through ‘day-to-day reality
and leave the real exposed’ (103). Amy Hollywood further remarks:
For Bataille, inner experience begins with dramatization and medi-

tation on ‘images of explosion and of being lacerated – ripped to
pieces’ […] Meditation on the wounded body of the other lacerates
the onlooker’s subjectivity; Bataille argues that woundedness and its
recognition are necessary for opening one human being to another.
The greater this woundedness and laceration – the more the self
is exploded and ripped apart – the fuller the communication that
occurs between the nonself and the now ruined other.
(81–2)
The image that Bataille notoriously used as exemplar is that of the

slow death of Chinese man, Fou-Tchou-Li, by a process of stripping the
flesh from his bones. For Bataille, the photograph not only shows, in
an affective way, tremendous pain and suffering – a doubly ‘cutting’
image – but also, through the gaze of the suffering man, suggests some
kind of ecstatic state which can be reached through that suffering, and,
by proxy, affective contemplation of it. Bataille contends that such
images provide an opportunity to transgress normative taboos of death
and suffering in order to ‘shatter’ or break through our own limited
conceptions of mortality.
Of course both the example of Fou-Tchou-Li and the very word ‘joy’
immediately point us towards the problem of a Bataille-like analysis,
which is that the pain of the other is co-opted for what Caton describes as
‘self-gratification, self-exploration’. In the photograph of Fou-Tchou-Li
the specificity of his death becomes subsumed by, in Bataille’s term,
the ‘erotic’ possibilities of imagination which the image offers: it is the
ecstatic ‘look’ of Fou-Tchou-Li which troubles us. This problem recalls
the more recent ‘Falling Man’ image, which emerged after the collapse
of the World Trade Towers in New York. The key image from that series
is of a man upside down, arms at his side, seemingly calmly falling to
his death. The positioning of the body and the aesthetic qualities of
the image, the strong vertical lines, the interplay of black and white,
suggested calm repose in a way that assuages the horrific context. One
of the criticisms levelled at the image is that the single frame misrep-
resented the ‘reality’ of the jump which, when shown in sequence,
shows the man ungainly tumbling through the air as he falls. Thus,
in the same way that Bataille invests in what he sees as an exalted or
ecstatic expression on Fou-Tchou-Li’s face, so too with the Falling Man

photo, we invest in it a solemnity, a rapturous calm: aestheticization
favours not the subject but the viewer. In her description of theatrica-
lity, Josette Féral remarks that, ‘more than a property with analyzable
characteristics, theatricality seems to be a process that has to do with
a ‘gaze’ that postulates and creates a distinct, virtual space belonging
to the other, from which fiction can emerge’ (‘Theatricality’, 97). This
definition makes clear the ethical dilemmas that arise from the creation
of aestheticized images of suffering from real sources; that is, the idea
that the suffering of others may be transformed into a ‘fiction’ for the
gazing subject. Writing elsewhere with Leslie Wickes, Féral further notes
that by aestheticizing images (refering to 9/11) spectators are left ‘on
the outside of the event itself. The spectators forget the horror of the
suffering and broken lives evoked in the image they are looking at, and
shift into observing it as a work of art’ (61).
While both Bataille and Stone and Sharpley place emphasis on indi-
vidual motivation and experience (albeit in response to social forces),
such readings of deathly fascination threaten to occlude somewhat
the ideological work that underlies the sites under discussion here:
one must balance the consideration of ontological desires with the
socio-political contexts from which such desire emerges. Auschwitz
as a memorial site, for example, whilst offering the kind of contem-
plative prompt that Stone and Sharpley describe, is framed by a very
specific set of historical and political circumstances. In his discussion
of its evolution as a site for visitors, Tim Cole remarks that the strug-
gle between various interested parties, principally Polish Catholic
and Israeli, points to the fact that Auschwitz ‘had come to mean a lot
more than simply the physical remains of the camp complex’ (105),
further commenting that Auschwitz has become ‘a ‘place of the mind’
rather than a ‘place of history’ (106). Indeed, for many tourists the
more pressing motivation for visiting than ontological security is to
do with formulation or stabilization of identity – a large number of
visitors to Auschwitz are Israeli or Jewish-American. Similarly, at the
War Remnants Museum in Vietnam, Western tourists are explicitly
asked to acknowledge the Vietnamese account of the War. Thus, the
degree to which attraction to dark tourism experiences are abstracted
by Stone and Sharply somewhat obscures political motivations and
implications.
Further, one can ask, as Diana Taylor does, in what sense our collec-
tive fears and anxieties are displaced onto these sites of remembrance in
ways that diminish their political force. That is, do memorials function
talismanically, drawing pain towards themselves so that viewers might

be relieved of its effects? Are they cathartic? If so, does such catharsis
in fact blunt the impact of the violent histories they represent? Of the
spontaneous public memorials to Diana Spencer, Taylor writes that in
death the public were able to ‘admire the image while ignoring the
violence that contributed to its making’ (D. Taylor, 154). The observa-
tion is relevant for the study of dark tourism inasmuch as one must
ask how the beguiling allure of ‘being there’ at sites such as Murambi
or Auschwitz may sometimes obscure historical specificity (a com-
mon point of critique). I certainly felt this was the case when I visited
Sachsenhausen in Berlin, where a generalized scenario of Nazi tyranny
(and ingenuity) was foregrounded at the expense of suppressing the
voices of those interned there. This was literally the case: in one of
the former barracks an audio display featuring survivors’ stories was in
the process of being dismantled to make way for an ‘authentic’ recreation
of the former living conditions of the barracks. Are dark tourists con-
sumers of grief, as Taylor puts it, who are, ‘the recipients, not the agents,
of an emotion that is not their own’ (157)? If so, is this, to draw on
Levinas, in fact a ‘useless suffering’? Levinas proposes that our own
suffering only takes on ethical meaning when it is suffering incurred
for the sake of the other (Entre Nous 94). Memorials might therefore be
accused of not only paradoxically relieving us of the pain of confronting
history but also of soothing our ‘fears and anxieties’ by suggesting that
our ‘useless suffering’ has moral purpose, acting as a currency of what
Lippard calls ‘compensation’ of the dead (122).
Taylor’s critique of public memorials highlights their political con-
text, particularly the sense in which they are as much an operation
of power exercised through aesthetic means as they are a site of onto-
logical discovery/security for individuals. If, as Agamben contends, the
concentration camp is the nomos of modernity (Homo Sacer 166), then
what does the transformation of these sites into tourist destinations say
of postmodernity? Agamben writes:
The camp as dislocating localization is the hidden matrix of the

politics in which we are still living, and it this structure of the camp
that we must learn to recognize in all its metamorphoses into the
zones d’attentes of our airports and certain outskirts of our cities.
(Homo Sacer 175)
Agamben suggests that the essential relationship between sovereign

power and the individual is determined by power’s control of individuals’
exposure to death. If this is the case, do visits to former concentration

camp sites, although putatively repudiating the obscene exercise of
power that took place there, in fact keep alive in the culture the ‘matrix’
or architecture of political control that Agamben describes? What
Bataille calls a death drive, rather than the result of the sequestration
of death as Stone and Sharpley contend, may instead be read as symp-
tomatic of the centrality of death in the exercise of power. Even in the
face of resistance to, or defiance of, those power bonds, as in Bataille’s
assertion that ultimate sovereignty resides in facing death and refusing
to fear it (Mbembe, 16), tourists are nonetheless actors within a certain
re-inscription of violent power. Sites such as Cu Chi in Vietnam, where
tourists are invited to crawl through tunnels and shoot semi-automatic
rifles, explicitly illustrate this.
Rancière puts the case in the context of the age of ‘war on terror’. By
drawing the public into practices of perpetual mourning and remem-
brance, power, he argues, writes a modern myth of infinite justice.
Because the ongoing ‘war on terror’ has no point of origin, nor any
possible end, terror is an ongoing psycho-state, predicated on what
has been and what might be. Infinite justice is the violence that must
necessarily be exerted to meet both the spectre and the threat of terror:
‘infinite justice then takes on its ‘humanist’ shape as the necessary
violence required to exorcise trauma in order to maintain the order of
the community’ (Rancière, Dissensus 187). The ethical turn, as Rancière
describes it, is therefore a mode of political operation that depends
upon both looking back at past catastrophes as the point of origin for
the narrative of infinite justice that now prevails, and at the same time
suggests that such catastrophe is in fact a condition of contemporary life
that requires ongoing ethical vigilance. Such politics are also reflected in
testimonial art practices, which he suggests are not ethical, but in fact
symptomatic of a culture that perpetuates an ‘endless state of mourning’
in order to enable endemic violence to remain as the norm (200).
Similar to the way in which the combination of consensus and

justice blots out politics, arts and aesthetic reflection tend to redis-
tribute themselves between a vision of art whose purpose is to attend
to the social bond and another of art as that which interminably
bears witness to catastrophe.
(193)
One must also draw some connection between the culture that Rancière
identifies and Pine and Gilmour’s ‘experience econonony’, as each are
firmly rooted in the neoliberal context. Tourism can indeed be seen as

a vector that draws them together.
Whilst I will respond to Rancière in greater detail as specific case
studies arise, the most significant problem here, keeping in mind
Bataille’s image of Fou-Tchou-Li, concerns the aestheticization of his-
tories of violence and suffering. How might such dark pasts be repre-
sented when they are argued to exceed the very limits of representation
and what is at stake in positing such limits? How might the theatrical
practices under scrutiny be separated out from the hegemonic order
that Rancière describes and at the same time resist the exploitative gaze
that Bataille writes of? An anti-aesthetic (and anti-theatrical) position
suggests that any imaginative rendering through the spectator’s gaze
acts to separate the reality of the event from the fantasy or fiction that
is constructed around it or emerges from it. The ethical problem of such
a gaze or attention is clear from earlier examples: to turn the pain, suf-
fering and death of the other into a drama for one’s own gratification
suggests a total disavowal of any moral responsibility for that other.
Ruth Klüger, German scholar and Holocaust survivor, for example,
addressing what she perceives as the ‘entertainment’ aspect of dark
tourism suggests that tourists who visit such sites are not concerned
with ‘those affected by crimes against humanity’, but with ‘the amuse-
ment of fully enjoying one’s sensibilities’ (qtd. in Dean, 9). In his article
for The Observer, Lennon also cautions:
‘Dark tourism’ sites are important testaments to the consistent failure

of humanity to temper our worst excesses and, managed well, they
can help us to learn from the darkest elements of our past. But we
have to guard against the voyeuristic and exploitative streak that is
evident at so many of them.
The drive at dark tourism sites, particularly those considered in this

study, to tell ‘big’ histories in the most impactful manner possible
means the particular and differentiated nature of individuals experi-
ences may be subsumed: that is, via the ‘touristification’ of history
these individuals are once more rendered nameless. Equally, sites may
be criticized for emotionalizing history through a focus on individuals
rather than addressing the complex social, political and historical
factors that underlie the sites, and which are less easily streamlined
into a coherent narrative. In either case, and however the motivation
may be understood, ‘theatre’ (largely the dramatization of historical
experience) is often raised as a problem.
Tourism and theatrical affect
At this juncture it is useful to think further about the aspects of tourist

practices that are often likened to drama and theatre. Whether museums
or specific historical sites, tourist attractions often seek to engage visi-
tors through an attention to elements such as staging and mise-en-scène,
identification and narrative progression. In ‘Performing Tourism,
Staging Tourism’, sociologist Tim Edensor notes that:
Tourist stages are replete with cues and directors. Props, stagehands,
stage-managers, directors constitute a supporting network which
facilitates, guides and organizes tourist performance according to
normative conventions and industry imperatives.
(73)
Paul Williams employs similarly theatrical vocabulary when he describes

memorial museums as ‘performing museums’ (69):
In a process analogous to the planning of a theatre production –

where play texts are selected, casts auditioned, sets designed, and
lengthy rehearsals take place – museum objects are spatially arranged
and decorated, placed in showcases and lit, and given explanatory
panels and audio-visual augmentation before the show opens.
(97)
Descriptions of tour guides are also often couched in terms of drama

and performance. Christopher Holloway comments that:
Guides […] wish to ensure that their passengers enjoy an experience

that is more than routine, and they may use their dramaturgical skills
to de-routinize the excursion. This they may do by using acting skills
to involve the audience emotionally, or they may invite members of
the group to share some deeply felt personal perspective of the site.
(388–9)
The language of drama and theatre commonly employed suggests a

perceived similarity between theatre and tourism, where tourists are
likened to audience members.
Dark tourism’s theatrical quality is much more deeply rooted and
significant than displaying a ‘likeness’ to theatre, however. While
there are certain dramatic (meant in both senses) elements employed
at the sites discussed, their most significantly theatrical aspects come

from the acts of imagination and contemplation generated by what
they do not and cannot show. As Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett writes:
‘Both heritage and tourism deal in the intangible, absent, inaccessible,
fragmentary, and dislocated’ (167). She further comments: ‘heritage
interpreters often locate truth in what cannot be seen, in the invisible
heart and soul of the site’ (168). Lippard reflects: ‘The most affecting
monuments for me are invisible. At places where something awful hap-
pened but its traces have disappeared leaving only the voids to speak, we
fill the blanks with our own experiences, associations and imagery (126).
That is, such sites’ theatricality is not only curatorial effect, but, more
importantly, the very means by which their unshowable aspects are
suggested. This theatricality is dependent on the spectator for its reali-
zation: it is the imaginative and affective investment of tourists that
renders its objects meaningful. In this sense, such theatricality is largely
defined by what Anne Ubersfeld describes as opacity. Remarking upon
the manner in which spectators concurrently negotiate absence and
presence, she writes that theatrical engagement is generated as much
through opaque signs as transparent ones and remarks that the work
required of the spectator to ‘read’ such signs can stimulate his or her
‘inventiveness’, which is felt as theatrical ‘pleasure’ (242). An example
that typifies opaque theatricality at play is Cambodia’s Choeung Ek
Genocidal Centre. Standing before the main memorial feature, a sign
for visitors reads: ‘With the commemorative stupa in front of us, we
imagine that we are hearing the grievous voice of the victims […] we
seem to be looking at the horrifying scenes and panic.’ Inside the stupa
are hundreds of skulls excavated from nearby mass grave pits. The sign,
which acknowledges tourists by use of the inclusive ‘we’, suggests the
power of the memorial to act as a conductor, channelling painful scenes
from the past. The choice of the verb ‘imagine’ is important also, as is
the qualification, ‘seem’, which is attached to looking. The dead can-
not be bought back to life to tell their stories. Rather, the memorial
acts as an affective prompt that is designed to stimulate the empathetic
imagination of the viewer. Above all, the sign is an instruction, indicat-
ing how we should direct our attention. It guides us through a process
of response that is theatrical in nature and which, if adhered to, might
make available to us something of the site’s past. The suggested process
requires imagination but also identification, in the sense that spectators
are called upon to recognize and affirm the human identity of which
victims were formerly deprived. This acknowledgement takes place via a
virtual or imagined ‘listening’ to the dead, which is the very thing that
indicates that the assumed role of listener is a theatrical effect, a process

enacted by the spectator. In such a scenario, the memorial takes on a
substitutive speaking role. This strategy recognizes the sense, as Elaine
Scarry argues, that pain eviscerates the power of speech.
Because the person in pain is ordinarily so bereft of the resources of

speech, it is not surprising that the language of pain should some-
times be brought into being by those who are not themselves in pain
but who speak on behalf of those who are.
(6)
In the case of Choeung Ek it is because of the pain and absence of

victims that the memorial speaks on their behalf, and it is the activation
of theatrical affect that gives voice to this substitutional speech.
Positioning a theatrical dialectic of absence and presence in affective
terms suits the context of this study but also presents certain difficul-
ties. Affect is an elusive concept that by its very nature evades descrip-
tion. Patricia Clough, editor of The Affective Turn, suggests that affect
is the feeling – or visceral apprehension – of what is beyond conscious
perception. Drawing on Brian Massumi, she describes affect as that
which makes us ‘vibrate with intensity’ (‘The Affective Turn’). James
Thompson suggests that affect ‘refers to emotional, often automatic,
embodied responses that occur in relation to something else – be it
object or observation, recall of a memory or practical activity’ (119).
He argues that in the theatrical context affect is an embodied response
provoked by aesthetic experience (135). In her work on theatre and
ethics, Helena Grehan draws on Alan Read to describe affect as ‘when
the inexplicable becomes palpable’ (24). Each of these descriptions
points us back to what Butler describes as the limits of critical knowl-
edge. Within this text I would like to employ the term ‘affect’ to signal
the moments when theatrical alterity makes itself felt. Such feeling is
marked by indeterminacy and contingency; it is non-linear, plural and
open. It is because of its open and indeterminate conditions that we
are able to apprehend (if not understand) the presence of spectres, or,
put another way, to ‘face’ the difficulties encountered at the limits of
understanding.
This is not to say that affect should be understood as autonomous – as
the real piercing through the everyday (as Noys suggested of Bataille) –
our affective responses are certainly influenced by cultural and political
conditioning. It must be acknowledged that such affectivity is ethically
fragile and susceptible to manipulation (this was one of Levinas’s chief
concerns with aesthetics). Edward Linenthal’s account of the construction

of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Preserving Memory,
provides apposite illustration of this. Linenthal states that well-known
Holocaust Historian Raul Hillberg:
consistently emphasized the need for perpetrators to ‘speak’ in the

exhibition, so that visitors could penetrate the murderous logic of
their world. However, given the boundaries of the commemorative
voice at work, this idea threatened to contaminate what was for
many a commemorative space.
(199)
The perceived theatrical power of the speaking voice of the perpetra-

tor was understood as a threat to the memorial project. Within such
scepticism one detects Brecht’s similar wariness of what he describes
as theatre’s ‘hypnotic’ potential: ‘The first condition for the A-effect’s
application to this end is that stage and auditorium must be purged of
everything ‘magical’ and that no ‘hypnotic tensions’ should be set up’
(‘Short Description’ 136). Further, the audience should not be ‘worked
up’, or ‘swept away’; by no means should the audience be plunged into
any kind of ‘trance’ state (136). In the examples that follow there are
similar tensions generated by attempts to control the theatrical affects
that inevitably arise at the sites discussed. It is therefore centrally impor-
tant to acknowledge the contingencies in each instance when speaking
of a theatricality that arises in response to absence. In the weaving
together of my own experience with a critical account that takes up
multiple voices, I attempt to foreground these contingencies and to
acknowledge the distinctiveness of each spectator or audience member’s
experience.
The obvious contrast with Brecht’s emphasis on what Augusto Boal
describes as, ‘understanding (enlightenment), on dianoia’ (103), is
the highly affective theatrical philosophy of Artaud, which could be
described as an aesthetic economy of experiences. Artaud made specific
references to the physiological responses that the audience should be
prompted to – ‘a show aimed at the whole anatomy’ (66) – and repeat-
edly stated the need to affect the nerves and organs of spectators:
‘metaphysics must be made to enter the mind through the body’ (77).
Artaud’s vision of theatre was one where the audience was completely
integrated into the performance – ‘no distinct divisions. No gap
between life and theatre’ (84). The increasing popularity of interactive
theatre, though probably quite unlike what Artaud imagined, seems
also to reflect the economies of desire that Pine and Gilmour point
to. The incredible success of Punch Drunk Love’s productions stands as
a good example. Recently in Auckland, New Zealand, an interactive
production called Apocalypse Z (clearly influenced by the novel World
War Z) involved audiences in participating in the aftermath of a zombie
attack. The contrast between Brecht and Artaud illustrates educative
and affective strategies that are both held in tension within one another
and inevitably interwoven at a number of the sites discussed.
Another way of thinking about the alignment of theatricality and
affect, and the ethical problems perceived to arise from this, is to con-
sider the dialectic of order/disorder that marks tourist activity generally.
Claudio Minca and Tim Oakes comment that:
The tourist is always looking for an impossible balance between the

need of finding and establishing order in the world – that means
mapping tourist spaces, landscapes and cultures – and the desire
(possibly) of transgressing that same order, of going beyond and
behind the map.
(12)
Stone and Sharpley’s argument implies that by confronting trans-

gressive disorder, ontological order is restored. Edensor translates this
dialectic into classical terms, describing tourist experiences as being
either ‘Apollonian’ or ‘Dionysiac’: the Dionysiac highly affective, while
the Apollonian appeals to knowledge, rationality and so on (‘Sensing
Tourist Spaces’ 37). At dark tourism sites this contrast can be observed in
the need to explain on one hand, and to evoke on the other. There is a
clear parallel here with the Brechtian/Artaudian contrast. The Dionysiac
is problematic for precisely the kinds of reasons Linenthal points to,
and yet at the same time it unseats what Pentheus represents in The
Bacchae, which is the overbearing rationality of the modern state. The
spell cast upon the women of Thebes by Dionysus in Euripides’ play is
the inevitable response to Pentheus’s secular ordering drive. The drama
attempts to restore the necessary balance between the two opposing
forces, perhaps the ‘impossible balance’ to which Minca and Oakes
refer. In both the Brechtian/Artaudian and Dionysiac/Penthian para-
digms one can see how the ontological/political readings of dark tourist
motivation find concord in the respective pairings. This pattern of
staged oppositions, broadly considered as the affective on the one hand,
and the political-historical on the other, returns again and again at the
sites considered as well as in the various approaches to representational
limits in the performance works discussed. The sites considered broadly

employ theatrical and dramatic devices in a conventional sense and at
the same time seek to harness theatrical alterity in order to call into
presence that which is absent (and ‘unrepresentable’). Given that tour-
ists, like theatrical spectators, are increasing drawn into a ‘playing a
part’, however, what I would like to discuss next is the nature of the
roles that are offered.
Pilgrim, witness, bystander, observer: the roles

of the spectator
Dark tourists, who people ‘unpeopled places’ (Lippard, 120), are vari-
ously described as pilgrims, mourners, voyeurs or interlopers, bystanders,
observers or witnesses. In this section I would like to consider some of
these roles in more detail, paying particular attention to the concept
of witness, which is so central to any discourse concerning the limits of
representation. I do not propose to settle upon a particular terminology,
but rather to explore the interplay between the suggested roles, each of
which inflects the designated part of the tourist somewhat differently.
Pilgrimage is a trope reasonably commonly applied to describe visi-
tors to sites of particular national or identity-based significance. Lennon
notes the connection, remarking that, ‘as far back as the Dark Ages,
pilgrims were travelling to tombs and sites of religious martyrdom’
(qtd. in The Observer). The busloads of Israeli and Polish schoolchil-
dren who visit Auschwitz daily are probably more accurately thought
of as modern-day national pilgrims rather than as dark tourists. Maria
Tumarkin argues that in settings such as Auschwitz and Gallipoli, by
taking up the word ‘pilgrimage’ tourists reveal a perceived sacred aspect
to the journeys undertaken:
The word pilgrimage, after all, does not just describe a journey to a
hallowed ground; it speaks not merely of a ceremonious outing but
of a quest to be spiritually transformed by physical contact with a site
considered sacred. That is to say that it is not just where you go that
counts but what happens to you when you get there.
(40)
By emphasizing transformation, Tumarkin points to the essentially

performative aspect of pilgrimage, which has two aspects: an externally
visible performance of reverence and an internally experienced shift in
the self. The external aspect can be understood as a means of offering
acknowledgment and recognition, whilst internally, as Williams argues,

memorial sites can be places for people to mourn, to forgive, to remem-
ber and to receive moral instruction (22). Pilgrimage is a journey carried
out both on behalf of or in service of another and, at the same time,
for the spiritual benefit of the pilgrim. The transformation implied
by the pilgrim’s journey indicates the affective aspect of it: the ‘what
happens’ is, by its nature, mysterious, in excess of language and sense,
individuated and unrepeatable. Whatever happens requires an other, a
force that in some way inhabits and alters the subject. One can see how
the kind of ontological yearning for contact with the dead described
earlier sits within a pilgrimatic paradigm. It is important to recognize,
however, that pilgrimage can be as much a political act as a spiritual or
religious one. In the case of young Antipodeans travelling to Gallipoli,
for example, the motivation and outcome is not so much spiritual as it
is concerned with reinforcing narratives of nationhood. A headline in
an Australian newspaper in 2012 read, ‘Gallipoli an, “emotional jour-
ney” for Aussie pilgrims’ (Catanzaro). The emotion concerned is most
pointedly generated in response to a narrative of ‘Australianness’ and
the pilgrimage, in many senses, is to a scene where national character
was forged.
Whilst the term ‘pilgrim’ has some rhetorical currency, it is the
notion of witness that is most commonly employed when discussing
the role of visitors to memorial sites, in situ or otherwise. Witness, whilst
taken up across multiple disciplines, arises in its strictest sense as part of
a legal discourse: a witness is someone who is able to give testimony. In
the tourist context this legal understanding is mobilized to imply both
a vague sense of global citizenry and to enforce narratives of identity.
The term is commonly expressed by both tourists – ‘we came to bear
witness’ – and in descriptions of tourists: a recent Associated Press head-
line read, ‘Tourists visit genocide memorials in Rwanda: Travellers can
bear witness to the mass slaughter of innocents’ (Kurash). This flexible
use of the term – such tourists are not witnesses in a strict sense, but
visitors to sites of aesthetically mediated aftermath – has been subject to
lengthy discussion in Holocaust and trauma studies. Primo Levi notably
argued that the true witnesses to the horror of the concentration camps
were those who died – those who endured the entirety of the process of
cruelty, which culminated in death:
We, the survivors, are not the true witnesses […] We are those who
by their prevarications or abilities or good luck did not touch the
bottom. Those who did so, those who saw the Gorgon, have not
returned to tell about it or have returned mute, but they are the
‘Muslims’, the submerged, the complete witnesses.
(63)
In Levi’s formulation, because true witnesses are not available to bear

witness, every act of witnessing is in some way removed. Levi’s posi-
tion (and work that has followed from it, such as Agamben’s) has been
influential in articulating the dialectical tension around witnessing: it
is both a necessity, and yet, by its nature, bound by certain limits – the
truth of the other’s experience always eludes us. As Derrida writes of
Paul Celan’s ‘Aschenglorie’, which he cites as an exceptional case of
aesthetic witness, the poem, ‘continues to bear witness that one cannot
bear witness for the witness, who in the end remains alone and without
witness’ (Sovereignties in Question 96).
Witnessing is further complicated not just by who may or may not
be understood as a ‘true’ witness but also by how the concept is broadly
used to describe different kinds of spectatorship. In Fantasies of Witness,
Gary Weissman summarizes various reworkings of the term, including
‘secondary witness’, ‘vicarious witness’, ‘retrospective witness’, ‘witness
by adoption’, or ‘witness through imagination’ (20). Reflecting the ethi-
cal implications of the transitive use of the term, Lucy Lippard remarks
that ‘monuments can make you a once-removed witness to memories
(or guilt) you never had’ (125). The pejorative sense in which Weismann
describes the term’s various employment indicates a resistance to its
cooption away from a legal basis, which is understood as negatively
theatricalizating the historical. Weismann cites an anecdote from
Linenthal’s memoir that expresses such concern:
In order to impress the story on visitors, simulation of Holocaust

experience seemed an attractive option. ‘A room might be con-
structed like a railroad car and as individuals are in this rocking
chamber, views would pass them.’ […] There would be a full-scale
model Auschwitz and as an emotional climax, a large room with just
shower heads. A metal door is clanged shut and then a voice says,
‘This is the last thing the Jews heard’.
(Linenthal, 115)
That the plan was rejected indicates the manner in which theatricality
is deeply problematized in such settings. Theatricality is equated with
false semblance, the pretence of authenticity, affective manipulation,
and a movement away from any encounter with the historic that could
be described in ethical terms. The attempt to show the ‘unshowable’,

and to make understandable what it beyond comprehension, is at the
heart of both Weismann and others’ scepticism. Rancière’s critique of
testimonial aesthetics and a political culture of mourning adds further
weight to scepticism regarding the widespread use of the term ‘witness’.
On the other hand, theorists such as Diana Taylor have argued for
the political power, and indeed necessity, of acts of substitutive witness.
Discussing the work of Peruvian theatre company Yuyachkani, she
argues that performance-based transmission of cultural memory and
cultural trauma expands the sphere of those capable of bearing witness
to that history. She writes:
[W]itnessing is transferable: the theatre, like the testimony, like

the photograph, film, or report, can make witnesses of others. The
(eye)witness sustains both the archive and the repertoire. So, rather
than think of performance primarily as ephemeral, as that which
disappears, Yuyachkani insists on creating a community of witnesses
by and through performance.
(211)
In 2012 I had the opportunity to watch Ana Correa, member of

Yuyachkani, perform a solo work entitled Confessiones. In it, Correa
reflected on her journey as an artist and shared some of the characters
she has created. The play traversed personal and collective memory,
both that of the company and that of those whose histories she has
represented. Near the end of the performance Correa handed out flash-
lights to three members of the audience, including myself. Dressed as
an indigenous Andean, she wore a hessian-like cloak. She beckoned the
audience to gather around her and ascended a small plinth as the stage
lights were brought down. Those of us with flashlights were invited to
provide her lighting. Upon illumination, she opened her cloak. Lining
it were photographs of Andean people who had been victims of state
violence. The moment of revelation was arresting. As Taylor writes of
the company, the gesture sought to create a community of witnesses.
The intimate action was that of making the hidden visible and the audi-
ence needed to provide the light to make this visibility possible. We were
drawn into a scenario where we had to perform our role as witnesses,
just as Correa performed the role of one who gives testimony. Unlike the
faces displayed at Tuol Sleng in Cambodia, for example, where tourists
are removed from the genealogical source of the image, here Correa
herself was that link: the theatrical moment was the culmination of
a story where Correa described working with a group of indigenous

Andeans. The history and images she shared were known to her, and
now passed onto us through her. If witness is transferable in this manner,
then in what sense does this play out, if at all, in the tourist context?
Lippard writes that: ‘Unpeopled places marking the sites of human
tragedy must be repeopled by visitors who, if they are open and attuned
enough, become surrogates for the absent, the commemorated’ (120).
The surrogacy practised by Correa is an object of inheritance for her
audience. Similarly, many memorial sites ask that visitors recognize the
charge of standing upon the ground that those they have come to com-
memorate no longer occupy. While Taylor submits that a photograph
or a film can make witnesses of its viewers, however, it is important
to acknowledge the significant differences of degree between various
types of testimony. In Confessiones the live performer was in front of
us – within touching distance – a warm-blooded substitute who gave
vital presence to those absent. At tourism sites, for the most part, there
are no such substitutes. The shoes at Auschwitz and at the Holocaust
Museum in Washington DC, for example, are called witness on behalf
of those whose loss they signify, but they do not look us in the eye as
Correa did. Clearly, such distinctions are significant.
In an article that teases out the general characterization of theatrical
spectators as witnesses, Caroline Wake suggests a taxonomy of witness –
primary, secondary and tertiary – that helps bring some clarity to the
various degrees of witnessing taking place. She helpfully expands upon
the tertiary witness mode: a third party who can be understood as
distanced by space – someone who observes the testimonial exchange
between primary and secondary witnesses – or by time, the third link
in a chain that moves further and further away from the original event.
Drawing on Brecht’s essay ‘The Street Scene’, and poem ‘On Everyday
Theatre’, to illustrate the relation between theatrical representation and
witness, Wake writes: ‘Within the scene of the accident, witnessing is a
mode of seeing whereas within the scene of the account, witnessing is
not only a mode of seeing but also of saying and, for the bystanders, a
mode of listening’. Wake makes two propositions: the first is that the
scene of the account generates its own witnesses, and secondly, that
such witnessing in comprised of both speaking and listening. If we
are to follow this logic, then in the example of Confessiones, Correa is
a secondary witness and the audience tertiary. The photographs stand
as substitutes for the primary witnesses, their silence heightening their
affect. At the same time, and with continuing reference to Brecht’s
street scene, Wake asks whether the term witness is adequate: ‘despite
the diversity this scene, or scenes, represents for modes of witnessing

in theatre and performance studies, we still have only one word at our
disposal – witness’. That is, given the recourse to describing witness as
‘tertiary’ in order to clarify its meaning, might there be other terms that
more usefully take into account the differences described above?
In his work, States of Denial, Stanley Cohen remarks upon the terms
‘bystander’ and ‘observer’ and, as with Brecht’s street scene, focuses on
the differentiation of roles. Bystanders, he suggests, can be of two dif-
ferent kinds, internal and external: ‘coming to know what is happening
around you, in your own country’, and ‘knowing about other countries’,
respectively (140). The external bystander is useful here in its relevance to
the context of dark tourism. Bystanders, by definition, are passive
figures: ‘people who have already seen, known or heard about the
situation – yet have still not reacted’ (140). Clearly in the case of most
dark tourism, spectators are not bystanders in the same sense that they
are not witnesses. Yet the distinction between one who gives testimony,
and one who has seen but not yet reported what they have seen is
important. The figure of the bystander is commonly implicit within the
histories depicted in this study in that the questions, ‘How could this
have happened?’ and ‘Why didn’t people stop it?’ are often central to
the accounts given. In cases such as Rwanda, the term ‘bystander’ is
of prime rhetorical significance in that memorial narratives empha-
size the role of what Cohen calls ‘bystander states’ (161). The Kigali
Genocide Memorial Centre’s display, for example, includes text in its
concluding section that reads, ‘The world withdrew… and watched as
a million people were slaughtered.’ Tourists are therefore implicated
not as witnesses – there is no basis for them offering testimony – but
as belated bystanders and as such called upon to ‘react’. In her work
on trauma tourism Clark proposes that visiting memorial sites can
motivate a performative act of promise: ‘the promise of “never again”
is performed through the ritual of “trauma tourism”.’ Sites such as the
Kigali memorial ask for such commitments to be made. The distinc-
tion between bystander and witness is subtle but important – in the
sense of ‘bystander states’ meant by Cohen – and emphasizes shared
responsibility.
The task of the observer is rather different. Cohen draws upon the
contemporary use of the term, ‘international observer’, to describe a
role based in what he calls the ‘compassion business’. He remarks, with
reference to Michael Ignatieff, that such observers, ‘come to know about
the misery of strangers, not as chance passers-by, but as representatives
of “an impalpable modern ideal: that the problems of other people, not
matter how remote, should concern us all”‘ (164). Indeed, the role that
tourists are encouraged to take on is often more like that of a belated
observer than a witness. At Auschwitz, for example, visitors are divided
into groups who are each assigned a guide that leads them through the
site, offering a factual narrative, illustrated by the presentation of key
pieces of visual evidence. At the end of my tour, tourists were expli-
citly invited to draw their own conclusions from what they had seen.
My guide posed the question, ‘Why Auschwitz? Why did this happen
here? Why?’, then left us to reflect on our own answers. The observer is
understood as participating in a process of resolution, which recognizes
the ongoing implication of the crisis observed. In the tourist context
this perhaps reflects the sense in which Clark writes, as cited in the
Introduction, that: ‘as a culture we will endlessly be drawn back, again
and gain, to the sites of trauma until the underlying issue is resolved.’
On the question of roles, perhaps we might return here to Brecht.
Both ‘The Street Scene’ and ‘On Everyday Theatre’ depict the response
of a crowd to an accident and each emphasizes a plurality of responses.
Brecht is vitally concerned with a multiplicity of perspectives as signi-
fied by the crowd who gather in the space of aftermath. This crowd is
most usefully understood as constitutive rather than reactive. That is,
following the catastrophe, it is the crowd’s multiplicity of expressions of
perspective that shape the form that the recollection of the event takes
in the world. Indeed, Brecht’s example emphasizes that any demonstra-
tion is contingent:
[…] he gives
Only so much as to make the accident intelligible, and yet
Enough to make you see them. But he shows neither
As if the accident had been unavoidable. The accident
Becomes in this way intelligible, yet not intelligible, for both
of them
Could have moved quite otherwise […]
(‘On Everyday Theatre’ 177)
There is an obvious vitality at play at the scene of the account. What

the demonstrator offers is a persuasive possible explanation; his demon-
stration is subjective, or selective – according to him – not an exact
or totalizing re-enactment. Clark, in her discussion of representations
of past atrocities, suggests four categories – stories, space, objects and
interactions – and illustrates an interactive dramaturgy marked precisely
by the contingency of meaning. ‘Visitors to these sites bring their own
desires, and it is a negotiation between the constructed environment

and the spectator that determines meaning.’ In Brecht’s example, the
listener responds to this account, generating their own understanding
of what took place, taking into account what might be multiple and
conflicting demonstrative interpretations:
The [street scene] performance’s origins lie in an incident that can be

judged one way or another, that may repeat itself in different forms
and is not finished but is bound to have consequences, so that this
judgment has some significance. The object of the performance is to
make it easier to give an opinion on the incident.
(‘The Street Scene’ 128)
The unfinished, unintelligible and contingent aspects of the account are

the very conditions that make the enquiry necessary; these limits are
generative in nature, and their palpability provokes the audience. The
demonstrator provides an account, which the listener receives and may
use as the basis of transmitting his or her own opinion on the matter,
thus expanding the sphere of concern, moving us closer to a space of
consequence.
All of the terminologies suggested here – pilgrim, witness, bystander,
observer – have their own problems, largely the affectation of a role of
importance despite the seemingly inconsequence of its performance.
However, it also allows us to build a context for dark tourism, and in
particular the memorial spectatorship that is the main focus of exam-
ples. It locates this spectatorship firmly in the global situation in which
such contemporary ‘wandering’ – as an extension of the flâneur –
takes place. This context is marked by an oscillation between: on the
one hand, a sense of purpose, which recognizes and acknowledges
the ethical significance of what has been seen and allows this to shape
one’s own subjectivity; and on the other, unthinkingly participates
in a culture of mourning that is predicated on the perpetuation of
what Rancière describes, also drawing on Brecht, as an ethos of ‘only
violence helps where violence reigns’ (Dissensus 186). Rather than
seeking to fix upon a definitive terminology that would help mediate
this tension, this book embraces instability, concurring with Cohen
when he states that, ‘Building a bridge to the suffering of others is
a moral not a technical matter’ (167). Moral or ethical implication,
while acknowledging the distance in time and space of the spectator
from the experience of the victim or survivor, also asserts an exis-
tential condition – a right to be – which, although shared by all, has
been wrongly denied to victims of violence. The spectator’s very act of

participation within the sphere of concern affirms this essential right.
In Levinas’s sense, it cannot be denied, for the spectator’s own existence
confirms it; this is, I believe, what Levinas means when he argues that
responsibility precedes all else – existence is responsibility. Of course,
each of us may refuse or deny this concern, yet the concern itself –
responsibility – exists nonetheless.
Ethics and ‘the inter-human drama’
As noted in the short introduction to this book, Levinas’s ethics provide

an important backdrop for much of the analysis. This is both because of
the emphasis he places on fealty to the other, and because his use of the
term ‘alterity’ invites theatrical comparison. In this section I would like to
elaborate on the aspects of Levinas’s work that are to be drawn upon
but also to clarify what I perceive as the limitations of his philosophy
(inasmuch as it is useful to this project) and to explain in more detail
how I intend to frame the ethical discussion. Levinas worried that the
substitutive nature of artistic representation might appease our desire to
take action in the world: ‘We find an appeasement when, beyond the
invitations to comprehend and act, we throw ourselves into the rhythm
of a reality which solicits only its admission into a book or a painting’
(Basic Philosophical Writings 141–2). Aesthetic reality is suggested as hyp-
notic in perhaps the same way that Brecht spoke of dramatic theatre. Yet
at the same time, Levinas’s own writing is rich with explicitly theatrical
analogies. I will begin by reviewing some of these and addressing the
tensions they generate when used in a discussion of ‘ethical’ theatrical
aesthetics. The terms ‘mimesis’ and ‘identification’ are also important
to the undertaking: mimesis because I want to suggest that theatri-
cal action is always shadowed by alterity and therefore opens itself
to ethical reading; and identification because I want to tease out the
non-identificatory paradigm that is central to Levinas’s ethics and suggest
a different way of approaching it.
The fact that Levinas’s work has been taken up by performance scholars
is not only because certain of his concepts seem implicitly theatrically
analogous, but also because his writing contains many references to
the language of drama and performance. Indeed, in ‘Time and Other’
he commented that, ‘It sometimes seems to me that the whole of
philosophy is only a meditation on Shakespeare’ (The Levinas Reader 41).
And it is not only performance scholars who have identified a theatrical
aspect to Levinas’s ethics. Published in 2007, John Caruana’s article in
Continental Philosophy Review, ‘The Drama of Being: Levinas and the

History of Philosophy’, acknowledges and takes as its starting point the
centrality of dramatic motifs to Levinas’s writing. From a philosophi-
cal perspective, Caruana places Levinas’s work in the context of what
he sees as his description of two distinct dramas: on the one hand, an
ontological drama – a drama of being, and on the other, an ethical
intrigue (251). The tension between these two dramas is what underlies
all human experience. Caruana states, ‘it is only by recognizing the
inherent problems of the drama of being that we can begin to appreci-
ate the hidden presence of another drama that unfetters us from the
tragic consequences that plague the ontological drama’ (253).
Levinas sets his descriptions of alterity and the other – fundamentally
marked by the obligation of the self to the other – in contrast with
ontology, or philosophies of ‘being’ that begin with the self. Levinas
characterizes being as a totalizing force that is fundamentally indiffe-
rent and suggests that, when untrammelled by ethical attention, cruelty
and suffering unfold from it: self-interest dominates and demolishes the
other. He therefore insists that our lives must be informed by something
that transcends being. Caruana comments:
For Levinas, the tragic drama or ‘intrigue of being’ simply cannot

do justice to the transcendent character of the defining and pivotal
moments of our lives. Instead, he requires us to be vigilant in our
efforts to trace the path to an ‘other scene’, the ‘ethical intrigue’ –
a drama that cuts deeper into the heart of what it means to be human
precisely because it addresses the moral cry against the catastrophic
ambivalence of existence.
(261)
The ethical intrigue is founded on the understanding that it is the other,

whose claim upon us is an expression of the infinite, that counters
ontological indifference or ensnarement in the web of being. Caruana
also comments:
These two dramas are not meant to be understood as discrete and

separate, for they are intricately intertwined. What transpires in the
second drama has the potential to place a human face on the drama
of being. More to the point, the ethical intrigue offers the only
legitimate response to the indifference and widespread cruelty of the
existential drama.
(251)
The intertwined nature of the contrasting dramas described by Caruana

is key, and together they make up what he calls a broader ‘interhuman
drama’ (252).
The distinctions that Caruana draws are mirrored in Paul Ricoeur’s
description of Levinas’s concepts of ‘saying’ and ‘said’, which he
describes as ‘the two protagonists of Levinas’s philosophical drama’
(Ricouer and Escobar, 84), succinctly summarizing: ‘Saying on the
side of ethics, the said on the side of ontology’ (82). The saying is the
a-temporal responsibility that comes from the other, while the said is
the instantiation of the self. Levinas stresses the saying should not be
understood as an echo of the said, for it comes from elsewhere, from
‘otherwise than being’ (Otherwise Than Being 3). The obvious problem
this presents us with, which Ricoeur identifies, is how we might access
the saying other than by way of the said: how else are we to commu-
nicate? Is the subordination of the saying to the said always inevitable
in any attempt at representation? To give an image to the problem one
might think of the scene in Fellini’s Roma, where archaeologists find
frescoes in a Roman villa buried beneath the city, only to have the light
and air that they bring with them obliterate the images before their
very eyes. How might we behold such images without destroying them?
Is it possible to allow the saying to be apprehended without at the same
time enacting its ‘unsaying’ (Ricouer and Escobar, 86)?
Wes Avram, reflecting upon the tensions that arise from putting
Levinas’s ethics into action, describes such work as requiring that one
proceed through a ‘thicket of difficulties’. He remarks: ‘While I can-
not cease thinking the ethical, it is the ethical that, finally, cannot
be thought. It can only be acted out, praxially, in the many liturgies,
responses, givings and receivings that make for moral life. This new
ethics has a spirituality, borne by the full sensuality of heart’ (282).
In speaking of the heart rather than reason and de-emphasizing dis-
tance, Avram urges a reflection on the functions of love, sympathy
and so on within Levinas’s philosophical landscape and for us to
consider more broadly how responsibility for the other might be per-
formed. Levinas himself draws a contrast between a ‘one-for-the-other
subjectivity’ – an involuntary notion of ethical responsibility that
‘precedes every decision’ – with ‘the generosity of a voluntary act’
(Basic Philosophical Writings 102–3). It is this distinction that makes
the question of how to fulfil one’s commitment and responsibility
to the other problematic. I suggest that to understand the sites and
performance works in ethical terms requires us to look to the fine
points of balance between a for-the-other subjectivity and voluntary
generosity. Within such a search the value of what Avram terms ‘the
heart’ is central.
It is in the context of this search that I am interested in the role of
mimesis. In his ethical formulation Levinas employs the term ‘substi-
tution’ to denote taking on responsibility for the other. Through this
book I examine how theatrical mimesis might be regarded as substitu-
tive practice in this sense. While ostensibly a practice of the ‘said’, in
its doubled aspect theatre is always, as Alice Rayner puts it, ‘haunted’
by alterity – by the saying that is an expression of what is ‘otherwise
than being’. In its very liveness and its openness to the spectator,
performance is, as Bert O. States asserts, marked by what it is not and
can never be (213). Or, as Dennis Kennedy suggests, theatre is always
shadowed by its opposite – death, ‘the perpetual ghost at the spectator’s
banquet’ (8). Crucially, this is why our responses to spaces marked by
absence are theatrical in character. If this is the case, then the stage itself
may be read, as Rayner reads it, as populated by ghosts, a sphere where,
‘the living and the dead come together in a productive encounter’
(Ghosts xii). But do such ghosts need to be understood only as doubles,
or can their ‘haunting’ or substitutive aspect be conceptualized more
broadly? In his response to Levinas’s concern with the ‘face of the other’
(through which their alterity is expressed), Jon Erickson suggests that
the entire stage can be read as a ‘face’ in the ethical sense:
What about the audience’s relation to the Other as performer/

performance? Is the face involved here literally the face of the per-
former, or is it indicated in the very architectural relation? That is,
isn’t the proscenium a face, an interface, isn’t the stage the face
of the Other compelling our attention? Aren’t the actors the very
expression of that face as a whole? […]
(13)
Similarly, one might think of Auschwitz-as-memorial-site as a face that

issues a moral or ethical summons. Indeed, despite later reservations, in
an early essay, Levinas himself asked, ‘Can things take on a face? Is not
art an activity that lends faces to things?’ (Basic Philosophical Writings 10)
What is crucial in measuring the visibility of the aesthetic face (in
an ethical sense) is the degree to which spectators are called to account
through the performance. Erickson writes:
The performer is there not to ‘teach’ the audience a lesson, but to

explore her own limits, to lay bare her own face before the others
and before herself. If that experience was strong and clear enough,
the more perspicuous members of the audience will understand and
be provoked, disturbed, moved, challenged by it. But does the per-
former in all this give up the face-to-face relation, the responsibility
to the Other as audience? Isn’t the performer’s responsibility in evok-
ing that responsibility in the audience for herself as paradigmatic
Other?
(11)
Here I would like to briefly pause to give an example from Dark Tourists
that goes some way to illustrating the scenario that Erickson sketches
out. The performance featured a scene in which three performers came
across a body lying in a pile of detritus. The body was naked save for
an open jacket and boots (Figure 1.3). The performers picked the body
up and roughly tossed it between them before finally bundling in into
a nearby shed and slamming the door shut. The part of the body was a
cameo of sorts, played by choreographer Malia Johnston. In this sense it
was a double interruption: a body both foreign and stripped of protec-
tion. The act of ‘laying herself bare’ before both the other performers
on stage and audience had a powerful effect, with a number of audience
members commenting that it was the most striking scene of the work.
The scene might also be called an example of where the ‘reality’ of the
performance was allowed to disrupt that fiction that it represented by
unsettling ‘aesthetic distance’ (Féral and Wickes, 55).
Yet in talking of the activity of the audience, as Rancière does, for
example, when he talks of an emancipated spectator, what is really
at stake is the very concept of spectatorship itself. Rancière argues
for a break in the dialectical positioning of audience and action:
‘Emancipation begins when we challenge the opposition between view-
ing and acting; when we understand that the self-evident facts that
structure relations between seeing and doing themselves belong to
structures of domination’ (The Emancipated Spectator 13). His call is not so
much for a freeing of the audience from the bondage of passivity, but
rather, as I interpret it, an essentially democratic call for the activation
of responsibility in spectators through a recognizing of the significance
of their activity: ‘The spectator […] observes, selects, compares, inter-
prets. She links what she sees to a host of other things she has seen
on other stages, in other kinds of place. She composes her own poem
with the elements of the poem before her’ (13). In his evocation of an
emancipated spectator, it is contingency and difference that Rancière
emphasizes. He further states:
What our performances – be they teaching, playing, writing, making

art or looking at it – verify is not our participation in a power embod-
ied in the community. It is the capacity of anonymous people, the
capacity that makes everyone equal to everyone else. This capacity is
exercised through irreducible distances; it is exercised by an unpre-
dictable play of associations and dissociations.
(The Emancipated Spectator 16–17)
This book is not so much concerned with judging whether certain

aesthetic projects or tourist sites fail or succeed, but rather looking at
precisely the ‘play of associations and dissociations’ that each puts
forth, which are considered in ethical terms.
Jerzy Grotowski, during his paratheatrical period, commented:
What does it really mean ‘the audience’? We are doing something,

and there are others who want to meet us; this is not the audience,
they are concrete human beings; some are opening their doors,
others come to the meeting, there is something that will happen
between us. This is more important than having an idea about the
‘audience’ and its role.
(124)
Similarly, Fischer-Lichte, in The Transformative Power of Performance, sug-

gests that the most powerful transformation of the spectator happens
when they are no longer a spectator at all, but in fact a participant. She
strikingly illustrates this point with a discussion of Marina Abramović’s
Lips of Thomas, wherein the audience was called to take responsibility
for the suffering of the performer (11–13). The performance featured
Abramović carrying out a ritual that involved inflicting a series of
increasingly painful acts upon herself. Each time the work has been
performed, the audience has, at varying points, intervened to stop
the ritual. The work ends only when the audience decides that they
can no longer be spectators to the pain performed. In this reversal are
traces of both a Brechtian call for action, and what could be described
as a contrasting Artaudian emphasis on transfigurative pain. What is
significant, by way of Rancière, is the manner in which the spectators
are ‘emancipated’ through taking responsible ethical action. What seems
important here, however, is not to advocate a particular kind of partici-
patory aesthetic as much as a rethinking of the spectator as a figure both
passive and separate from the history before them. As Féral and Wickes
note of performance art actions such as Abramovich’s, they force spec-
tators to renounce the suspension of disbelief (54). Indeed, implicit in
much of Grotowski’s work, and in Rancière’s, is the powerful notion
that we are all, each of us, as a community of ‘narrators’ and ‘translators’
are equally responsible for ‘chang[ing] something of the world we live
in’ (The Emancipated Spectator 22–3). Therefore the central question at
hand concerns what constitutes ethical human behaviour generally, as
being predicated on a recognition of the inseparability of the suffering
of others and one’s own subjectivity: ethical consciousness.
Much of the theatrical ethical discussion by Nicholas Ridout, Helena
Grehan and others focuses its analysis on this finely calibrated relation-
ship between performer and spectator that Erickson evokes. In Theatre
and Ethics, Ridout, with reference to Levinas, argues that the most ethical
of theatre might be that which, paradoxically, does away with ethics.
The work that would provoke a truly ethical response, in Levinas’s

terms, would be that work which appeared, at least, to have no
ethical ambition whatsoever. Such a work would have to confront its
spectators or participants with something radically other, something

that could not be assimilated by their understanding of the ethical.
(67)
He emphasizes pieces that through their aesthetic concerns ‘surprise,

challenge or affront’ (70). Perhaps this is a theatre of what Rancière
calls ‘dissensus’. In this regard Ridout’s argument is not unlike Grehan’s
discussion of ambivalence as productively unsettling the audience,
generating both self and critical reflection (21–5) or Vivian Patraka’s
‘aesthetic of atrocity’, which would ‘displace suspense and cause spectators
to view a historically inevitable outcome with loathing and dread (89).
In relation to theatrical representations of the Holocaust, Claude
Schumacher states that such performances should leave the ‘spectator
perplexed, wanting to know more although convinced that no knowl-
edge can ever cure him of his perplexity’ (8). In their discussion of
extreme violence on stage, Josette Féral and Leslie Wickes refer to an,
‘aesthetic of shock’. Similarly, in his discussion of postdramatic theatre,
Lehmann describes an aesthetics of ‘responsibility’ and ‘risk’, which set
aside ‘theses and messages’ for strategies which instead ‘point audiences
to their own presence’ (187).
The performance addresses itself fundamentally to my involvement:

my personal responsibility to realize the mental synthesis of the
event; my attention having to remain open to what does not become
an object of my understanding; my sense of participation in what
is happening around me; my awareness of the problematic act of
spectating itself.
(143)
The common thread of this critical work is a perceived (or desired)

schism between performance and spectators, often through breaking
the model of dramatic identification. Lehmann describes postdramatic
theatre generally as a ‘“phenomenology of perception” marked by an
overcoming of the principles of mimesis and fiction’ (99). Such descrip-
tion is significant in that he argues that these performances, whilst not
abandoning mimesis altogether, attempt to wrest it from Aristotelian
convention in a way that aims precisely against the sense of ‘cosmic’
and moral order than underpins classical tragedy. Lehmann notes
that: ‘What ancient tragedy already articulated was the thought that
there must be some coherence inhering in a human’s life’ (172). What
charges the tragic narrative is the sense in which this coherence remains
inaccessible to the protagonist – their fate is beyond their conception.

Lehmann shifts attention back to the spectator in a way that challenges
such a fatalistic paradigm. Whilst an Aristotelian concept of theatre is
largely rejected by the theatrical examples discussed in this text, the
basis of that rejection – a perceived schism between representational
pleasure and ethics, and the inability of an Aristotelian causal (fatalistic)
plot-based framework to capture the reality of non-fictional suffering –
is worthy of attention. Indeed, Agamben in Remnants of Auschwitz,
argues that, ‘After Auschwitz, it is not possible to use a tragic paradigm
in ethics’, rejecting Aristotle’s proposition primarily on the basis of
Auschwitz’ negation of the possibility of heroism (99). Whilst Agamben
does not deal especially with the theatrical particulars of the ‘tragic
paradigm’, nor was Aristotle’s theory of tragedy an aspect of his ethics,
Agamben’s argument nonetheless reflects a more broadly held scepti-
cism concerning the relevance of tragic theatre in a post-Holocaust age.
Holocaust scholars concerned with theatre have strongly argued against
what they perceive as tragedy’s inability to respond adequately to the
scale and scope of human loss at sites such as Auschwitz. Lehmann’s
postdramatic aesthetic is significantly grounded in such a rejection,
which he describes as a ‘withdrawal of representation’ (172).
But what might the withdrawal of representation mean for the spec-
tator? In what sense might such spectatorship – marked by confusion
and ambivalence – be considered ethical? In suggesting a rift or divide
between performance and audience, each of the aforementioned theat-
rical scholars, like Rancière, emphasizes the activity of the audience.
Lehmann, in particular, comments that postdramatic theatre ‘turns
the stage into the arena of reflection on the spectators’ act of seeing’
(157). In both explicit and subtle ways many of the works discussed in
this study do precisely this. In Maria Kizito, Erik Ehn uses the dramatic
device of a spectator in the gallery. American nun Teresa, who has
travelled to watch Kizito’s trial, continually draws the audience’s atten-
tion back to the context of their own spectatorship. The connection
between the worlds of perpetrator and spectators, mediated by the actors,
underscores a claim that Ehn makes for collective responsibility: ‘her
kind of guilt is key to understanding who we are in the world today’ (qtd.
in Edmondson, 70). Dark Tourists similarly placed at its dramaturgical
centre the distance between the experiences of others and our desire to
belatedly understand them. The work began and ended with a tourist
and explored various configurations of ‘sight-seeing’ throughout.
Just as Lehmann and others emphasize the responsibilities of seeing,
Alice Rayner, in her article, ‘The Audience: Subjectivity, Community and
the Ethics of Listening’, similarly emphasizes the role of the audience

as those who listen ‘at the boundaries of comprehension’, suggesting that
the function of the audience is to, ‘hear both history and desire in the
silence […] to hear meaning in both the spoken and unspoken’ (262).
Such attention to silence is particularly significant throughout the
book, as already illustrated in the example given of Choeung Ek. This
kind of listening is not an automatic response, but a motivated action.
I wish to position this kind of theatrical listening in ethical terms. In
doing so I acknowledge that such positioning contradicts the manner
in which Levinas defines ethical subjectivity, where he makes a clear
distinction between a ‘one-for-the-other subjectivity’ – an involuntary
notion of ethical responsibility that ‘precedes every decision’ – and
‘the generosity of a voluntary act’ (Basic Philosophical Writings 102–3).
Implicit in my elaboration on Rayner’s ethical listening is the sugges-
tion that an ethics that arises from the demands of radical otherness is
not mutually exclusive from instances of recognition and identification:
that is, we can think about identification as a political strategy as well
as a dramatic one and that, as such, it functions rather differently than
an absorption of the other into the sameness of the self.
In this sense, I do not wish to abandon the concept of identifica-
tion, which seems regarded as passé in criticism such as Lehmann’s,
but to reframe its terms somewhat. To return briefly to Levinas, the
formulation of saying and said relies upon his insistence that the other
is fundamentally unknowable – the other cannot be assimilated into
one’s own experience, they are not a figure to be identified with in the
manner that we might think of as conventional theatrical identifica-
tion. Whilst identification is not necessary for theatre to take place –
and indeed, as described above, much contemporary performance is
anti-identificatory – I do hold that it is central to the conceptualiza-
tion of an ethical practice of aesthetics. That is, one cannot separate
violence from dis-identification, in the sense that making the face of
the other un-identifiable is also central to strategies of dehumanization
where, ‘the face represents that for which no identification is possible,
an accomplishment of dehumanization and a condition for violence’
(Butler 145). Indeed, artists such as Alfredo Jaar and Ai Weiwei have
spoken of the necessity of identification to political art. As part of a series
of photographic works made in response to the Rwandan genocide, Jaar
created a piece called The Silence of Nduwayezu. The work was based on an
orphan Jaar met who had witnessed the murder of his parents. Jaar was
struck by the eyes of the unspeaking child. In the exhibition spectators
read Jaar’s text, which was displayed on light boxes, before turning a
corner where they were met by a huge table, upon which were piled
a million slides, each of Nduwayezu’s eyes. Spectators were invited to
pick the slides up and look through them. Importantly, Jaar describes this
gesture as an identificatory one:
When we say a million deaths it is meaningless. So the strategy was

to reduce the scale to a single human being with a name, with a
story, and that helps the audience to identity with that person. And
this process of identification is fundamental to create empathy, to
create solidarity, to create intellectual involvement.
(‘Interview: The Rwanda Project’)
Such identification – a recurrent device within Jaar’s work – does not,

as Butler suggests, consist of ‘an extrapolation from an understanding
of my own precariousness to an understanding of another’s precarious
life’ (134). Rather, by seeing through the eyes of the other, we are invited
to more profoundly acknowledge what they see and have seen, and at
the same time recognize our inevitable distance from that sight. As Jaar
comments:
I’m interested in that moment when the audience takes a look. They
look at the eyes very carefully, and that is the moment I’m look-
ing for – when their eyes are a centimetre away from the eyes of
Nduwayezu, who witnessed what we didn’t want to see.
As part of the Citizens Investigation project, initiated in response to

the major earthquake in China of 2008, Weiwei created a series of works
that each emphasized the names of affected individuals. Names of the
Student Earthquake Victims Found by the Citizens’ Investigation (Figure 1.4),
for example, features the names of over five thousand students who
died. Weiwei writes:
A name is the first and final marker of individual rights, one fixed
part of the ever-changing human world. A name is the most primi-
tive characteristic of our human rights: no matter how poor or how
rich, all living people have a name, and it is endowed with good
wishes, the expectant blessings of kindness and virtue.
(183)
In this sense, the ethical struggle could also be described as an iden-

tificatory one. In what Paul Ricoeur calls its social character, mimesis
Figure 1.4 A tourist views Ai Weiwei’s Names of the Student Earthquake Victims
Found by the Citizens’ Investigation, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden,
Washington DC, 2012 (Photograph: Emma Willis)
plays an important role within such artistic identificatory paradigms.

In ‘Mimesis and Representation’ Ricoeur emphasizes mimesis as means of
making chaotic experience intelligible and in doing so binding together
its participants. Bert O. States describes such meeting as where ‘self and
other are joined and exchange natures, thus offering a momentary
solution to the enigma of our ontological isolation from the things
of the world’ (20). The pleasure of mimesis, of imitation, rather than
arising from an understanding of what is in the world is instead pro-
duced by a realization – and temporary mediation through joining
and exchange – of the affective disjunction of being in the world – of
ontology. Ricoeur describes this ‘joining and exchange’ in terms of a
shared pre-figurative repertory and argues that it is the generally shared
understanding of action and suffering that constitutes the basis for
the communication of a particular set of actions and suffering. This
shared understanding provides the basis for an identificatory relation-
ship. Thus, we can know something of the suffering of the other in as
much as we ourselves generally understand what it means to suffer. The
particular suffering of the other remains ineffable, however, while the

ineffable quality of suffering itself is a shared experience. The notion of
sharing is central here, as it denotes not just mutuality but also respon-
sibility. In this sense Ricoeur’s defence of the ethical aspect of mimesis
helps to clarify what Rancière in Dissensus strongly contests, the notion
of ‘unrepresentability’ which, he argues: ‘produces an indistinction
between right and fact, occupying the same place in aesthetic reflection
that terror does on the political plane’ (195).
We exist in an interconnected, although geographically, culturally and
politically differentiated, network of selves and others. The theatrical
projects and memorial sites that I am most interested in stage the very
tension of being both self and other, and of awakening to the respon-
sibility that we bear precisely because of our relation to the other, not
our separation from them. Levinas often refers, with obvious theologi-
cal connotation, to the Infinite as the source of the saying – of ethics.
If we repurpose this term away from its theological origin to mean the
network of all human beings then, whilst recognizing the uniqueness
of the situation of the other we also recognize that their suffering does
belongs to us not as individuals, but as part of a community and in
this way forms a point of what Jaar calls solidarity. Such solidarity is
not the same as mourning, where, in a state of abjection, we imagine
that we feel the pain of the other, but rather an expression of the com-
mitment to justice. The tension generated when such an approach to
identification is employed effectively expresses what Derrida describes
as the condition of artistic testimony, where the testifying object points
to what witness can never reveal, but which requires the belief of the
listener nonetheless (Sovereignties in Question 76).
2
Performing Museums and
Memorial Bodies: Theatre in the
Shadows of the Crematoria
[If] cremation takes some dramatic turn […] the crematorium,

like that of Dachau, evoking some very possible future archi-
tecturally outside of time, of the past as well as future […]
then it may be possible for the theatre to survive.
Jean Genet, Reflections on the Theatre 63
In yoking together theatre and the crematoria of Dachau, which may

be read here as an obscene symbol of twentieth-century failure, Genet’s
claim is by turns political, theatrical and mystical. What might it mean
to speak of the ‘drama’ of the crematoria, specifically that of Dachau,
without reducing the gravity of its history? What kind of relationship
exists between such dramas and the sense in which these sites function,
as James E. Young claims, as performance spaces: ‘Like all memorials,
Auschwitz also functions as a performance space, a political stage’ (The
Texture of Memory 144). What are the conditions of such theatre? What
are its affective qualities and what sense of responsibility might it
invoke? In this chapter I discuss the manner in which visitors are active
participants in a drama of place at three sites: Sachsenhausen, Auschwitz-
Birkenau (hereafter Auschwitz) and Dachau. The enquiry focuses on the
concept of engagement – physical, intellectual and emotional –with
particular emphasis given to the role that objects and architecture play
as substitutions that stand in place of those absent, thereby allowing an
imagined interplay of speaking and listening (a form of prosopopoeia).
An account of my own experience at the three sites begins the enquiry.
These accounts are intended as both illustrations that help situate pro-
ceeding discussion, and as admission of my own subjectivity. I come to
these sites as an outsider in many regards: a New Zealand woman with
no (known) personal connection to the sites visited. My memory is, as
56
Performing Museums and Memorial Bodies 57
Young puts it, tenuously ‘vicarious’ (At Memory’s Edge 2). Is it possible
that memorial practices as carried out by tourists might share in the task
of what Young calls the creation of a ‘common past’ where a ritualized
‘remembering together […] becomes shared memory’ (6-7). Does the
subtle dialogical underpinning of the sites discussed work to constitute
a community of ‘listeners’ (in the sense meant by Alice Rayner) commit-
ted to justice, or rather does it generate ambivalent acts of mourning,
in the sense meant by Rancière, where the community constituted is a
fundamentally negative one?
Through reflecting on Jerzy Grotowski’s production of Akropolis,
I clarify the distinctions between a performative reading of these
social and political spaces and theatrical performances. I examine the
limitations of the strategies of what Paul Williams calls ‘the performing
museum’ when compared to the use of the performing body as a site of
historical inscription (Rokem, ‘On the Fantastic’ 50) and ask how the
vitality of the performing body disrupts the deathly affects that are fore-
most at many memorial sites. I further consider how, through such vital
inscription, Akropolis dramatizes what Butler calls the ‘limits of under-
standing’ (or unrepresentability). In the face of such limits, theatre, like
any other medium, has had to respond to Theodor Adorno’s provoca-
tion that poetry after Auschwitz was ‘barbaric’ (34). Of particular interest
in this regard is the claim made by Alice Rayner when she writes:
Theatre is the specific site where appearance and disappearance

reproduce the relations between the living and the dead, not as
a form of representation, but as a form of consciousness that has
moved beyond dualities and the problems of representation without
disregarding them.
(Ghosts xvi)
What are the conditions required to bring about or heighten this

consciousness? Further, how might such consciousness be understood
in relation to an ethics of alterity? Finally, how might the audience be
ethically implicated, in the sense meant by dramaturge Ludwig Flaszen
when he described the Akropolis as a ‘call to the ethical memory’ of the
spectator (176).
Sachsenhausen, Auschwitz, Dachau: a personal journey
Sachsenhausen Memorial and Museum is located on the outskirts of

Berlin in the quiet town of Oranienburg. Set up in 1936 to house a
wide constituency of largely political prisoners, Sachsenhausen was

not a death camp but a concentration camp, although a number of
Jewish prisoners passed through it on their way to other camps further
east, such as Auschwitz. The site has gone through a number of trans-
formations as the political environment around it has changed. When
I visited there were still highly visible traces of its GDR iteration as site
of socialist triumph over fascism, most notably a large monument. Post
German reunification, the focus of the camp-as-memorial has shifted
towards foregrounding German culpability. When I visited in 2007 the
curatorial strategy for the site seemed still be to ‘on the move’, however:
there were reconstructions-in-progress of architectural features that had
formerly fallen into ruin, as well as significant changes to the more
museological elements of the site. This sense of flux was reflected in a
certain casualness concerning how visitors were directed to engage with
the memorial and museum. Tourists were able to take one of the tours
offered by a number of private companies or simply to navigate their
own way around the site with the aid of a brochure.
Departing from Berlin, I took the Sandeman’s New Berlin
Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp Memorial Tour to the site, which
is about half an hour’s train ride from the centre of the city. Despite the
pictures in the brochure featuring elderly survivor-guides, our leader
for the day was a young girl from New Zealand, a traveller temporarily
situated in Berlin. She had a lively demeanour that initially exuded
a spirit of holiday adventure more than that of sombre reflection. As
we gathered on the train platform and waited to depart for the camp,
she announced that we were going to have ‘a really fun day together’.
Quickly realizing what she had said, she retracted. ‘Well, not exactly
fun. But you’re going to learn a lot of important information.’ It was
both strange and strangely predictable that my guide was a mirror for
my own out-of-placeness. Beyond a cringe of national embarrassment,
this unexpected narrator of Nazi history seemed to indicate how such
sites have become commodified destinations, which are sometimes
roughly handled. The Sandeman’s Sachsenhausen tour was bundled
into a package of Berlin tours offered by the company that included,
among other attractions, pub crawls.
The tour unfolded as a relentless catalogue of horrors, where we
were led on a carefully choreographed journey from one place where
‘it’ happened to the next. We began by walking through the Arbeit
Macht Frei gate and ended at the incinerator of the pathology build-
ing. Throughout, the guide provided us with a thorough commentary
on the details of various acts of cruelty inflicted upon the prisoners.
We spent quite some time standing on the ruins of the old prison block/
barracks. Our guide explained in great detail a number of punishments
that took place, pointing out remnants that added veracity. This was the
general format for the tour: our attention was drawn to an object and
we were then given a flood of rehearsed information in order to explain
its significance.
Midway through the tour, a minor gesture by the guide led me to
reflect on how we were, at times, asked to imagine the experiences of
prisoners and to place ourselves within these imaginative pictures. We
were lead to a wide circular pathway, covered with different sizes of
stones. Our guide told us that one of the prisoners’ work details was to
wear 20kg packs and spend all day running around the track as a way of
testing the soles of German army boots. We were then invited to walk
along the path on the way to our next stop on the tour. Whilst not an
invitation to ‘walk in the shoes’ of the other, it subtly suggested some
kind of imitative value. The dramatic delivery of the story and the way
in which we were invited to ‘experience’ the path made me uncomfort-
able. I reflected on the sculpture contained within the Jewish Museum
in Berlin, Shalekhet (Fallen Leaves), by Menashe Kadishman. Situated in
one of the deliberately created voids in Daniel Libeskind’s building, over
10,000 iron faces, mouths open, cover the floors. In order to explore
the installation, one must decide whether to walk over the iron faces,
which crunch underfoot as one disappears into the dark recess of the
void. Whereas there, I had carefully stepped on and over the faces, with
a strong self-reflexive awareness of the implications of such movement,
at Sachsenhausen, I walked on the grass alongside the path instead.
There were omissions within the tour, edits which did not fit within
the streamlined dramatic narrative: a collapsing old wooden villa that
the violence of time seemed to have exploded stood as an aberration,
caught between absence and preservation; an old brothel; a garden of
private sculptural memorials to the deceased. These places were passed
over in favour of the ‘main attractions’, such as the gleaming, pristine
pathology building’s surgical room, and the reconstructed execution
trench. After the trench, we were ushered into the site of every concen-
tration camp tourist’s anticipation (and/or dread) – the gas chamber/
crematorium. All that remained were the ruins that outlined a floor
plan, little walls and piles of bricks and oven doors. Our guide contin-
ued her informative commentary, peppered with vivid anecdotes of
horror. In the end, it seemed to me that the tour was, albeit somewhat
unwittingly, a carefully detailed account of Nazi ingenuity. In the end-
less explanations of exactly what and how atrocious acts were carried
out, it was the enterprise of death that ultimately took centre stage,
rather than the lives of those who suffered there, whose presence was
strangely effaced.
This effacement was most apparent in the obvious reconstruction
taking place. Near the beginning of the tour we were ushered into a
restored barracks in which a museum-type display was set up. There
were a number of photographs and audio recordings, which narrated
the stories of various prisoners. As noted in the previous chapter, we
were later told that these displays were to be dismantled in favour of
recreating the ‘original’ conditions of the barracks. The emphasis on
restoration struck me as highly ambivalent in implication: what was it
that a return to the original conditions of the camp might offer? Indeed,
I noticed that new concrete fence-posts had been cast and installed,
awaiting only their barbed wire threading. Was it not possible that this
rebuilding simply reinscribed the original violence of the site in a way
that further effaced the lives of those who had suffered there? And how
far could such curatorial strategies be pushed and to what end? Stories
have circulated on the internet, and indeed reported by Reuters, of tours
to a former Gulag site in Lithuania where tourists can pay to undergo
a prison experience (Zuta). Is this where such a strategy could lead in
time – an explicit realization of the camp as the persistent ‘matrix of moder-
nity’, as Agamben writes, but made camp: a grotesque parody. Finally,
I felt that the camp’s performance of itself, in conjunction with that of
the guide was such that there was no room for either the voices of vic-
tims or for the silence of what Levi calls the ‘true’ witnesses. I wondered
if some other strategy of remembrance was required, one that focused
on the lives of those who were captive there, rather than the means by
which their suffering and death was made possible.
Visiting Auschwitz (Figures 2.1–2.3) was an altogether more organized
experience. To begin with the site insists upon only guided group tours,
either through an approved private company or with one of the multi-
lingual guides who work as staff. This compulsory aspect of the visit
is a way of managing the large numbers of people and controlling the
manner in which they experience the site. As with Sachsenhausen, our
journey around the site was highly choreographed, but in this instance,
the guiding and displays were more thoughtfully presented and allowed
more space for reflection.
The weather was bitterly cold, so much so that after our visit a fellow
tourist commented that you would not really get the ‘total’ experience
if you came during the summer. The icy snow increased our sense of
urgency in making quick breaks from one building to another. The
weather deteriorated as the day progressed, to the extent that our Polish
guide shortened the Birkenau section of the tour. I mention this, and
my fellow tourist’s comment, because it seems important to acknowl-
edge the contingencies of such visits: what was the weather like? Where
did the guide come from? Did the audio guide work properly? Was the
site overwhelmed with school children? Such factors play a significant
role in how visitors experience the site. The cold at Auschwitz was not
just uncomfortable, but also highly affecting in the way indicated by
my fellow tourist.
My public tour was with a group of around twenty other English
speakers, led by a young Polish woman who chose which aspects of the
camp we would see. Before entering the various former barrack buildings
which housed the displays, our guide would give an explanation of the
significance of what we were going to see as well as practical instruc-
tions for viewing, such as moving single-file and keeping to the left.
She would also indicate when we could or could not take photographs –
principally yes if we were outside and no if we were inside. Her general
tone was brisk towards us, though not unkind. She delivered the story
of the camp with authority and confidence, giving us basic and necessary
information. Most narration took place before and after we observed
the displays, leaving us ample time for our own reflection.
In general the museum displays combined photographs, informa-
tion and objects. These objects are well known – shoes, suitcases, hair
and so on. Looking at the displays, I found myself confronted with an
overwhelming sense of distance, however, struggling to understand
what the objects might be telling me. They were anticipated in advance
of visiting, and now, confronted with them, I was uncertain of how
to respond and felt strangely removed. There was a small moment of
rupture, however, when we entered a large room housing a display
of prisoners’ suitcases. An older gentleman from our party let out a
loud exclamation when he realized that a suitcase at the front of the
display had belonged to a family member who had perished at the
camp. It seemed a remarkable stroke of chance that, of the many many
cases, hers was displayed. The guide waived the photographic ban
and allowed the man to take a picture. His cry generated an affective
response in me, which the objects alone had not. It so clearly evoked
the person concealed, as it were, within the object.
The Auschwitz section of the tour ended with a visit to a gas chamber,
the most intact of the entire Auschwitz-Birkenau complex. At this build-
ing, as with many others, there was a small queue. Before we entered
our guide asked us to call to mind a small-scale model of the chamber,
62
Figure 2.1 Tourists at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Poland, 2007 (Photograph: Emma Willis)

which we had been shown earlier. The diorama featured hundreds of

little figures being shepherded through all stages of the ‘shower’ com-
plex. These figures were heart-rending. Indeed, the image of that model
is clearer in my mind now than that of the building itself, for once
inside, it was we, the tourists, who filled the space. We shuffled quietly
around the concrete structure and when I try to remember it, all that
remains are the faces and figures of other tourists: old, young, some
lingering, halting the queue, others moving smoothly, one foot in front
of the other without pause. There was a small shrine. I wondered whose
task it was to light the candles. Were they blown out each evening or
kept burning? As we exited, we passed by a camera crew setting up to
film something. Tourists milled around like extras on a set. Like us, the
camera had come to try and capture something that might be preserved
for later use. It did not seem out of place.
After the Auschwitz section of the tour we were transported by bus
to the altogether more desolate and broken-down Birkenau. There,
I was struck by the site’s absences. Where there were once so many
barrack buildings, only a small few still stand. The white of both snow-
covered ground and sky overhead intensified a feeling of mass erasure.
We entered a wooden barrack (a reconstruction) on the left-hand side
of the camp. Our guide explained to us the living conditions within

it. She informed us that the wooden barracks on the other side of the
camp were exactly the same as this, and, therefore, it was not necessary
to see them. The only departure from her controlled demeanour came
near the end of the tour. Standing at the end of the railway tracks, she
described Hitler’s determination, in the final days of the War, even
when he knew it was lost, to kill as many Hungarian Jews as possible.
Suddenly her voice bristled with palpable emotion, piercing through
the previously controlled delivery. As with the earlier moment of the
suitcase, this human response to the site punctured something of the
rehearsed presentation.
Finally, she finished with a short speech, which sounded as if it has
been delivered many times before. She reminded us that the perpetrators
of these crimes were not madmen; they were sane human beings who
made evil choices. She then said, ‘Why Auschwitz? Why did this happen
here? Why?’ She paused, and then told us that we would need to answer
this question for ourselves. In a moment that in the telling seems so
banal and clichéd, I felt a wave of anguish, as if suddenly and unbear-
ably cut loose from her stream of calm and reasoned explanations. After
her speech we were given the choice of either spending another hour,
without guidance, walking around the perimeters of the Birkenau site,
or making our way immediately back to the bus. In quiet agreement we
trudged through the snow back to the bus. My thoughts on the way
back to Krakow were soft, muted, couched with the after affect of the
day’s small moments of intense feeling; undecided, uncertain.
My visit two years later to Dachau, which is situated on the outskirts
of Munich, took place in the German summer. The site was ringed with
the greenery of trees in full leaf and large groups of schoolchildren out
numbered other tourists. Visitors to Dachau (Figures 2.4–2.6) may either
go with a private tour group or by themselves. Other than school parties,
most people seemed to be travelling without guidance, but with the assis-
tance of the site’s comprehensive audio guide. The device contains expla-
nations of various features of the site, provides historical background, and
also gives accounts from survivors in a number of different languages.
There is much more information contained on the guide than one could
listen to within a single visit and, therefore, choice is an important aspect
of using the device. After initially listening to the first few relevant clips,
I put my audio guide away, only taking it out again at the end of my visit
to sit down and listen to some of the survivor accounts.
There are two main features of the memorial at Dachau: the site itself,
with a mixture of original and reconstructed features, and a comprehensive
and thoughtfully curated museum display housed in one of the former

main buildings. The detailed display discusses all aspects of the camp,
provides factual information, survivor recollections and facsimiles of
historical documents. As with the audio guides, there is almost too
much information to take in. Rather, one has to choose which sections
of the museum to dwell on. I was particularly interested in the instances
of staging that took place at the camp – times when the camp would
be temporarily and partially transformed for the sake of visitors. One
of the visual displays quoted from a journal of a former prisoner, who
described the ‘show’ that was put on when the camp was visited by
commissioners, the usual horror of bodies lined up for roll call replaced
by an open canteen and camp orchestra.
The combination of audio and visual material gives visitors a degree
of freedom in terms of composing their own experience of the camp,
much more so than at Auschwitz. As such it generates an environment
in which looking and listening are combined with talking and moving
in more autonomous and interesting ways than at the previous two
memorials. I noted in my journal that the space was apprehended in
moving through it; that it was defined by a sense of flow – of people and
of talk. In thinking of visitors as composing their own journey through
the site, albeit with the guidance and suggested navigation of the audio
guide, I reflected on Rancière’s ideal spectator, who composes a poem
of their experience. I reflected on Paul Ricoeur’s discussion of mimesis,
and the way in which walking, or moving through the space, might be
Figure 2.4 Tourists at Dachau, Germany, 2010 (Photograph: Emma Willis)

66

a configurative process, and of the multiple configurations woven by

visitors. I thought back on something I had recently read by art critic,
Christopher Tilley, who described ‘a walk undertaken in relation to a
study of the past’ (Body & Image 268). My own walk loosely followed the
assigned route, but was haphazard, meandering, backtracking – a walk
that mostly engaged with the walking of others – following, anticipating,
pausing, finding stillness, off track, on track, turning away, refusing the
designated journey at times, focused on exterior spaces, flow, streams,
moving water, cool tree-lined paths, focused on faces, reading emotion,
listening to different kinds of talking – teaching, laughing, whispering.
Tilley describes walking as a temporal journey and material narrative.
He evokes a ‘walk from the inside, participatory, taking one’s body into
place – opening up one’s perceptual sensibilities and experience’ (269).
I tried to walk in this way and, at the same time, compose a ‘poem’ of
my walking. I began by taking still photographs, observing other bodies,
then began to capture recorded images.
Above all, I was interested in the expressions of life at the site; those
that came from people, as well as environmental expressions – the
surrounding trees and streams. People seemed to be engaged in all
sorts of ways: some sombre, others talkative and relaxed, some were
alone, couples held hands, school groups moved in energetic clumps.
In short, given both information and also a freedom as to how to
engage that information, a plurality emerged that had perhaps been
suppressed at Auschwitz, which seemed foremost to engage a type of
austere ‘witnessing’ framework. I do not mean to make it sound, like
my fellow New Zealander, that the experience was or should be ‘fun’,
but rather that expressions of life seemed profoundly important in
terms of inscribing the site with something other than a deathly affect.
In Auschwitz these small moments of ‘life’ rose to the surface occasion-
ally while at Dachau they seemed to emerge more freely. While the
experience of being ‘in place’ is different for each visitor – a school-
child and an elderly person will not receive the site in the same way –
the way in which such differing respondents bumped up against each
other seemed significant. I described this in my journal as the energy
of collectively acknowledging and exploring the site. This energy,
I felt, was the necessary counter to the violence which I described as
the dominant force at Sachsenhausen. At Dachau care and thought
seemed to have been given as to precisely what was being memoria-
lized, and the relationship that the living had to this. Young writes:
Unlike the restored ruins of other sites, the memorial at Dachau does
not ask visitors to confuse its orderly, sterile present with its sordid
past. In its abstract references to what it once was, Dachau reminds

visitors that their own memory of this time, dependent on sites like
Dachau, is also necessarily abstract.
(The Texture of Memory 70)
There was no ambivalence toward visitors, but rather an invitation to

engage, to build a collective and transient human memorial of those
willing not so much to remember, as to learn. At Dachau it became
apparent to me that witnessing does not work in this context – it
presumes more than the site can provide or the visitor can enact.
However, what can be described are acts of learning, sharing, talking,
reflection, acknowledgment, and perhaps even resolve. The theatricality
imbued in the process is subtle and contingent, but most importantly,
following Genet, concerned principally with a merging of spaces of life
and death, and with an acknowledgment of the centrality of the dead in
shaping our understanding of the responsibilities of the living.
Theatre of the void
The theatricality in play at the sites I visited took two main forms.
Firstly, there was a curatorial dramaturgy that blended story, narration,
objects and architecture. The dramatic pretexts that operate at each
of the sites, and which situate visitors as participants, can usefully be
thought of as what Diana Taylor terms ‘scenarios’: ‘Simultaneously
setup and action, scenarios frame and activate social dramas. The setup
lays out the range of possibilities; all the elements are there: encoun-
ter, conflict, resolution, and denouement, for example’ (28). Secondly,
there were the more subtle theatrical affects that arose from the sites’
absences. The realization of this affect was often dependent upon some
external catalyst – for example, the moment when a man from my
tour at Auschwitz recognized his relative’s suitcase. These two modes
were interwoven throughout, contributing to what may be described
as both dramatic and affective ‘emplacement’ (as Mike Crang terms it).
Tourists are emplaced as social actors who participate, to greater or lesser
degrees, in imaginative rehearsals of past events. Narrative plays an
important part in this process. At both Sachsenhausen and Auschwitz,
a promenade-like form was interwoven with a linear dramaturgy: tour-
ists were drawn into a story for which the site provided illustration. The
dramatic arrangement of the site impacts upon how powerful a sense of
emplacement is evoked for visitors: how and where objects are placed
for display, the use of guides as narrators, pathways that are mapped
out through the space, the balancing of informative commentary with

space for silent contemplation.
Such involvement relies on an interweaving of affective and educa-
tive means. Reading is not generally the primary activity at most of the
sites considered, instead emphasis is placed on producing particular
affects through attention to place, which includes elements of sight,
sound, touch, and sometimes even smell. All of this gives force to the
visitor experience. As Williams notes, ‘The perceived authenticity of a
historical site is greatly enhanced when it contains tangible proof of the
event in place’ (Memorial Museums 79). This sense of being ‘in place’ is
highly constructed, even as it draws on pre-existent features of the site.
The paradigm of the ‘performing museum’, as Williams terms it, has
been clearly influenced by the affective draw of sites such as Auschwitz.
At the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC, for example, visitors are
given a passport, they may view a replica rail boxcar, there is a display
of shoes on loan from Auschwitz presented in the same manner as that
memorial’s display, and so on. This kind of museum attempts to repli-
cate the dramatic impact of a sited experience through the theatrical
arrangement of objects.
The implications of dramatic emplacement are multiple. On the one
hand it implies ethical responsibility. As Taylor argues, ‘[it] forces us to
situate ourselves in relationship to it; as participants, spectators, or wit-
nesses, we need to “be there,” part of the act of transfer’ (32). On the
other hand, the very distance that the term ‘tourist’ connotes between
our lives and the history on display makes apparent another more
metonymic function, where the act of reverence and acknowledgment
is better understood as a symptom of a ‘culture of mourning’, in the
sense meant by Rancière. Further, and more specific to the theatrical
context of the enquiry, the adherence to narrative conventions leads to
the problem of what Vivian Patraka calls the ‘pleasure in seeing expecta-
tions fulfilled by the impending death of another’ that is bound to the
fatalistic tragic paradigm (89). We might therefore say that theatricality
persists at such sites as a response to the absences that mark them and
yet, at the same, time, this very means of making the past ‘present’
threatens to subsume the voices it evokes. What more can be said of
this dialectic tension where death and theatre’s determination to revive
the subject meet? To consider this I turn to Genet’s cemetery-theatre:
‘In today’s city, the only place […] where a theatre could be built is in
the cemetery’ (69).
The first question that arises from Genet is why he so forcefully inter-
twines cemeteries and theatres. Genet would have been well aware, in
1967, of the implications of advocating a theatre that took place in the

shadow of a crematorium. It is worth making brief note of the post-
War history of Dachau, something Genet would likely have had some
knowledge of. In his account of the camp’s evolution Young writes
of the intriguing temporal disjunctions that occurred as its purpose
changed. After the Second World War, Dachau was ‘transformed from
a German concentration camp to an American military stockade, and
then into a sprawling refugee camp’ (The Texture of Memory 61). Young
draws on accounts of visits to the site in the 1950s that illustrate its
overlapping identities: ‘raggedy children at play’ and ‘households of old
women’ were to be seen alongside a ‘crematoria that stands in its own
little park, perfectly preserved, with a well-kept two-acre garden around
it’ (62). He further writes:
In another section of the camp, Americans had set up a gigantic food-

processing centre for U.S. troops stationed in Germany and Austria.
Large trucks came and went all day long, while visitors were directed
by a large billboard at the camp entrance to ‘the Memorials and the
Crematorium.’ According to reporter Gaston Coblentz, the left side of
this billboard also pointed the way to the postal exchange, fire
station, and bowling alley. The right side directed visitors to ‘laundry
and dry cleaning, chapel, crematory and motor pool.’
(62–3)
These accounts, with a faint echo of Tadeusz Borowski’s bleakly sardonic

This Way to the Gas Ladies and Gentleman, illustrate a scenario within
which the contradictions between past and present, and the manner
in which each complicates the other, are left unacknowledged. The
juxtaposition places the obscene within the landscape of the normal
and at the same time makes evident that any such normal can never
escape the shadows of the crematoria. Given that when Genet wrote his
essay, a divided Europe was only beginning to grapple with the task of
memorializing a deeply troubling period in its own history, his choice
of Dachau as figure begins to make more sense.
In ‘Double Take: Acting and Writing in Genet’s “The Strange Word
‘Urb”‘, Samuel Weber addresses Genet’s cemetery theatre: ‘Theatre of
the Holocaust? Holocaust as theatre? Not entirely. Rather, the Holocaust
as a grisly provocation to rethink the place of theatre in relation to the
dead’ (309). In this sense, for Genet, Holocaust history is a pretext for
a larger task which grows out of it. The location of theatre within the
space of the dead – and he most radically suggests that this should be
something like a working crematorium – is a way of carrying out the

existential task of confronting death; theatre carried out in full recogni-
tion of a binding finitude to which we are all subject. That the survival
of theatre is made dependent by Genet on cemeteries and crematoria
suggests that theatre needs to engage mystery in the most profound
sense: ‘As for the audience, only those who know themselves capable of
taking a nocturnal stroll through a cemetery, in order to be confronted
with a mystery, will come to the theatre’ (71). Such mystery is distinctly
at odds with the strange quotidian evoked above. The only clue that
Genet gives as to how this might be realized (as opposed to why, which
he argues more fulsomely) is in his suggestion of its location. Genet sug-
gests that the use of such a deathly location foregrounds an existential
mindfulness, from which a deep feeling might be summoned that is
extra-political, deriving from the mystery of life and death. In doing so
he describes a kind of theatre that is performed in recognition of the
fact that our own lives cannot be untouched by those who have died
before us and, indeed, that our own lives are always lived in the shad-
ows of others’ deaths. One of the ways he suggests that theatre and
cemeteries might be dynamically interrelated is in their treatment of
time – how each operate, in a sense, outside of time: ‘The theatrical
event being suspended, outside of historical time, on its own dramatic
time – is for the sake of a vertiginous liberation’ (64).
I would like to pause here to briefly discuss Charlotte Delbo’s account of
performing Molière’s play, The Hypochondriac, whilst interned as Raisko,
an Auschwitz satellite camp. Delbo’s reflections on the production
offers another perspective on Genet’s essay. The production strikingly
illustrates what Erika Fischer-Lichte calls the ‘transformative power
of performance.’ To borrow from her, Delbo’s performance could
be described: a ‘re-enchantment of the world’ under the direst of
circumstances (181). The production illustrates an important argument
throughout this book, which is that it is not a particular theatrical
aesthetic that might be considered most ethical, but rather that theatre’s
ethical aspect lies in its responsive character. Theatre may always be
marked by its alterior aspect, as I have argued, but in order for this
aspect to be apprehended by an audience, certain aesthetic intentions
and conditions (unique to each performance) are required. If postdra-
matic theatre, for example, is understood as responsive, in part, to the
challenge to representation that arose in the aftermath of the Holocaust,
Delbo’s example illustrates that dramatic theatre was an effective means
of responding in its midst. In providing a literal illustration of Genet’s
theatre in the shadow of the crematoria, Delbo’s account helps illustrate
this very point and at the same time shows that beyond its initially
unsettling aspect, Genet’s own exhortations are imbued with vitality.
(Rebecca Rovit and Alvin Goldfarb give an account of the extent of per-
formances which took places inside the camps in their work, Theatrical
Performance During the Holocaust).
The conditions at Raisko, where inmates were assigned work in a
scientific agricultural laboratory, whilst harsh, were an improvement
on those which Delbo writes of in her account of prior internment at
Auschwitz. At the latter camp, she writes: ‘You cannot imagine these
heartrending voices, veiled by the mist-enshrouded marshes and their
own weakness, repeating words which no longer summoned any
images’ (167). Upon this brink of life and death, theatre was impossible.
When the group of women were transferred from Auschwitz to Raisko,
however, she states: ‘but no sooner are they resurrected, they do thea-
tre’ (167). The ‘doing theatre’ initially consisted of the women reciting
parts of plays to each other while they were working. After a time they
decided that they wanted to stage a performance.
Molière’s comedy, which Delbo says little of, tells the story of Argan,
a chronic hypochondriac, and the plot essentially revolves around his
engagement of his daughter to a doctor, in order that he may continue
to receive free medical care, despite his daughter’s love for another. The
play lampoons the medical fraternity as well as those who fall under its
spell. Medicine is characterized as the practice of charlatans and in oppo-
sition to good sense – Argan’s illnesses are not so much feigned as they
are imagined with the assistance of doctors. In the end Argan is brought
to his senses through the cunning trickery of his maid, Toinette, and
brother-in-law, Béralde. Love and sense prevail. While Delbo does not
comment on the ironies of staging a work about false pain, this aspect
of the play, nonetheless, gives a peculiar charge to her account. The very
confusions in the play between real and false, illness and health, love
and cruelty speak of the relationship between the play and the context of
its staging. Where Argan disappears into a world of imagined maladies,
Delbo’s women escape into a restorative world of theatre.
Much of Delbo’s account is concerned with preparations and
rehearsal. Firstly, a fellow prisoner, Claudette, transcribed the women’s
memory of the play. Once this was done, rehearsals began. The process
of preparing the production was slow and consumed what little free
time the women had – ‘Sundays off and an hour in the evening’ (168).
I write this as though it were simple. You may think you’ve got a play
down pat, and you see and hear all the characters, but it’s no easy task
for someone who’s just recovered from typhus and is constantly hungry.
Those who were able to do so helped out. Recapturing a line was often
the victory of an entire day’s quest. And the rehearsals… They took
place after work, after supper – supper was two hundred grams of dry
bread and seven grams of margarine – at the time when, in a dark, freez-
ing hut, you experience more keenly than ever a profound weariness.
(169)
Delbo’s account makes it apparent that the work of the production – ‘we
were at last living our illusion’ (169) – was itself therapeutic. Describing
the day of the performance, Delbo writes: ‘Having forgotten for the
first time all our concerns about our daily soup, bread rations and vari-
ous chores, we busied ourselves from early morning with our exciting
preparations’ (169–70). The preparation was a significant interruption
and intervention in the oppressive routine of camp life, which tempo-
rarily transformed the form and function of the environment: ‘Cecile
achieved miracles of ingenuity with sweaters transformed into doublets
and casques, nightgowns and pyjamas turned into breeches for the male
roles’ (170). Using existing materials, the women also made a raised
stage, complete with a curtain and prompter’s box. In the sense that
Rokem argues that theatre may be able to provide a ‘dialectical antidote’
to the Holocaust (Performing History 192), the process of both preparing
and performing Molière’s play provided such relief.
That said, the ironies of staging such a comedy are significant in terms
of the transformational aspect of the performance. The comedy mocks
the institutionalized control of bodies in favour of heralding the restora-
tive power of love, laughter, music and dance. As Philip Berk states in
his essay, ‘The Therapy of Art in Le Malade Imaginaire’, ‘In contrast to
the professional artifices of the medical faculty, Molière sets not merely
the world of natural kindness and spontaneous love, but the world of
comédie, no less an art than medicine’ (40). He further notes that Molière
reduces medicine to rhetoric that cannot cure, whilst the imagination
has restorative power (42). Indeed, within the play, Molière’s own thea-
tre is suggested by Béralde as a prescription for Argan’s suffering: ‘I’d
love to open your eyes, even so. Look, there’s a comedy by Molière on
at the moment. That would explain better than I can’ (Molière, 75). And
the effect of the performance itself was powerful. Delbo writes:
It’s magnificent because some of Molière’s lines, having surfaced

intact in our memory, come to life again, unchanged, full of their
inexplicable, magical power.
It’s magnificent because each one of us plays her role with humility,
without trying to push herself to the foreground. Perennial miracle
of modest interpreters. The miracle of having an audience suddenly
recaptured childhood’s purity and resurrected the imaginative faculty.
It was magnificent because, for the space of two hours, while the
smokestacks never stopped belching their smoke of human flesh, for
two whole hours we believed in what we were doing.
(171)
Delbo’s Molière called to a past existence and one that was similarly
hoped for in the future. The comédie represented a world in which
wisdom triumphs over foolishness and where the common sense of
ordinary people wins out over institutional power (represented in
The Hypochondriac by the medical fraternity). The illusory nature of
the mimetic spectacle did not undermine its ethical value, but rather
heightened it.
Delbo’s account provides a kind of premonition of Genet’s call for
theatre performed in the shadow of the crematoria. Underlying the more
provocative aspects of Genet’s essay is an urgent argument for theatre
to confront that which most brutally trammels human life. For Genet,
deathly environments are a powerful means of disrupting normative
temporal frames, pointing to a certain end of time. This end is not so
much a finite point, but an endlessness that pervades and consumes all
aspects of life. Indeed, Genet refers to the devouring or digesting quality
of crematoria as being most important. This endlessness is further
signalled in a reference that Genet makes within his essay to the concept
of void. He suggests that the moment of an artist’s inspiration reveals
this void. His or her task therefore is to construct something ‘slyly
suggesting that from this void some semblance is snatched which reveals
the void’ (68). Although only mentioned briefly by Genet, void is central
to his conceptualization of a theatre amongst the graves and a way of
expressing the affect of what is unspeaking, unknowable, and some-
times unbearable. The void interrupts an explanatory schema, and in
its absence points to what it cannot represent. It might also be under-
stood as an expression of what Rayner describes as theatrical conscious-
ness. Genet uses the term ‘architecture’ to describe such artistic practice.
As already pointed out, in Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin,
void is a central concept both architecturally and thematically:
Cutting through the form of the Jewish Museum is a Void, a straight

line whose impenetrability forms the central focus around which
the exhibitions are organized. In order to cross from one space of the
Museum to the other, the visitors traverse sixty bridges which open
into the Void space, the embodiment of absence.
(Libeskind)
At its most dramatic, such a void makes contemplation of the represented

absence difficult, or perhaps impossible. The only thing it offers for the
spectator to respond to is nothingness, albeit a highly aestheticized
nothingness. It is interesting, in this sense, that Libeskind’s central void
at the Jewish Museum has been filled in with Kadishman’s installation,
as if the nothingness of the original design was too much to bear –
silence had to be replaced with a voice. Libeskind’s interruption of the
museum’s pedagogical task is too unsettling. Lucy Lippard similarly notes
that, ‘where traces have disappeared leaving only voids to speak, we fill
the blanks with our own experiences, associations and imagery’ (126).
How then might we understand the compulsive imagination of a
speaking voice that tempers the existential pain of such silence? I will
examine how such imaginative activity might be discussed both theatri-
cally and ethically in the next section before finally considering, with
particular reference to Akropolis, how theatre’s performing bodies might
preserve the paradoxical presence of voids: that is, as asked in Chapter 1,
how might one perform the saying without at the same time enacting
its unsaying?
Theatrical affect and the presence of the dead
To work through the significance of imagined voices some further dis-

cussion of theatrical affect is required. Certainly concentration camp
sites impact visitors somatically as much as intellectually. As Williams
writes, visitors are encouraged to relate to the sites through engag-
ing in their ‘visceral, kinesthetic, haptic, and intimate qualities’ (97).
Weissman provides a vivid example of affective emplacement in the
opening passages of his book, Fantasies of Witnessing. He details the
memoir of Holocaust survivor, Martin Lax, focusing on a passage that
records the survivor’s return to Mauthausen with his son, Michael:
‘Now he had come hoping to be swallowed up by the camp, to experi-
ence what Mauthausen had been for me in 1944. He wanted to become
a prisoner, to actually feel the horror that I had felt’ (1). The stated
intention of Lax’s son represents an identificatory extreme – a complete
engulfment and becoming of the other/father – a desire to enter the
void. Michael’s attempt, however, is frustrated by the transformation
of the site into a tourist destination. Both father and son bemoan the
way in which it had been altered to accommodate crowds of visitors:
‘[He] wondered how he might experience any of it, when the Holocaust
was no longer there to be seen’ (2). What triggers a breakthrough is an
episode that takes place as Michael and his father walked the steps to
the Mauthausen stone quarry, also known as the Staircase of Death.
Upon reaching the bottom of the stairs and gazing down upon a pool
100 feet below into which prisoners were often pushed (hence the
name), Michael is able to access a feeling of horror which enables him
to approach the experiences of his father. This affect is stimulated by
the vertigo brought about by standing on the edge, which induces the
feeling of horror he seeks. In this transformational moment, there was
a continuity of somatic response – automatic and positional – which
grounded a fusion of roles and horizons. A clear distinction between
past and present time collapsed, enabling him to feel as if he were in
the historical time of his father. In this case, affect allowed the subject to
be absorbed within the narrative, as if memory was transmitted from
one body to another via the affective conduit of place. While the exam-
ple of father and son is distinct from tourists, often unrelated outsiders,
concentration camp memorials frequently attempt, at least partially, to
immerse visitors in a sense of the place ‘as it was’, a kind of drama of place.
Such dramatization of place necessarily brings to bear a sense of dramatic
time – time past – that is put in counterpoint with the present time of the
memorial as tourist destination. As William Miles notes: ‘Any Holocaust
memorial must bridge the existential gap between the here-and-now of the
tourist and the event (or events) of more than half a century prior (1176).
A sense of emplacement therefore helps to bridge such gaps of time.
Because of the facilitation of dramatic time, a certain emphasis on
witnessing comes into play. This can be seen in two ways: firstly, visi-
tors may be framed as there to bear witness; or, secondly, the site and
its objects may be figured as witnesses who offer themselves as testi-
mony; or rather, as Jill Bennett notes, as ‘translation of testimony’ (3).
Of the former, Michael’s story is a vivid example of attempting to, as
Weismann puts it, ‘witness [it] as if one were there’:
It is a desire to know what it was like to be there, in Nazi Europe; in

hiding; at the sites of mass shootings; in the ghettos; in the cattle
cars; in the concentrations camps; in the death camps; in the gas
chambers and crematoria. This desire can be satisfied only in fantasy,
in fantasies of witnessing the Holocaust for one’s self.
(4)
In the latter sense, displayed objects create the impression of the

museum as a remembering entity and in doing so create a strong point
of engagement and identification for visitors:
Although the intrinsic solidity of any museum object appears to

make it both dumb and still, museums often seek to grant it a
dynamic life history; assigning it a dramatic role in the historical
story of any event. That is, the idea that an object ‘witnessed’ an
atrocity is a rhetorical strategy that aims to humanize something that
existed during the period; the object itself gains a ‘life’
(Williams, 31)
In this sense, artefacts function as historical actors designated the role

of substitute witnesses. This is exemplified in the poem by Moshe
Szulsztein, cited in the previous chapter, which is displayed on the wall
at the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC, next to the exhibit of
shoes on loan from Auschwitz. In a specifically tragic sense, the shoes
take on the role of messenger – angelos. Importantly, however, the shoes
themselves do not speak, but rather a voice, that of Szulsztein’s poem,
is put into an associative relation with them. The shoes themselves
remain importantly silent. The poem, like Kadishman’s sculpture, miti-
gates such silence and absence. Via the poem, the objects, in a choric
fashion, perform the narrative of loss on behalf of those who are no
longer present to tell of it. An ABC news story about the rebuilding
process at Sachsenhausen further exemplifies the tendency to also think
of objects or architecture as witness:
On a hot summer afternoon, construction workers proceeded qui-

etly, methodically and carefully to take apart fence posts, strengthen
the wires and put them back together again – one man, one post,
from start to finish.
‘There are ashes scattered of people who died here’, said Leszek
Godlewski, a supervisor on the reconstruction project. ‘These posts
are in fact witnesses to the events which took place here.’
(Gizbert)
The role of witness bestowed upon them is clearly a dramatic gesture,

in the sense that many are not the original posts, but rather facsimiles
of those originals. Through the designation of the role of witness to
objects and architectural remains, a certain prosopopoeian function
comes into play, an imagined speaking that inheres from the object’s
status as a relic from the past. The object is understood as something
that has ‘seen’ and thereby offers a sort of silent testimony, which we
must interpret through an engagement of our imagination.
It is this imagined speaking – a dramatization of the site and its
objects – which stimulates the most objections from historians and
Holocaust and tourism scholars. Caroline Wiedmer, for example, argues
against a talismanic or dramatized approach:
It is all too seductive to believe in such a thing as aura, to believe

that there are places where a sort of direct, privileged access to the
Holocaust is possible via the very stones and mortar that housed it.
But of course there is no such thing as a pure site affording access
to a knowledge of the Holocaust untouched by interpretation or
construction. And a historically significant site cannot necessarily
speak for itself.
(165–6)
Wiedmer objects to the fact that such speaking is presented as an inhe-

rent affect of the site, rather than the result of representational devices
designed to elicit empathetic engagement. Similarly, Williams notes:
We wonder whether the production of performative spaces might

produce a leveling of the experience, where every experience becomes
part of a predictable aesthetic scene of ‘negative histories.’ Might
a growing willingness to make atrocities the subject of evocative
visitor experiences see the memorial museum move in the direction
of a morbid theme park?
(102)
These and other critiques, anti-theatrical in nature, worry that such

an approach may subsume historical particularities within a genera-
lized schema, that it emphasizes emotional experience over learning,
and that it may transform historical sites into aesthetic and affective
destinations that diminish critical distance. In a similar manner, his-
torian Tim Cole expresses reservation when he describes a ‘Holocaust
heritage industry’, which ‘does not recover the original Auschwitz but
produces an “Auschwitz-land” for the present from the Auschwitz of
the past’ (110). In his argument, theatricalization of the past drains it of
meaning. ‘As we see our own reflection in the glass case and the relics
beyond, do we see “evidence” of the “Holocaust” or simply a collection
of “grotesque artifacts” of the “Holocaust”?’ (112). Such a ‘grotesque’

theatricality is further suggested by Young when he describes a ‘macabre
dance’ performed by objects such as the shoes at Auschwitz (The Texture
of Memory 132). Young argues that the context of display means that
the lives of those who suffered are obscured by their deaths, and that an
affective theatre replaces historical understanding. In a manner similar
to Young’s reservations, Polish artist, Artur Żmijewski, has stated:
The best way to forget is to set up a Museum of the Holocaust, then

people don’t have to experience pain anymore or can experience it in
an acceptable level. This means that the Museum lives through his-
tory for us. At first sight, it is a collection of objects, in reality, it is an
entity that feels, suffers, and remembers for us. The museum creates
the impression that it is not the body that remembers but objects.
(qtd. in ‘Art Must Always Not Speak Meekly’ 3)
In his formulation, the museum, rather than engaging us in its affect

seals the past off, displacing us from a sense of responsibility for it. His
description suggests an identificatory premise whereby the museum
becomes a body that suffers as a spectacle for viewers. He argues that
such a performance diminishes the pain of responsibility by making
that pain wholly external.
However, some of Żmijewski’s own work demonstrates precisely why
substitution is necessary, 80064 being a particularly striking case in
point. The video features Auschwitz survivor, Józef Tarnawa and his
tattoo, the number 80064, which the artist persuades him to have re-
inked. The video is uneasy watching as Żmijewski convinces the elderly
man to go through with the ‘renovation’. Tarnawa is baffled as to why
Żmijewski wants him to do it. He worries how the process of restoration
will alter the tattoo’s meaning and value:
TARNAWA: It won’t be the same number […] It will be restored.

ŻMIJEWSKI: The number won’t become inauthentic. It will be more
authentic.
TARNAWA: It won’t be original.
(80064)
Tarnawa’s fear is that the process of recreating the tattoo will destroy its
historical specificity. He worries about the ‘cleaning’ of his own history,
and the loss of an identity constructed around the faded etching. As
the tattooist explains to him how he will need to care for the updated
number, he further worries about the consequences of the new tattoo,

‘Why are you imposing this burden on me that I need to take care
of it?’ Żmijewski’s conjecture that the act of restoration will actually
enhance the value of the tattoo reveals the ideological schism that gives
the work its unsettling power. Two forces are pitted against each other:
one which values the ‘original’ as having an intrinsic value which can-
not be extracted or reproduced; and the other which denies the original
any sacred status.
What Żmijewski’s work reveals, however, and what disturbs the viewer,
are the contemporary circumstances that both demand the reproduction
and fetishize the object. The video causes a repetition of the original
forced submission of the prisoner to the dehumanizing mark and impli-
cates the spectator as consumer of the economy of iconographic images
of violence, suggesting that such consumption reduplicates their effects.
As Tarnawa comments, ‘I never expected something like this to happen
to me again.’ For Robert Eaglestone, the original tattoos inscribed on
the skin of prisoners signified the disavowal of personal identity – the
sense in which prisoners were reduced to the status of sub-human: ‘the
tattoo marked the change in status from human to less than human’
(329). 80064 is most ethically troubling in the fact that the artist in no
way takes the pain of this disavowal upon himself, but instead makes
Tarnawa its double bearer. Pain is not ameliorated or better understood
and Żmijewski’s stated expectations that ‘the gates of memory would
open’ and that there would be ‘an eruption of remembrances’ were
not met (If It Happened Only Once 24). Żmijewski’s work is so disturb-
ing because it fails to protect Tarnawa. While powerfully making the
point that the pain of Auschwitz endures despite it fading from public
memory, Żmijewski’s renovation of Tarnawa treats him precisely as
museum object (Figure 2.7).
In its attempt to make the pain of the past felt ‘for real’, 80064 chal-
lenged the mimetic basis of a performing or remembering museum.
What underpins the anti-theatrical stance that Young and others also
emphasize is a concern with dissimulation and pretence (mimesis and
its reception) and the argument that this facilitates false identification,
which in turn collapses the distinction between self and other. But is
there another more complex reading of how theatre operates in this
scenario? Rather than merging the experience of the self with that of the
other, might not identification actually allows a means of approaching
the other in spite of difference? The mimetic aspect of the identificatory
process need not mean a negation of the specificity or alterity of the
other’s experience, but rather may be understood as a way of using
Figure 2.7 Artur Żmijewski, 80064, 2004 (Still image courtesy of the artist,
Foksal Gallery Foundation, Warsaw, and Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich)
imagination to associate oneself with the suffering of others. The way

in which Levinas uses the term ‘association’ is how I would like to refi-
gure identification here. It is an understanding of responsibility which
proceeds from the difference that marks mimesis.
To substitute oneself does not amount to putting oneself in the place

of the other man in order to feel what he feels, it does not involve
becoming the other […]. Rather substitution entails bringing comfort
by associating oneself with the essential weakness or finitude of the
other.
(Is It Righteous to Be? 228)
What is identified is not a secure understanding of the other’s experi-

ence, but rather the fact of their suffering (a recognition of their ‘face’)
and following that, in Levinas’s ideal, an assumption of responsibility
for this; that is, not guiltiness but an obligation to respond. Implicit
in Butler’s Precarious Life is the argument that this sort of reconfigured
understanding of identification is a necessary counter to processes

of dehumanization which work by promoting dis-identification.
As cited in Chapter 1: ‘the face represents that for which no iden-
tification is possible, an accomplishment of dehumanization and
a condition for violence’ (145). A politicized identificatory process
might therefore be understood as a means of locating oneself as a
responsible individual in relation to what Eleanor Fuchs describes,
with reference to the Holocaust, as representations of ‘the failure of
the human enterprise’ (11).
As argued in the previous chapter, mimesis is always dialectically
charged; it both is and is not what it represents. Similarly, identifica-
tory attention both does and does not believe in that representation.
This point is important as it responds in part to the paradox that Butler
points out in relation to representation when she writes:
For representation to convey the human, then representation must

not only fail, but must show its failure. There is something unrep-
resentable that we nevertheless seek to represent, and that paradox
must be retained in the representation we give. In this sense, the
human is not identified with what is represented but neither is it
identified with the unrepresentable; it is, rather, that which limits
the success of any representational practice.
(144)
This failure, of course, must be in relation to a potential or partial

success – the void is filled by an object whose inadequacy to fill it is also
recognized. The success of the representation practice, the way in which
it might, in Alice Rayner’s terms, usefully allow spectators to express
a common concern towards a common – that is, concerning all –
catastrophe, is to do with the self-reflexivity of the mimetic process
(The Audience 220). This, I believe, is the reason behind Genet’s call for
theatre in a cemetery; theatre staged in full recognition of death is a
kind of ultimate self-reflexive performance.
Near the end of his essay, Genet discusses the Roman funeral mime,
a striking exemplar of mimesis as a response to death: ‘His role? To lead
the funeral procession and mime the most important acts of the dead
man’s life’ (72). Genet suggests that such a figure, by his performance,
‘makes the dead live and die again’, through ‘devour[ing] the life and
death of the dead man’ (74). Further elaborating on the scene, he sug-
gests that upon death, the role of the mime is to enable a dramatic
repetition of the life lived. Significantly, such repetition is not only for
friends and enemies, but also the ‘merely curious’, or what Plato calls
the ‘promiscuous crowd’ (qtd. in Dukore, 29):
Before the dead man is buried, let him be borne in his casket to the
front of the stage; let his friends, his enemies, and the merely curious
gather in that part of the theatre normally reserved for the public;
let the funeral mime who led the procession divide and multiply
into two, into several groups; let him become a theatrical troupe; let
him, in the presence of the dead and the public, recreate the life and
death of the deceased; after that, in the dead of night, let the casket
be borne to the grave; and finally let the public depart, the spectacle
is over.
(Genet, 73–4)
In the palpating quality of replaying living and dying – an alternating

coming into being and retreating into darkness – Genet illustrates a
performance of the very limit point of performance. It is in coming up
against this limit, in willingly confronting it, that theatre, Genet argues,
gains its power. His scenario suggests that in re-enacting a life, its very
loss is even more keenly felt. This is because the performance is inde-
libly marked with what Levinas describes as that which is ‘otherwise
than being’.
How then might such a self-reflexive practice be realized in rela-
tion to Holocaust history? How does one memorialize a void, absence,
destruction, loss? Whilst I have argued for a more nuanced reading
of the identificatory potential of substitutive objects, my own experi-
ence makes clear the contingencies of their effect. At Auschwitz, for
example, it was only when I observed someone else’s recognition of
the suitcase that I myself was able to recognize the emotion in him.
The distance between the case and myself without such a conduit
was too far to bridge. In At Memory’s Edge, Young describes a series of works
that self-reflexively deal with this distance. Hans Hoheisel and Andreas
Knitz, for example, designed a work for the Buchenwald Memorial,
which they called a ‘living’ memorial. The central form was a concrete
obelisk engraved with the names of 51 national groups who suffered
and died at Buchenwald. In order to make the memorial ‘live’, the
collaborators put a heating system inside the structure that kept it at a
constant body temperature, ‘suggest[ing] the body heat of the memory it
would now enshrine’ (105). Spectators were invited to touch the memorial
in an act of simulated ‘contact’, where the warmth of the concrete was
invested with meaningful presence and visitors were ‘touched in turn by
the human warmth embodied’ (105). The scenario reversed the situation
that plays out at sites such as Sachsenhausen where during my tour it
was the enterprise of death that took centre stage.
Across examples of what he calls ‘counter memorials’, Young high-
lights works where spectators must become active participants in the
process of confronting the past and are asked to place themselves in
relation to those who have been ‘misplaced’. These works use theatrical
means – suggestion, affect and substitution – and in doing so remind
us of what Genet calls ‘the presence of the dead’. This self-reflexive
theatricality acknowledges both the contingencies of experience and
the limits of understanding. So-called ‘experiential’ knowledge does
have an important role to play in seeking to understand our relation-
ship to events of the past and should not be regarded as unhelpfully
in opposition to historical knowledge, a position that misunderstands
the historic as non-physicalized intellectualism. Rather, perception is
always physically and environmentally contingent. Following Merleau-
Ponty, Suzanne Jaeger argues:
Perception of an object is always an incomplete process, and its

reality for us is given in the incomplete character of perceptual
experience. One never gets to the totality of what makes the thing
what it is. One’s perception is always limited by what one has not
yet seen, what one no longer sees, what is absent from one’s present
vision. Intellectualism mistakenly conceives perception to be com-
pleted by an act of cognition […]. But perceptual experience is always
incomplete, partial, somewhat ambiguous and never total.
(133)
The incompleteness of perception is important as it signals that meaning

is resistant to exhaustion. Dramatic tension derives from the ‘not yet’,
and ‘no longer’. The identificatory processes which take place at con-
centration camps are the necessary response to the dramatized absences
which shape the experience of visiting. The theatrical conditions of the
performing museum necessitate an audience response which affirms the
dramatic narrative. This is the apprehension of the palpable quality of
the void which marks all such spaces of absence.
Displays, such as the shoes, hair and so on, do – by theatrical effect,
as Żmijewski claims – bear witness on our behalf. But at the same time, this
effect extends an invitation to us. The objects seem to present themselves
for our viewing, thus creating the possibility of contemplation and
unsettled empathy. Reflexively, these objects may, as they did in my
experience, make visitors aware of the fact that the site and its objects
have no talismanic force other than that which we are willing to bestow
upon them. This, in itself, reveals the theatrical nature of the sites. They
necessarily function as imaginatively driven spaces whose absences and
inexplicabilities must be countered by our own willingness to engage
with them. Spectators require a humanized point of entry, which is why
Williams describes artefacts as enlivened within a performing museum.
This, in turn, creates the possibility of emotive and affecting response.
In the end, however, there is one thing that a concentration camp as
performing museum lacks: bodies. At every turn, the absence of bodies
turns the performance back on itself, drawing spectators into a necessa-
rily speculative space in which they are ultimately alone. The performing
museum can be understood as striving to compensate for this lack of
bodies. Through presentational strategies, it encourages an imagination
of victims, and a kind of substitution, where the multitudinous bodies
of living tourists, in themselves, point to the ever-absent dead and to
the void which has engulfed them.
It is for this very reason that prosopopoeia, or personification,
continually rises up to counter the absences which charge memorial
sites. Such a designation of voice has an ethical aspect to it, serving to
counter the manner in which former prisoners were commonly reduced
to the status of objects. Displayed remnants such as human hair are
grotesque demonstrations of historical acts of anti-personification.
Indeed, in Remnants of Auschwitz, Agamben notes that: ‘we know from
witnesses that under no circumstances were they [bodies of the dead] to
be called “corpses” […] but rather simply Figuren, figures, dolls’ (50–1).
Countering this tendency, the prosopopoeian and innately theatrical
function of memorial sites means that objects ‘can somehow be imag-
ined as self-generating and speaking through [themselves] on behalf of
the place where [they are] inserted and encountered’ (Hunt, 229). This
is a kind of anti anti-personification – a reinstatement of the human
voice as a retrospective response to its original denial. It is the recogni-
tion, in Levinas’s sense, of the faces of history. At the same time, the
distance between the imagined voice and the historical one is palpable
and creates a strongly melancholic affect, which is the most striking
feature of such sites. It is a distance which may not be overcome, but
only observed. Visiting sites such as Auschwitz is in many ways always
ethically compromised, not simply in the sense meant by Rancière
where such acts emphasize a culture of perpetual mourning, but also
in the inadequacy of our acts of memorialization, which are incom-
mensurate with the losses acknowledged. There is a precarious balance
between making visible a politics of death and affirming an ethics

that seeks to preserve life. I would like, finally, to discuss Grotowski’s
Akropolis in order to reflect upon how theatre may manage such a deli-
cate balancing act. Grotowski himself remarked: ‘In order to touch on
what is tragic today, one must put man in his wholeness onto the scale,
from the skin to what is most intimate, most difficult to express, most
elusive’ (‘Holiday’ 126). In presenting the image of a scale, Grotowski
suggests the necessity of a finely balanced relationship between the
figure who reveals him- or herself, and the one who receives this revela-
tion, and that such exposure requires a certain receptive care in order
for balance to be maintained.
Akropolis and ethical memory: the role of the audience
Earlier I asked how theatre might preserve or articulate the force of a void.
I have chosen Akropolis as example because of its particular balancing
of absence and presence and formulation of the audience within this
equation, as well as the sense in which it provides a continuing example
of theatre performed in the shadow of the crematorium: the perfor-
mance concluded when the actors disappeared inside a crematory oven
which they had been constructing throughout. Akropolis, unlike Delbo’s
Molière, however, was all fragmentation, dissolution and loss. While
I have suggested the Raisko performance of The Hypochondriac might be
described as a desperate theatrical ‘re-enchantment’ of a dire environ-
ment, Peter Brook, in a filmed introduction to the publicly available
recording of Akropolis, called the work a ‘black mass’ that summoned
forth an evil presence. The performance (directed by Grotowski in
collaboration with Jósef Szajna), as already noted, is largely overlooked
in edited collections of plays and commentaries about Holocaust
theatre. It is scarcely mentioned in Skloot’s The Theatre of the Holocaust,
Fuchs’s Plays of the Holocaust, Schumacher’s Staging the Holocaust,
Plunka’s Holocaust Drama or Patraka’s Spectacular Suffering: Theatre,
Fascism and the Holocaust. The fact that the work has been so well
discussed in terms of its theatrical innovation has perhaps meant that its
content has been overshadowed – it has been historically positioned as a
work whose primary importance was in shaping contemporary theatre
practice. Further, in using the Polish drama, Akropolis, written by
Stanisław Wyspiański in 1904, as the basis for the piece, Grotowski fore-
grounded Polish identity and the ways in which Auschwitz might bear
upon it. As such, he did not portray Auschwitz as a singularly Jewish
experience. Wyspiański’s text brought to bear elements of Catholic
iconography, for example; and in this sense Akropolis was not a work
that exclusively represented the Shoah. Because of its theatrical inno-
vation, however, Akropolis does present a significant opportunity for
examining how an experimental paradigm might respond to the
challenge of ‘staging the Holocaust’.
Unconventional dramaturgical and theatrical strategies have commonly
been called for by scholars who have considered how theatre might
represent the Holocaust. Michael Taub, in his introduction to Israeli
Holocaust Drama, draws upon Lawrence Langer to argue that non-
realism is the only appropriate ethical response as it ‘has the power
to subvert the “pleasure”’ that would be gained from the normative
narrative process of suspension of disbelief, identification, resolution
and catharsis’ (qtd. in Taub, 3). That is, in the context of Holocaust
theatre the issue of dramatic resolution – as the outcome of a beginning,
middle and end structure – is troubling, in that any narrative resolution
which gave the audience cathartic satisfaction is perceived to neces-
sarily reduce the unimaginable scope of the catastrophe. In her edited
collection of unconventional Holocaust plays, Elinor Fuchs similarly
challenges the primacy of conventional dramaturgy. She argues against
works that ‘showed catastrophic events as the private experience of
individuals or families’, and for a move away from ‘received structures’,
and beyond ‘individual characters’. What is more effective, she argues,
are works that show the Holocaust as a ‘collective catastrophe’, and that
are ultimately about ‘the life and death of the community’ (2). Claude
Schumacher also argues specifically for non-realist representation:
My answer is that theatre – theatre which has true integrity and

highest artistic standards – does not try to create an illusion of rea-
lity, and it is precisely in the absence of mimetic trompe-l’oeil that the
real strength of theatrical performance lies. True theatre affords the
spectator a heightened experience ‘liberated from the lie of being
the truth’.
(4)
The effect of such a drama he suggests should be a play that ‘disturbs,

offers no comfort, advances no solution, it is a play that leaves the
reader or spectator perplexed, wanting to know more although con-
vinced that no knowledge can ever cure him of his perplexity’ (8).
Freddie Rokem similarly states (as cited in the Introduction) that
Holocaust theatre should, ‘make it possible for the “naïve” [spectator]
to understand, and at the same time to show that he or she probably
never really will’ (‘On the Fantastic’ 41). The positions of Schumacher
and Rokem are distinctly anti-tragic in the sense that Aristotle specified
that the tragic plot: ‘should not show […] decent men undergoing a
change from good fortune to misfortune; for this is neither terrifying
not pitiable, but shocking’ (qtd. in Dukore, 16). The shock lies in such
theatre’s lack of narrative resolution – its anti-cathartic affect as well
as its disturbing content. Vivian Patraka in her work on theatre of the
Holocaust emphasizes the use of shock by way of proposing an ‘aesthetics
of atrocity’ as an anti-poetic solution:
An aesthetics of atrocity would remove this pleasure in seeing expec-

tations fulfilled by the impending death of another. It would repre-
sent horrific, non-formulaic scenarios that challenge our frames of
knowing and disallow distance from the persons whose bodies are
injured. It would displace suspense and cause spectators to view a
historically inevitable outcome with loathing and dread.
(89)
The ‘aesthetics of atrocity’ she describes is anti-tragic, not just in its

critique of ‘suspense’ and ‘formulaic scenarios’, but in its very emphasis
on dread which finds no resolution.
Schumacher, Rokem and others specifically emphasize perplexity in
order that the act of spectatorship becomes a self-conscious one. That
is, to the degree that a certain light is thrown back onto spectators,
a sense of responsibility for the other is generated. Or, as Jon Erickson
writes (cited in Chapter 1), ethical effect comes into play when the
performer takes responsibility for ‘evoking that responsibility in the audi-
ence for herself as paradigmatic Other’ (11). Lisa Fitzpatrick, similarly
writes that:
The various foregroundings of the body that occur during […] per-
formance visibly and audibly draw attention to the actual body – of
the actor, not only of the character – and therefore to the presence
of the Other in the shared space of the performance.
(63)
This is the main distinction between visiting a memorial or ‘witnessing’

a theatrical performance. The performing body has a vitality that makes
the distance between actors and absent figures palpably felt by the
audience. It is in this sense that the body itself becomes, as Rokem has
commented, a surface of memorial inscription. The body is invested with
a symbolic ontology that, similarly to the personified objects – clothes,

shoes, hair and so on – discussed earlier, counters the de-personification
of victims, but with amplified effect: figuren are given audible voice. The
body of the actor acts as a proxy for those who suffered in the camps
and may be understood as an anti anti-personification who contests the
reduction of prisoners’ bodies to sites of disease, muselmänner or figuren.
The aesthetic characteristics that Hans-Thies Lehmann describes as
characterizing the postdramatic may be understood as responsive, in
part at least, to the representational challenges that Adorno signals,
especially the sense in which such performances ‘resist interpretation’
(25 my emphasis). The manner in which interpretation is problema-
tized reflects not just aesthetic concerns but also, as Adorno suggests,
historical, political and philosophical ones: how does one represent the
‘unrepresentable’? Or, perhaps, when interpretation is resisted, what
fills the space that it leaves behind? Even in emptiness such space makes
itself felt as what Rayner describes as a ‘form of consciousness’. As
Levinas puts it, even in the nothingness of a void there is still substance,
what he describes as the ‘there is’ of the void itself (Totality and Infinity
190). Such consciousness is not diminished by palpable absences, but
rather heightened by them. Thus Grotowski, who was so invested in
theatrical presence, remarks (albeit during his paratheatrical phase) that
it does not matter if the other is absent, their ‘need’ continues to actua-
lize itself nonetheless – the ghost strives to be manifest.
Every essential experience of our life is being realized through the

fact that there is someone with us. And it does not matter whether
that other person is present now, at this moment, or was present
once, or will only be; that person either is actually, tangibly there, or
exists as a need actualizing itself – ‘he’, that other who is coming, is
emerging from the shadows, is pervading our life – in us embodied,
our flesh and blood.
(‘Holiday’ 120)
However, such ‘absent presence’ requires a catalyst: in the case of the

performances considered, it is the actors, as Fitzpatrick notes, who
provide such a catalyst.
Eugenio Barba, who was present during the creation of Akropolis,
describes four qualities that made it ground-breaking: ‘[T]he relation-
ship between stage and auditorium; the relationship between the
director and the text; the function of the actor; and the transgressive
possibilities of the theatre craft’ (38). Barba’s analysis of the work gives
some concrete measures for pinning down how something like Patraka’s
‘aesthetics of atrocity’ or Schumacher’s ‘stunned silence’ (8) might be
realized through experimental practice. Through my discussion I will
variously, though not in a taxonomical way, comment on each of
these areas. Akropolis proceeded in five stages between 1962 and 1967.
The widely available recording was made in the United States in 1966,
during the fourth stage of the work, though not released until 1968.
Because of its availability, the recorded version of the US performance
has become the main version for discussion and is the one that I will
refer to. Wyspiański’s earlier play, an examination of Polish history and
identity that was innovative in both form and content, takes place in
the burial vault of the cathedral at Wawel castle in Krakow, where a poet
imagines figures from the church’s tapestries, which variously depict
Classical Greek, Jewish, Christian and Polish stories, come to life. There
is no published version of either Wyspiański’s text nor Grotowski’s
adaptation of it in English, so I am grateful to Magda Romanska’s
‘Between History and Memory’, which discusses Wyspiański’s play in
some detail. In many ways Wyspiański was an experimental forerunner
to Grotowski, his own work drawing mixed and sometimes perplexed
responses. Indeed, whilst written at the turn of the century, the play
was so dramaturgically innovative that it was not until 26 years after its
publication that it was performed in full. Romanska notes that the play
is ‘particularly dense and inaccessible’ (223). Grotowski’s fragmentation
of the original play text redoubled its inherent difficulty and this effect
was of course magnified for any audience members who were non-
Polish speakers. Grotowski’s use of language, which was deliberately
obscure, both in content and delivery, reinforced the unavailability of
the prisoners’ experiences. Indeed, in a recent article, Grzegorz Niziolek
went so far as to describe the production as: ‘An entity so inevitable,
so impossible to question, so aesthetically complete, so rigorously com-
posed, that the production does not bear intellectual analysis or rational
reflection’ (26).
Romanska notes that the play, like Wyspiański’s others, combined
‘Polish national themes with ancient and classical elements and mod-
ernist forms’ (226). The cathedral of Wawel castle in Cracow contains
the tombs of many great Polish figures, especially Kings and Queens,
and was often referred to as a ‘Polish necropolis’ (227). In naming the
work Akropolis, Wyspiański drew a line between the Greek icon and the
Polish version of it; Romanska notes that both are ‘conduits for his-
tory, memory and identity’ (227). In locating the work in the castle’s
cathedral specifically, Wyspiański also emphasized a sense of religious
mystery, something that Grotowski drew upon in a deeply ironized way

in his own version of the drama. Wyspiański’s play is set in the castle
on the evening of Easter Saturday in the liminal hours between mid-
night and 4am and is divided into four disconnected acts that function
like plays within the broader play. Within that setting is a key figure,
a poet, through whose imagination the four acts, each taken from one
of the tapestries in the cathedral, come to life. In Act I, Wyspiański
depicts a number of significant Polish figures, including generals and
archbishops, as well as certain angels. Romanska describes this sec-
tion of the work as focused on ‘national themes’ (228). Act II shows
the Trojan myth of Hector and Andromache, Act III the Jewish story
of Jacob and Esau, while Act IV depicts, ‘King David of Israel, who in
this version becomes a Polish prophet’ (228). The final act also features
Christ Salvatore, a saint known for his healing ability. At the end of
the play, while the castle collapses, Salvatore rises up, riding a chariot
driven by white horses. Salvation comes by way of the destruction of
the necropolis.
With an awareness of the basic structure of Wyspiański’s original text,
one can see that Grotowski used much of the central dramatic mate-
rial whilst altering the context in which it was performed. Aside from
two small additions to the prologue – a review comment from 1932
and a fragment of a letter that Wyspiański wrote commenting on how
happy he was with the play – Grotowski did not, according to Flaszen,
rewrite or add anything to Wyspiański’s text. Rather, he heavily cut the
text, made certain rearrangements and heavily repeated some phrases.
Flaszen commented that both Wyspiański and Grotowski wanted to
‘represent the sum total of a civilization and test its values on the touch-
stone of contemporary experience’ (175), further commenting:
The struggle of Jacob and the angel and the backbreaking labor of the
inmates, Paris’ and Helen’s love duet and the derisive screams of the
prisoners, the resurrection of Christ and the ovens – a civilization of
contrast and corruption.
(176)
Niziolek points out that Grotowski importantly emphasized the ‘biblical

theme of the patriarch Jacob’ by reversing Acts II and III, meaning that:
‘Jacob, who receives a blessing for himself and for his tribe, becomes
Priam, mourning the annihilation of his nation’ (29). By using the
same characters – Hector, Helen, Jacob and so on – Grotowski inter-
wove the earlier exploration by Wyspiański with a contemporary one
that even more deeply problematized the play’s existential and political
concerns.
Niziolek also comments, however, that the ‘idea to substitute
Auschwitz for Wawel goes beyond the intentions articulated by […]
Flaszen. It deals […] with the disturbance of meaning within the original
text and the re-evaluation of the myths invoked by Wyspiański’ (27).
The protagonist was no longer a poet searching for meaning, but
rather a nameless group of prisoners at Auschwitz. This was an ‘anti-
dramatic’ move that challenged heroic values both thematically and
dramaturgically.
I reworked [Akropolis] to analyze not only the great myths of the past
but the biblical and historical traditions as well. It dramatized the
past from the point of view of heroic values. Since World War II we
have noticed that the great lofty ideas of Western civilization remain
abstract. We mouth heroic values, but real life proves to be different.
We must confront the great values of the past and ask some ques-
tions. Do these values remain abstract, or do they really exist for us?
To discover the answer we must look at the most bitter and ultimate
trial: Auschwitz. Auschwitz is the darkest reality of our contemporary
history. Auschwitz is the trial of humankind.
(Grotowski qtd. in Wolford and Schechner, 84)
Niziolek argues that in the Polish context, the play dealt with the nego-
tiation of national identity in relation to Auschwitz and the sense in
which, through the history of its various incarnations, it became, ‘the
space of cultural and political palimpsest, as new meanings superseded
other erased and marginalized ideas’ (27). Amongst these ideas, which
would have been contemporary to those of Grotowski’s adaptation, was
that of the camp as a tourist destination. Niziolek cites a short story by
Tadeusz Różewicz, ‘The Museum Tour’, to illustrate the kinds of social
problems that the camp seemed to draw to light. Niziolek describes
Różewicz’s evocation of the tourist experience as being like a ‘national
peep-show’:
The groups of visitors crowding the camp are looking for thrills,
asking each other eagerly ‘where is the hair’, recommending the
documentary film to one another […] uttering conventional and
sentimental expressions of sympathy […]. Despite the guide’s efforts,
the visit to Auschwitz provides no knowledge.
(27)
Niziolek’s referencing of this aspect of the camp indicates not just the
problems of such spectatorship, as have been discussed, but the very
kind of spectatorship that Grotowski reacted against with his produc-
tion. Whereas the tourists above offer ‘sentimental expressions of
sympathy’, in Akropolis, as Niziolek notes, Grotowski wanted spectators
to feel ‘emotional shock’ – to be traumatized’ (26).
Of the performance, there are two main aspects I will focus on:
firstly, the presentation of the actors’ bodies, particularly their faces;
and secondly, the integration of the audience within the performing
environment. The work was staged in a relatively small black-box studio
space. The audience, who by my visual estimate numbered between 60
and 70, was seated on all four sides. Two of these sides (facing) were
arranged in three levels with an aisle running down the centre. On all
four sides seating was divided into small sections of only two or three
seats. The arrangement of the audience around the room meant that they
were very close to the performers, sometimes within touching distance.
The relative integration of the seating with the playing space meant that
action could take place in front of, behind or beside audience members.
Because of the configuration the audience was largely lit throughout the
piece and as such become an important part of the visual landscape of
the work. The central point of focus, which all sides of the audiences
were turned towards, was what Flaszen describes as a ‘huge box’:
In the middle of the room stands a huge box. Metallic junk is heaped
on top of it: stovepipes of various lengths and widths, a wheelbar-
row, a bathtub, nails, hammers. Everything is old, rusty, and looks as
if it had been picked up from a junkyard. The reality of the props is
rust and metal. From them, as the action progresses, the actors will
build an absurd civilization of gas chambers, advertised by stovepipes
which will decorate the room as actors hang them from strings or
nail them to the floor.
(177)
Out of this space the performance began with a prologue delivered

by an actor who provided the ‘infernal’ music for the piece, played
on a fiddle. As noted, this prologue, in addition to using Wyspiańksi’s
text, included two other fragments which expanded the context of
the work in a metatheatrical manner. This text signalled the themes of
the work as well as drawing attention to the fact of the performance
itself – the manner in which it was an attempt, by way of theatre, to
respond to Auschwitz. The prologue was followed by the main entry of
the actors, who marched rhythmically around the space, their wooden
shoes sounding a loud and ominous beat. Such percussive composition
accompanied all the sections in which the prisoners were seen at work,
which was the main throughline of the play. Grotowski described this
action as follows:
The prisoners worked all the time. They took metal pipes that were
piled in the center of the room and built something. At the start,
the room was empty except for the pile of pipes and the spectators
were disseminated through all the space. By the end of the production
the entire room was filled by the metal […]. We organized it all into
the rhythm of work in the extermination camp, with certain breaks
in the rhythm where the characters refer themselves to the traditions
of their youth, the dreams of their people.
(Grotowski, Schechner and Chwat, 42)
The imaginative interruptions of the main action temporarily obscured

the obscene work of the prisoners building their own crematorium
oven.
Perpetrators of violence were absent from the drama, which instead
focused on the effects of violence. Rather than ‘humanizing’ the
victims of violence, however, Grotowski had each adopt a ‘mask’, a
‘non-emotive’ expression that was held by performers throughout the
work (Flaszen qtd. in Kumiega, 63). In his account of the rehearsal pro-
cess Flaszen describes the genesis of the masks:
During early rehearsals, Grotowski realized that some of the actors

easily slipped into an emotional attitude when confronted with the
concentration- camp material. He devised a special training for the
group. […] [He] began to ask the actors to recreate facial masks based
on photographs of actual concentration-camp inmates. Grotowski
guided the actors to select and freeze sneers, scowls, frowns, and
other expressions. He sought expressions that connected as well to
each actor’s own personality and typical reactions.
(Flaszen qtd. in Slowiak and Cuesta, 105)
Barba also wrote of Grotowski’s intention in employing the masks,

commenting that the expressions ‘evoked that of the “Muslims,” as the
prisoners in Auschwitz were called when they reached the last stage of
survival’ (56). While the masks depicted the muselmann, they at the
same time estranged the audience from his or her gaze: ‘The mask, with
lifeless eyes that looked beyond the spectator, jarringly duplicated the
single expression (or expressionlessness) apparent in the photographs
during the last stage of the survival prior to extermination’ (Flaszen
qtd. in Kumiega, 63). It is these masks that I want to focus on. In their
strangeness they help illustrate a non-interpretive aesthetic, strongly
resisting conventional identification by at all times directing the audi-
ence toward a contemplation of alterity and difference. Performers’
personal identifies were not wholly effaced by the frozen expression,
however, rather there was a strange doubleness, where the persona
of the actor was both present and absent, similarly the spectral figure
they depicted. As Fitzpatrick writes, the body of the actor encapsulates
both performer and character in a way that draws the attention of
the audience to ‘the presence of the Other in the shared space of the
performance’.
The frozen faces, combined with the repetitious rhythms sounded by
the wooden shoes, the robotic work carried out and a highly regulated
use of the voice, emphasized the destruction of the prisoners’ humanity.
In this way Grotowski attempted to both represent the unrepresentable –
to give the non-representational object a form via the actor – and, at the
same time, show that ‘despite our exchanges, he [the other] remains
that which I – closed up in myself – am not’ (Levinas, Is It Righteous
to Be? 191). The work constantly pivoted around such dialectical ten-
sion: the audience was integrated into the performance space, yet,
as Grotowski noted, totally irrelevant to the actors; the prisoners
sought refuge within the realm of theatrical imagination, yet this was
completely incapable of offering them any salvation. In this sense,
theatre was a prescription that offered no remedy. Yet, at the same
time, Grotowski seems to suggest that it is through the theatre, most
significantly through the actor, that a meaningful confrontation with
the past might take place: indeed, Flaszen described the play, as cited
earlier, as a call to the ‘ethical memory of the spectator’. Such a claim
suggests memory’s collective aspect, its transferability and movement
through time. The performance insisted that this call be accepted
not because of common understanding, but precisely because such
understanding is impossible. In making a recognizably human face
unavailable, Grotowski potently demonstrated the failure of a tragic
poetic. In all of the ways that the work alienated the spectator –
language, discord, noise, a vision of the human grotesque – it drew
attention to such catastrophic failure: to what happens when the face
of the other is definitively annihilated and when no identification
takes place.
The disfiguring, so to speak, of the human face was emphasized

through the nature of the prisoners’ interactions with one another. In
a way that reflected Taduesz Borowski’s evocation of camp life in This
Way to the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, which was such an influence on
Grotowski (Romanska 240), the prisoners were not simple victims –
they taunted one another, competed, fought. Borowski’s collection’s
titular story revolves around the survival of certain camp members
at the expense of others, in particular by what could be salvaged from
the belongings of those who, on arrival, were sent directly to the gas
chambers. A character called Henri comments: ‘They can’t run out of
people or we’ll starve to death in this blasted camp. All of us live on
what they bring’ (31). Such qualities contributed to disallowing any
kind of sentimental attachment to the characters. As Jennifer Kumiega
comments:
This psychological barrier was an effective way of preventing con-

ventional catharsis. Raymonde Temkine who saw Akropolis in Opole
in spring 1963 wrote: ‘The spectator would be relived if a real contact
could be established, a communion through pity; but he is rather
horrified at these victims who become executioners […] and who
repulse or frighten more than they evoke pity.’
(61)
Further, in foregrounding the construction of the crematorium oven,

Grotowski uncomfortably depicted the prisoners as helplessly complicit
in their own extermination. Such dramatic action struck at the very
heart of the complexities of Auschwitz: the manner in which prisoners
were forced to turn upon one another, the fact the survival was often
only won at the expense of another. Flaszen notes that ‘the inmates are
the protagonists and, in the name of a higher unwritten law, they are
their own torturers’ (177). Grotowski also stated that ‘we did not show
victims but the rules of the game; in order to not be a victim one must
accept that the other is sacrificed’ (Grotowski, Schechner and Chwat, 42).
Akropolis demonstrated that the horror of the camps was not simply
that prisoners had violence inflicted upon them, but rather were drawn
into an environment of total violence.
It was only in the fantastic imaginative sequences that punctuated
the work that there was any escape from this violence or outlet for
emotional expression. These sequences showed a transformation of
sorts. The prisoners drew on theatre itself in an attempt to generate
some psychic relief. In the acting out of human emotions, even those
of distress or anguish, a spark of recognizable life returned to the pri-
soners. What marked their attempt as different from Delbo’s, however,
was their utter failure. Transcendence was presented in only the most
ironized of fashions. When Rachel, an object of desire, was depicted as
a piece of pipe, the image suggested that the prisoners could no longer
distinguish between men and metal. The sensuality attached to the
stories of longing for Helen and for Rachel was dark and futile. The
prisoners plunged (to use Delbo’s word) into a liminal state of make-
believe, yet the same kind of ritualistic enactment led them, in the end,
into the oven of their own construction. Whereas Christ Salvatore, the
saint who can heal, rose from the rubble of the collapsed Wawel cas-
tle in Wypiański’s Akropolis, suggesting the possibility of redemption,
Grotowski’s prisoners’ supplications found no reply. In the end, myths
of the past were made obscene, useless and perhaps even barbaric in the
sense meant by Adorno. Human culture became a caricature of itself,
just as the faces of the actors had been sculpted into grotesque forms.
Civilization failed.
What more might then be said of the audience within such an
equation? The manner in which they were called to participate was
not physical – they did not need to intervene – but rather, as Flaszen
states, ethical. This call was made in the first instance through specta-
tors’ integration into the representational landscape. Watching the
film recording of the work, the drawing together of actors and audi-
ence is very clear: the faces of spectators are lit and present. With
viewers on all sides, individual audience members would have been
very much aware of each other as well as the actors. Thus, a kind of
contact was established between actors and audience through the
scenographic design within which the audience was integral to the
world of work.
In their comments Flaszen and Grotowski variously describe a life/
death dialectic between the audience and the actors. Flaszen states:
The actors represent those who have been initiated in the ultimate
experience, they are the dead; the spectators represent those who
are outside of the circle of initiates, they remain in the stream of
everyday life, they are the living. This separation, combined with the
proximity of the spectators, contributes to the impression that the
dead are born from the dream of the living.
(177)
Grotowski turns the perspective somewhat and, from the actors’ point
of view, describes the audience as ghosts:
The spectators sat throughout the room. They were treated as people
of another world, either as ghosts, which only got in the way, or as
air. The actors spoke through them. The personal situation of the
spectators was totally different from that of the characters. The spec-
tators functioned both as spectators and within the context of the
play. They are in the middle and at the same time they are totally
irrelevant, incomprehensible to the actors – as the living cannot
understand the dead.
(Grotowski, Schechner and Chwat, 43)
Both Grotowski and Flaszen describe a both/and quality to the per-

formance: the audience were both near and distant, living and dead,
necessary witnesses and totally irrelevant. Indeed, at the beginning
of the performance, one of the actors regards the audience and says,
‘Look at the shadows.’ The instruction was ambiguous: the shadows
might be either the actors as the shadows of the dead or the audience.
Such ambiguity is ethically important in terms of confronting what
the muselmann or figuren represents: Shoshana Felman notes that the
dehumanized figuren, ‘all at once, cannot be seen and can be seen through’
(300; original emphasis). Niziolek describes Grotowski’s depiction of
the muselmänner as showing them at, ‘the end of experience, beyond
speech and consciousness, impossible to express; someone who cannot
be looked at, more fearsome than a corpse’ (28). It was distance of these
figures, exemplified by the masks, which provided the emotional shock,
or trauma, for the audience. In the direction of his actors, Grotowski
called upon the audience to see the muselmänner perform, whilst at the
same time withholding access to the interiority of the characters. Such
withholding powerfully dramatized what Gene Plunka describes as an
emptying out of thought that took place at a certain level of depriva-
tion: ‘Life evolved into survival of the body, free from the hindrances of
intellect or culture’ (75).
Whereas Fischer-Lichte locates theatre’s transformative aspect in
its ability to call upon spectators to take responsibility for the per-
formance, Akropolis illustrates the power of suspending the audience
between two states: both ‘in the middle’ and ‘completely irrelevant’.
Indeed, what meaning would physical intervention or incorporation
into the performance have except for a consolatory one? The very fact
that the audience is called to action on the one hand, and incapable of
intervention on the other, created the most palpably ‘ethical’ effect in

the sense meant by Flaszen when he remarks upon the ‘ethical memory’
of the spectator. While according to Niziolek, Grotowski described the
intended effect of his staging as to emotionally shock the audience,
Rayner’s evocation of a state of theatrical consciousness is perhaps more
helpful. As she writes, ‘Theatre is the specific site where appearance and
disappearance reproduce the relations between the living and the dead’
(Ghosts xvi). Such relations are always dialectical in nature: both vital
and impossible. Just as our subjectivity is always made in relation to
others, so too is the constitution of the living – psychic, cultural and
physical – dependent on the dead. If the bodies of Grotowski’s actors
functioned as ‘living memorials’, then the distinction between what
they and a visit to Auschwitz offers is this: vitality. In their vitality such
performances demonstrate continuity in the sense that they reveal the
persistence of the trauma in the present. Akropolis was first performed in
Opole, only some sixty kilometres from Auschwitz. If, as Brook claims,
the performs made ‘evil’ present in the midst of the audience, then the
act of invocation was affirmation of the collective aspect of the trauma
of the Holocaust. In this sense, the audience was asked to be in the
midst of what was already present: ‘the other who is coming, is emerging
from the shadows, is pervading our life – in us embodied, our flesh and
blood’ (Grotowski, ‘Holiday’ 120).
Vitality – an affirmation of life – must underlie an ethics that con-
cerns itself with the kinds of absences that this book considers. At
the beginning of this chapter I explained how at the Sachsenhausen
concentration camp memorial, it was the Nazi enterprise of death that
took centre stage, undermining or obscuring any presence given to its
victims. In At Memory’s Edge Young described an artistic response to
this memorial ‘trap’ in citing Hoheisel and Knitz’s living memorial for
Buchenwald, a body-temperature concrete obelisk that invites visitors
to touch its surface. The invitation to tactile connection similarly illus-
trates a continuity that disrupts a distancing temporality. This is not the
kind of disruption that Bataille seeks, where the affect of encounters
with the pain and death of others heightens in us a sense of continuity:
a self-serving emotional shock. Rather, in the ethical situation, the life
of those absent is made the object of memorialization, not their death.
In re-performing the life of the dead, the ethical assertion is that in its
import, such life exceeds not so much our ability to bear witness as the
narrative or aesthetic frameworks that might constrain its abundant
aspect. Thus the question is not so much one of lack or loss as it is of
excess. If this is the case, then we begin to understand why Rancière
argues that a culture of mourning cannot or should not be described as

ethical. In those acts, the excess expressed is not so much for the dead as
it is what Levinas describes as a ‘useless suffering’ that facilitates a poli-
tics that makes life all the more precarious. Herein, perhaps, we begin to
understand what Genet meant when he spoken of the vitality of funeral
mimes who, ‘in the presence of the dead and the public, recreate the life
and death of the deceased’ (74–5). The act of re-creation unsettles the
‘deadness’ of the past, and, in so doing, reminds us of the obligations
of the living – of life.
3
Vietnam: ‘Not the bullshit story
in the Lonely Planet’
A question then arises in this version of the history of the

senses – from mimesis to the organized control of mimesis –
as to whether the mimetic faculty can escape this fate of
being used against itself? Can parody supply an answer?
After all, parody is where mimicry exposes construction…
Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity 68
The passage of this book now departs from the European itinerary, begin-
ning first in Vietnam and Cambodia, before moving to an Aotearoa New
Zealand example where dark tourism and cultural tourism meet, and
finally ending in Rwanda. Vietnamese War tourism, which is the context
for this chapter, provides a backdrop against which to explicitly think
about the other side of unrepresentability; that is, the sense in which
it is by positing the other as other that one gains dominion over them.
The analysis focuses on the role of theatricality within such pitched
representational struggle. The role of the guide is given particular
focus, as are examples of meta-theatre. Theatrical playfulness in each
instance unsettles both the certainties of spectators and political
identities through deliberately confusing theatrical and quotidian
space. To examine the role of the guide the chapter takes one specific
tourist site, the Cu Chi tunnels, as key example. The tunnels are a popu-
lar tourist destination located about an hour’s drive outside of Ho Chi
Minh City. Tourists are able to dress up as VC soldiers, crawl through
small sections of the tiny tunnels and shoot rifles. During my visit it was
the guide’s heightened and highly affecting delivery that stood out. His
narrative of personal political confession had the effect of subverting
and ironizing the government-sanctioned tourist ‘script’. This seemed
to be a calculated dramatic strategy, which deliberately blurred the
101
distinctions between actor and role, on-stage and off-stage, in order to

draw the audience into a relationship of confidence. The effect was that
paradoxically, we were in the end left face-to-face with our own desires
as tourists and none the wiser about the ‘truth’ of our guide’s history.
The meta-dramas considered are Adrienne Kennedy’s An Evening with
Dead Essex (1973) and more briefly Jackie Sibblies Drury’s 2012 play, We
Are Proud to Present a Presentation About the Herero of Namibia Formerly
Known as Southwest Africa, From the German Sudwestafrika, Between the
Years 1884–1915. Although a sidestep from the tourist context, both
plays usefully illustrate what is at stake in the labour of representation
and the affects that flow from this work. Each of the chapter’s examples
gain their power from a kind of double-play. Kennedy’s play exposes
a politics that relies on racial othering through refusing to objectify
Mark Essex. At Cu Chi the guide willingly objectified himself in a per-
formance intended to satisfy Western desires while at the same time
fulfilling Vietnamese economic ones. Each enacts a complex doubling
or interweaving of desire and identity where performance destabilizes
the certainties of the audience.
Doing the twist in this dirty little war
In the context of South East Asian tourism, an analysis of theatrical

alterity needs to be related to the historical processes of differentiation
that have produced the notion of the ‘inscrutable’ other. For Western
tourists this means a rather different context from visiting memorials
that are culturally closer to home. Vietnam’s sites of War remembrance,
designed to appeal to a foreign tourist audience, are distinctly ambiva-
lent in tone. Tourists are not invited to participate in what Rancière calls
‘endless acts of mourning’ in the same manner as previous examples.
Rather, one feels that the grief of the Vietnamese people is private. For
the most part, there is no bearing of the Vietnamese soul at the sites
discussed, but instead a wholly pragmatic response by Vietnamese as to
what they understand as the desires of Western tourists. Furthermore,
despite the fact that for Western tourists Vietnam-the-country is at
least partially known through Vietnam-the-war, such evidences are
largely absent (in as much as a tourist might recognize them). Indeed,
when I took a tour of the demilitarized zone (DMZ) it consisted of
bussing to a series of sites where no evidence of what took place there
remained. Post-War Vietnam moved quickly to rebuild with little sen-
timental attachment to the detritus left behind by the last in a long
series of foreign oppressions, which between the American, French
Vietnam: ‘Not the bullshit story in Lonely Planet’ 103
and Chinese had been going on for around a thousand years. In light
of such evidentiary absences, War tourism in Vietnam relies heavily on
museums, reconstructed historical sites, and the role of guides in evok-
ing what can no longer be seen. Whereas at the concentration camp
site memorials considered, theatrical alterity affects a presence that
recognizes the humanity of those who died and asks tourists to be pre-
sent to this, in Vietnam such intimacy is not generally invited. Rather,
theatrical strategies are used to give dramatic impact to the history at
hand and to emphasize the Vietnamese perspective on what they call the
‘American War’.
So in what sense is this dark tourism? John Lennon and Malcolm
Foley describe dark tourism as travel to sites of death and disaster.
Certainly Vietnam qualifies in this regard yet, as noted, there is little
visible evidence of War. Tourists are instead met with a series of substi-
tutes intended to appeal as much to their sense of adventure or curiosity
as to what Philip Stone and Richard Sharpley, in their explanation of dark
tourists’ motivation, describe as ‘contemplations of mortality’ (587).
It is possible to suggest that by their attendance at various museums
and sites, tourists agree to entertain a perspective on their own cultural
entanglement in Vietnamese history from the ‘other’s’ point of view.
That is, there is a willingness, albeit temporary perhaps, to relinquish
one’s own dominant discursive position even if only to satisfy the
desire of knowing what the other ‘thinks of me’. However, whatever
the nuances of tourists’ engagement with the Vietnamese account of the
War, the ‘darkness’ of attractions is inevitably ensnared in a complex
politics of alterity. Indeed, a large part of the ‘pleasure’ of this spectator-
ship comes precisely from its alterior aspect – from its objectification of
difference.
The use of theatrical propaganda during the War provides a neat
example of objectification that sets the scene for a fuller discussion of
how such didactic dynamics play out within the tourist sphere. In 1969
TDR (The Drama Review) published an article simply entitled, ‘Vietnam’,
which consisted of verbatim documents that showed the use of theatre
by both American and North Vietnamese forces as part of the War
effort. The records provide an intriguing account of the mobilization of
theatre for political and military ends. The opposing wartime dramas
remind us of the important fact that the divisions of the War were not
simply Vietnamese versus American (and allies). The American dramatic
troupes were organized and funded by the US military, but wholly com-
prised of South Vietnamese personnel. This was foremost a painful civil
war, a fact that is somewhat elided (another absence) at many tourist
sites, which tend to simplify their historical narratives: again, there are
dimensions to Vietnamese pain that remain private. One particularly
interesting document published in the TDR article, which I will come
to, is an account by left-wing American journalist, Cathy Wilkerson,
of watching a North Vietnamese parody of American soldiers. Her
reflection points to the complications of political perspective – her
convictions are challenged by the satirization of difference that elicits
such delight from the rest of the audience. While the expression of ten-
sions underlying War tourism in Vietnam are not nearly as theatrically
explicit as during the War, the play of representations can be placed on
a continuum. As I shall discuss, tourism is a stage upon which Vietnam
enacts its history for a global audience.
Travelling performance troupes, the form that both armies used as
a model, are a long-standing cultural traditional in Vietnam. In the
North, the National Liberation Front and Viet Cong’s small drama
groups would travel from village to village, performing songs and skits
that emphasized traditional Vietnamese culture and the importance of
opposing American action. The American army, realizing the signifi-
cance and success of these theatrical troupes, devised their own drama
programme. The American-supported South Vietnamese dramatic
groups were called Van Tac Vu Cultural/Drama teams (VTV). In a way
that perhaps expresses their non-traditional genesis (and American
influence), the teams operated in competition with one another and
were scored on their performances. The US programme had a wide reach
and teams would perform in up to twenty villages and hamlets during a
month, to thousands of audience members. The US army memo cited in
TDR suggests that, ‘During the first year of operation from March 1966
to June 1967 the Van Tac Vu teams performed before nearly 10% of the
entire population of South Vietnam, with almost 1.5 million people
attending one or more Van Tac Vu performance’ (148). Performances
included: traditional and modern songs, magic tricks, dances and short
plays (often comedies). The army memo published by TDR gives exam-
ples of material supplied by VTV teams to be performed in response to
the ‘VC Tet Attack’, including: two modern songs, ‘Resentful Spring’,
and ‘I feel So Sad’ (for children), a traditional song adapted to the con-
temporary political context, and a skit. This skit, ‘The Path of Life’, was
a 25-minute dramatic performance:
Plot involves a young VC cadre who participated in the Saigon

attacks and was wounded in the process. He manages to escape,
after witnessing much destruction wrought against the people.
He makes his way back to his fiancee’s home outside of Saigon. She
tries to hide his identity. In the conversations between father, daugh-
ter, mother and VC the basic conflicts become clear. The boy joined
the VC following the destruction of his home by GVN artillery and
the actions of a corrupt indemnification official. But as the conversa-
tions develop, many things become clear. He discerns the extreme
cynicism of the VC hierarchy in sending people to die and in killing
many innocent people. He realizes that his own house was destroyed
in the process of fighting against this cynicism. He finds out that
the corrupt official has ended up in jail. His mind turns completely
against the VC cause and he makes arrangements to surrender to
GVN forces. Even the father, who was an uncommitted neutralist in
the beginning of the skit, becomes strongly anti-VC as the conflicts
resolve themselves.
(148)
There is no evidence given in the documents published in TDR to

directly attest to the effectiveness of these performances, although the
significant resources poured into them suggests at least the perception
of their success. While the melodramatic skit, ‘The Path of Life’, and
earnest songs are difficult to interpret without the cultural context of
a knowledge of Vietnamese performance traditions, it seems safe to
say that by engaging with drama, songs, tricks, dance and so on, the
performance troupes sought to appeal to the political conscience of
audience members through alternately entertaining and emotionally
captivating them. Here conventional identification was precisely the
point: the more effectively such performances involved spectators in
the enactment, the more powerful their political force. The US Army
memo reproduced in TDR stated: ‘The concept of Van Tac Vu C/D cadre
is not only to entertain the people by cadre themselves, but how to lead
people, to organize local artists and to make them entertain themselves’
(147; emphasis mine).
In contrast with ‘The Path of Life’, Wilkerson’s account of an anti-
American, National Liberation Front performance shows how parody
was employed to successful effect:
One dance we saw depicted a group of village women and an old man
who were hiding a young man from conscription into the Saigon
army. The women wiled and reprimanded the American soldiers who
appeared in pressed camouflage uniforms as they marched in highly
stylized, rigid form onto the stage. The American soldiers reacted to
the women by trying to do the twist with them – hips swinging with
weighted awkwardness. As the soldiers attempted to shift into more
seductive approaches, the Vietnamese women struck back.
The soldiers then tried to capture the old man, apparently threaten-
ing to do away with him unless he revealed the whereabouts of the
young man. Again the women attacked the soldiers and rescued the
old man. As the soldiers continued to be frustrated in their attempts
they became more threatening and violent. Finally they uncovered
the hiding young man.
In the ensuing struggle, in which the heavy weapons of the
Americans are drawn – the villagers having no weapons – the women
continue to battle with the soldiers. Finally they trick the soldiers out
of their weapons through a series of rapid and complex movements.
Without their weapons, the American soldiers cringe in fear. They
express an awareness of the strength of the women. They are then
sent scurrying away, while the villagers celebrate their triumph.
(qtd. in TDR 152)
As textbook propagandist theatre such performances emphasized

vilification of the enemy other (who may in fact be an enemy hiding
within), relying on the kind of dis-identification that Judith Butler
argues is central in enabling political violence (145). It was precisely by,
as Michael Taussig states, ‘miming’ the other, the other was made other:
the process of copying returned power to the copier (19). American
Wilkerson, although sympathetic, described mixed emotions in watch-
ing the performance:
The atmosphere was strange for us. It was moving to be for the first
time in a large crowd of people who explicitly shared a common
opposition to American imperialism and aggression in Vietnam. At
the same time, it was important to me to remind myself that the
individual soldiers in the dances were symbolic of the American
intervention as a whole. That when we joined in the applause at the
defeat of the soldiers, it was not to celebrate the fate of the particu-
lar soldier, but the successful resistance to U.S. military power. The
more we learned of specific details about the way the Americans
conduct their war, especially the way the G.I.s are treated by the U.S.
command, the incredibly ugly and self-defeating situations they are
forced into, the more I felt in closer alliance with the G.I.s on the
bottom of the dirty little war…
(153)
The key word to pull out of Wilkerson’s account is strange – it is the

grotesque depiction of US soldiers that unnerves her, which in turn
motivates the distinction she makes between individual soldiers and
the military machine. It is significant that, in its satirical bluntness,
the work prompts her to this kind of critical reflection. Of course, she
is not the intended audience and the performance does not ‘fail’ by
distancing her from its intended effect. Indeed, it was apparently a hit
with the audience: ‘Spontaneous applause spread throughout the audi-
ence whenever an American soldier was tricked or defeated (152–3).
However, it usefully points us to the fact that one of the problems with
many Vietnamese tourist sites is that they lack the violent force of the
satirical depiction that so unsettles Wilkerson. It is because many sites
aim to either entertain or benignly castigate that their effect is blunted.
Rather than offering the double-play of parody, which might more
clearly situate tourists in relation to their own spectatorship, many sites
simply reflect back to tourists the Vietnamese understanding or inter-
pretation of Western perceptions of the nation and its people.
This perception is in part based on the repertory of US narratives and
images that are already familiar to tourists when they arrive in Vietnam,
which in turn effects the dramatic choices made by Vietnamese in stag-
ing the country’s past. From the anti-war films of the 1970s, The Deer
Hunter (dir. Michael Cimino 1978), Coming Home (dir. Hal Ashby 1978),
Apocalypse Now (dir. Francis Ford Coppola 1979), to 1980s blockbusters
such as Rambo: First Blood Part II (dir. George P. Cosmatos 1985), Platoon
(dir. Oliver Stone 1986) and Good Morning Vietnam (dir. Barry Levinson
1987), to popular television series China Beach (1988–91) and Tour of
Duty (1987–90), to films of the last decade including We Were Soldiers
(dir. Randall Wallace 2002) and Tigerland (dir. Joel Schumacher 2000),
the Western public has largely learnt about/dealt with/worked through
the history of Vietnam via popular media. During my visit I saw nume-
rous second-hand copies of Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried on
the bookshelves of various guest houses (one of which I picked up and
read as I travelled through the country). Furthermore, regardless of
the political position of most of these films or literature, Vietnamese
characters are generally depicted as entirely inscrutable figures. In The
Deer Hunter, for example, while we are sympathetically engaged by the
psychological decline of Nick (played by Christopher Walken), which
is shown primarily through his absorption into the dangerous world of
gambling on Russian roulette games, it is his psychological and physical
abuse at the hands of VC forces that is the catalyst for his traumatized
state: Vietnamese soldiers feature no more than as cruel torturers.
Taken together, the images given in these films and across other
media frame tourists’ expectations and tourist operators subsequently
respond, as noted earlier, by serving these expectations. Scott Laderman
notes that from the 1990s onwards, when Vietnam was opened up for
widespread tourism, travellers ‘arrived carrying not just backpacks and
cameras but guidebooks and ideological suppositions. They were not
seeing Vietnam for the first time; they had seen “Vietnam” already. It
had been on the big screen dozens of times’ (9). This Western repertory
contributes to a certain tension: on the one hand, American expectations
are reflected back in a kitsch economy that will literally sell them back
US Zippo lighters and War medals (fakes); but on the other, Americans
(and others who fought with them) are vilified within the Government-
sanctioned narratives of the War. It is perhaps possible to overstate the
point that Laderman makes. I was born in 1974. Although I missed
‘the television War’, I grew up watching its dramatic re-enactments.
But for the new generation of South East Asian backpackers, this
imagery is yet another degree removed from the experience of those
baby-boomer Veterans who return on American-organized veteran
tours. Nonetheless, cultural differences are heightened at tourist sites
precisely because of what is at stake in the process of telling the nation’s
story – the right to claim moral, military and political victory.
Tourism in this sense plays an important role demonstrating to an
international audience Vietnam’s command of past, present and future.
Keith Hollinshead argues that, particularly for postcolonial societies,
tourism is central to the programme of developing an internationally
recognized, self-determined identity:
The emerging postcolonial fictionality of nationhood will produce –

partly through the vocalizations of what we might call ‘Declarative
Tourism’ – new local citizens and new political subjects. Tourism as
a discursive event will help yield a new politics of style. Certain old
coherencies about people, about places and about pasts will increas-
ingly become suspect as new communities are imagined into being
and called onto the international stage.
(33)
Defining declarative tourism more closely, Hollinshead describes it as

a ‘fantasmic projection [that] promises […] a whole new creative spec-
trum of options via tourism as “a” or “the” enabling speech act’ (36).
Certainly, the Vietnamese government has taken hold of tourism as a
stage upon which to put its version of the historical record. As audience
to these performances, tourists are cast in a de facto secondary witnessing

role inasmuch as they are asked to observe and acknowledge the pain
caused by the War and at the same time, as representatives of the
Western forces that inflicted such suffering, asked to bear some respon-
sibility for it. This is explicitly demonstrated at the War Remnants
Museum, for example, most notably through a series of exhibits fea-
turing shocking and gruesome imagery attributed to American cruelty
(Figure 3.1). It offers a counter-narrative to American versions of the
War and in this sense attempts to reconfigure American perceptions of
it. Laderman notes:
The institution provided a space in which foreigners often remarked

about being exposed for the first time to a narrative of war with which
they were previously unfamiliar, a narrative that, in its most basic focus,
placed Vietnamese rather than American experiences at its centre.
(152)
Despite the forceful Vietnamese account, however, Laderman and

Victor Alneng both point out that although some tourists, as a result
Figure 3.1 War Remnants Museum, Vietnam, 2008 (Photograph: Emma Willis)
of their visit, are ‘converted’ to the Vietnamese perspective on the War,

others remain unconvinced by hearing the story of the ‘enemy’. For
example, Alneng cites a visitor who, ‘Claiming she enjoyed her visit to
the museum […] laughingly dismissed a picture of some GIs showing
off some decapitated Vietnamese with the comment: “It’s funny really,
this government propaganda, I mean, the Americans never did things
like that”’ (476). The comment demonstrates the ongoing rhetorical
conflict as to the ‘true’ history (and legacy) of the War, which in turn
prompts the use of affective (dramatic) tactics in order to more force-
fully put the account.
Motivation for the deployment of affective strategies is as much
pragmatic as political, however. As noted earlier, in the light of evi-
dentiary absence – there are no burnt out buildings, military bases or
detentions camps – War tourism in Vietnam relies heavily on museums,
reconstructed historical sites and the role of guides in evoking what can
no longer be seen. In this sense, Vietnam uses tourism as a declarative
stage but also as a canny economic one. The coupling of these two
distinct aims is often uncomfortable, however, producing precisely the
kind of laughter elicited above. The tourist in question refused to play
her part, so to speak, precisely because she perceived that what she was
presented with was a staged – that is, not authentic or truthful – account of
history. In the following example, my tour of Cu Chi, it is the confusion
of truth and fiction, actor and role, on-stage and off-stage that I am most
interested in. While the affectively absorbing performance of my guide
traded on giving a perspective on Vietnam’s history that was not ‘the
bullshit story in the Lonely Planet’, it was likely much less ‘authentic’
than such a claim would suggest.
Cu Chi: ‘Vietnam’s answer to Disneyland’
Located only a short drive from Ho Chi Minh City, Cu Chi is a popular
tourist destination with a reputation for interactive experience:
The tunnel tour – dubbed ‘Vietnam’s answer to Disneyland’ and

‘Disney and Fellini do Nam’ by visitors – is organized to have tou-
rists make believe they are heroic VCs; they crawl in the tunnels, eat
‘VC food’ and join the VC-dolls for photos. Some tours include the
opportunity to dress up in VC pajamas and for target practice with
M-16s and AK-47s for US $1 per bullet. Those who are successful are
awarded with medals or VC scarves.
(Alneng, 474)
Clearly the site is both theatrical in its interactive aspect and dramatic
in its attempts to impactfully stage the site’s past. Guides play an impor-
tant role as narrators of the overall experience who situate the various
activities on offer within a coherent framework (see Figure 3.2). Because
of the central control of tourism in Vietnam guides are government
employees who both express the sanctioned account of the War and at
the same time perform as insiders whose confidences give tourist the
impression of an authentic (not bullshit) account. It is the degree to
which guides are able to both convey the official account and distance
themselves from it that determines the dramatic efficacy of their deli-
very; a move that acknowledges that bullshit is not just the preserve
of Lonely Planet. At the crudest level, this efficacy can be measured
by the values of the tips offered by tourists at the conclusion of a tour.
As with any dramatic performance, emotional engagement is valued
and rewarded which creates a certain paradox: while tourists want the
truth this needs to be sufficiently ‘finessed’ in order to convince us of
its veracity.
The theatrical competence of tour guides’ delivery is often a signifi-
cant determining factor in the success of any given guided tour. E. Fine
Figure 3.2 Cu Chi Tunnels, Vietnam, 2008 (Photograph: Emma Willis)

and J. Speer, in their analysis of guides, argue that it is foremost the

performance of the guide that animates the site: ‘This hypothesis stems
from a rhetorical and dramatistic perspective, which views tour sites as
dramatic settings, complete with audience and actors’ (75). In this dra-
matic analogy the guide is an actor, a multifaceted role that includes a
number of what Christopher Holloway describes as ‘sub-roles’:
Typical sub-roles will include types such as ‘information-giver’ and

‘fount of knowledge’, ‘teacher or instructor’, ‘motivator or ambassador
for one’s country’, ‘entertainer or catalyst for the group’, ‘confidant,
shepherd and ministering angel’, and ‘group leader and disciplinarian’.
(385–6)
In a continuation of the dramatic parallel, Philip Pearce describes a stage

upon which the guide performs:
The physical spaces in which tourist-guide interactions take place can

be seen as a kind of symbolic text. Adopting this kind of hermeneutic
analogy, the environmental setting can be interpreted as a configura-
tion of elements (functional items, spaces, barriers and props) which
are arranged so that one may read the goals, rules, potential roles,
and expectations for social interaction in that setting.
(138–40)
As intermediaries, guides help bridge the distance between tourists and

locals and help them make sense of the staged environment in which
they find themselves.
The elaborative aspect of the guide’s role, their ability to weave a
narrative that draws together disparate aspects of the site, heightens
the importance of the their performance: ‘Interpretation and not the
mere dissemination of information, is the distinguishing communica-
tive function of the trained tourist guide’ (E. Cohen, 15). In this sense,
emotional engagement is an important part of the overall performance.
Holloway notes:
Guides […] wish to ensure that their passengers enjoy an experience

that is more than routine, and they may use their dramaturgical skills
to de-routinize the excursion. This they may do by using acting skills to
involve the audience emotionally, or they may invite members of
the group to share some deeply felt personal perspective of the site.
(388–9)
My guide at Cu Chi was such an adept performer. Weaving together his

personal narrative and the site’s history, he cleverly created an emotion-
ally intriguing experience.
Part of the strength of his performance came from his ability to put
himself on display. More than merely ‘information giver’ he provided
a glimpse into the reality of Vietnamese life and history that exceeded
the site’s formal narrative. If, as Dean MacCannell argues, tourists are
motivated by the desire to get ‘behind the scenes’, or beyond the stage,
in order to catch a glimpse of the authentic (‘Staged Authenticity’
595), then our guide cannily mined this desire. Did this compromise
the account given? For MacCannell, the performed aspects of cultural
tourism undermine its claims for authenticity. He identifies the stage –
meant both literally (e.g., song and dance culture shows) and as a
general descriptor of the cultural tourism sphere – as a space of dissimu-
lation. This deception, he argues, is economically motivated:
Such performances seem to combine modern elements of self-interested

rational planning and economic calculation with primitive cos-
tumes, weapons, music, ritual objects and practice that once existed
beyond the reach of economic rationality […]. The ‘primitivistic’
performance contains the image of the primitive as a dead form. The
alleged combination of modern and primitive elements is an abuse
of the dead to promote the pretence of complexity as a cover for
some rather simple-minded dealings based mainly on principles of
accounting.
(Empty Meeting Grounds 19)
MacCannell attacks such performances precisely because of their

mimetic façade, which he seems to argue obscures the real real. But
what, exactly, does the real look like and where might it be found? Does
the ‘not real’ aspect of a finessed tour guide performance mean that it
is also necessarily not true? Fiction gains its power through its ability to
express recognizable truths via the guise of imagined characters and sce-
narios. Is it possible to say the same of a situation such as a guided tour,
where conventions dictate that the guide provide a straightforward,
albeit highly entertaining, version of the truth? Perhaps the disjunctive
meeting of fiction and history marred by false semblance provides its
own kind of truth, one whose reality is just as, if not more honest as the
unembellished account.
The tour I participated in was with around twenty other tourists of a
variety of ages and nationalities. The tour began when we entered the
minivan that picked us up and concluded around four hours later as

we returned to the city. What was particularly striking about our guide,
who was with us throughout the journey, was his ability as a skilled
orator, master storyteller and, one suspects, wonderful actor. His ongoing
narrative accompaniment to the tour elevated it from an informational
outing, accompanied by opportunities for hands-on learning, to a
personalized and affective historical drama. He consistently reminded
us that, because of his inside knowledge, he would be able to tell us the
real story, not the ‘bullshit story in the Lonely Planet,’ which was all
‘lies’. Drawing us into an atmosphere of confidence, he told us that the
Government itself would not sanction his insider account, which was
often a critical one.
During the hour-long bus journey, the guide recounted his personal
experience of the War and later consequences. He began by declaring
he had fought on the wrong side. Prior to the War his father had been a
diplomat and had forged strong relationships with the Americans. In his
teens the guide moved to America, where he trained with the US Army.
He then spent seven years as a soldier, mostly fighting in and around

Saigon during the War. After the American withdrawal he decided not
to return to the United States and stayed on to continue fighting against
the Viet Cong. When the Southern Vietnamese government collapsed
a year later, he was arrested by the new communist government and
put into a re-education prison for four and a half years. He never saw
his family again. His status as ‘Puppet Officer of the American Army’
meant that, according to him, he was forever blacklisted from profes-
sional occupations in Vietnam. He explained that he had spent the last
18 years working as a tour guide because it was the only official job that
the government would allow him. Now he was 59, he said, and would
retire next year.
The guide’s story was skilfully told within the broader context of
Vietnamese history. After 18 years of delivery he had mastered the inter-
weaving of personal and national narratives, managing to cover a time
span from the French occupation to the present day. On the journey up,
while I found his story profoundly moving, I was intrigued by the fact that
he seemed so affected by telling it, often to the point of appearing tear-
ful. Occasionally, moments of sharp bitterness would pierce through the
‘fascinating yarn’ tone of his delivery, such as the declaration that his
major mistake was that he had not known which side would win the
War. The War ruined his life, he declared. When talking about his expe-
riences in prison he expressed ambivalence, voicing regret that he had
misunderstood the communists’ intentions, whilst railing against the
unfairness of what their victory had meant for him personally. All the
while, though, he stood by a love of his country and its people, particu-
larly his ‘100 per cent Vietnamese wife’.
On arrival at the tunnels, his delivery shifted into a more conven-
tional mode. He explained the significance of the various displays to
us, still all the while dropping in his own ‘authentic’ memories and
insider knowledge. After visiting the different models and reconstruc-
tions (Figure 3.3), we stopped at a rest area before proceeding to the
main attraction of the visit, the tunnels themselves. As we approached
the benches the sound of gunfire became more and more insistent. He
explained to us that there was a firing range set up. We could pay per
one US dollar per bullet to fire a Kalashnikov AK47, one of the guns
favoured by the Viet Cong. A number of tourists availed themselves of
this opportunity (Figure 3.4).
The guide sat down and had a beer as we passed our rest break. After, as
we walked towards the tunnels, he stopped suddenly and declared that
we must ‘forget everything I said on the bus. I was wrong’. He seemed
overcome with shame at having been on the wrong side. He declared
the correctness and sincerity of the Vietnamese people’s struggle for

their own independence. He lamented his ignorance, and that he was
‘bought off’ for ‘American money’. The group listened quietly and
attentively.
The crawl through the tunnels provided the climax to the visit, and,
as with the rifle range, the guide absented himself from the experience.
In detail, he explained what to expect once inside: the spaces were small
and narrow, often only just enough to squeeze through, with three dif-
ferent levels, largely unlit. It took visitors around ten minutes to move
from beginning to end. Because of the narrow way – ‘Vietnamese size’ –
and the constant stream of parties moving through, it would not be
possible, once inside, to turn back. Being wary of small spaces I heeded
the guide’s warning and placed myself at the back of the line. I made
it only a few steps in, however, before the smell of damp earth sent me
back to the entry. I took my place on a bench along with the guide,
a British woman with bad knees and an American whose size, it was
estimated, would prohibit her from squeezing through the smallest of
spaces (a fact publicly confirmed by her husband when he emerged
at the other end). My failure to enter the tunnels afforded me the

opportunity to observe members of the party as they emerged. All
were hot and sweating, some tired, others relieved, the claustrophobes
charged with adrenaline. The crawl is (by all accounts) an affective
experience that stimulates a kind of empathetic investment. Tourists
in my party commented with disbelief on how Viet Cong forces could
have spent such long periods of time almost buried under the earth.
After the tunnel crawl, the party returned to the minibus.
The bus ride back to the city was largely passed in silence, during
which I reflected on the guide’s earlier expressions of anguish. The
government’s long assignment to him of the job of guide plunged him
into a kind of purgatory, forever condemned to come face-to-face with
his misdoings and regrets. Forced to tell, day after day, the story of his
victors – those against whom he fought for so long, and those whose
story he now had to recount – forever marked him as outcast. Indeed,
he was a man who had to accept the daily humiliation of admitting
having been on the side of the ignorant and morally bankrupt. And
worst of all, he had betrayed the people of his nation, the people he
professed to love so well. Once we neared the city, he recommenced
his commentary in order to complete the story. As we wound through
the city roads he returned to the subject of his impending retirement.
He wanted to finish his dairies and publish them (he had already had
one book of his experiences published in the United Kingdom, he
said). He was looking forward to being cared for by his two ‘good sons’.
Finally, and once again, he lamented the awfulness of his job and the
frustration of his life’s ambitions by the mistakes of his youth. Stepping
off the bus, we each pressed tips into his palm as he shook our hand.
The guide’s grafting of his personal story onto the history lesson
elevated the tour above a mechanized run-of-the-mill tourist enterprise.
By adding together personal details and insider knowledge not other-
wise signposted, his narrative not only engaged our attention emotion-
ally, but also added complexity to what was otherwise a didactic site.
However, moved as I was by our guide’s account, I could not shake
doubts not just about the content of the marvellous tale, but also, con-
sidering he had been telling it for 18 years, the emotional force with
which it was told. The suspicion that my tour guide gave a wonderfully
staged performance seemed confirmed when I read Alneng’s account of
his tour guide at Cu Chi, which began remarkably similarly:
As the tour bus makes its early morning departure from Pham Ngu
Lao, Anh, the guide, opens with a plea: ‘Don’t believe anything you see
or hear in Vietnam, because 90 percent of everything is government

propaganda.’ According to Anh, the communists would never tole-
rate his account of Vietnam.
(473)
The declaration that the ‘communists would never tolerate his account
of Vietnam’ was a skilful rhetorical move which, just as with my own
guide, positioned him as a confidant, an insider willing to put himself
at risk in order to reveal hidden truths to the tourists. Laurie Beth Clark
similarly described her guide at My Lai as ‘a highly skilled storyteller
and a compelling performer’. As it unfolds, Alneng’s description differs
from my own guide’s story, however, suggesting that rather than the
unlikely coincidence that it was the same guide, the approach of both
was a common strategy, which perhaps reflects a more general pattern.
Alneng writes of his guide:
As an ex-soldier of the ARVN (South Vietnamese army), he spent

two years in a re-education camp and didn’t speak English for
18 years. His sister fled to America while he stayed behind working
as a farmer and taking care of their father. He views the USA as a
place where anyone can be successful. The Vietnamese people are
described in positive terms while the government is portrayed less
favourably. The narrative is mixed with jokes. On most tours Anh
follows a rehearsed procedure, but occasionally he would tell more
about his personal experiences, among other things how he flew over
Hamburger Hill one day after the notorious battle there ended.
(473–4)
My guide described almost five years in a re-education camp, a similar

separation from his family, whom he never saw again, and included
some time spent in the United States before the War was in full swing.
He similarly reinforced his love of the Vietnamese people, while lament-
ing his suffering at the hands of the government.
The positioning of the guides in both my own and Alneng’s experi-
ence provides an interesting dramatic tension. As he notes ‘the Cu Chi
tunnels highlight the heroism of the Viet Cong’ (475). In this sense, the
guides cast themselves as antagonistic players, adding a level of tension
and complexity to the narrative. This ambivalence is supplemented by
the fact that tourists enact Viet Cong experience – shooting their guns,
crawling through the tunnels. The immersion of tourists into the sub-
terranean experience of Vietnamese during the War perhaps illustrates
what Taussig describes as ‘the perceiver trying to enter into the picture
and become one with it, so that the self is moved by the representa-
tion into the represented’ (61). The contradictions of the tourist/guide
experience seem to mirror the ambiguities of the War itself, in which
the distinction between friend and enemy, victor and defeated, right
and wrong, was often uncertain. Furthermore, as Clark points out of her
tour of My Lai, her guide and accompanying survivor were at the same
time ‘performers’, ritual mourners who served not only tourists but also
the community and the dead.
Within the tour the guide, despite his disclosures, remained distant,
ambivalently positioned. The memory of him sitting alone drinking
a beer whilst the members of his tour group shot rifles captures this
best for me. Was this an off-stage moment of relaxation or an authen-
tic instance of reflection that provoked the outburst that followed it?
Reflecting on the tour’s end, I am drawn to Bert O. States’s discussion of
Samuel Beckett’s Catastrophe. The short play concerns a Director and his
Assistant sculpting, as it were, the figure of a Performer in order to create
the final catastrophic image of an unnamed and undescribed play. Once
satisfied with his creation, the Director shouts:
D: Stop! [Pause] Now … let ‘em have it.

(Fade-out of general light. Pause. Fade out of light on body. Light
on head alone. Long pause.)
Terrific! He’ll have them on their feet. I can hear it from here.
(Pause. Distant storm of applause. P raises his head, fixes the audi-
ence. The applause falters, dies.
Long Pause.
Fade-out of light on the face.)
(301)
Of the play States writes:
We watch a man being complacently, as a matter of business, stripped

of his humanity, made into a thing before our eyes for our pleasure
and instruction, whatever that may mean. But then Beckett overturns
his catastrophe – overturns the overturning – and poses the real ques-
tion: are we to applaud his play? What are we applauding if we do?
(207; original emphasis)
Certainly this seems the very question to ask of Cu Chi, and, as with
Catastrophe, there is no simple answer. Did we applaud, as we slipped tips
into the guide’s hand, a wonderful performance of abjection: indeed,

what he told us was as much a story of personal failure as anything else.
What would this say of us if we did? What else might we have done? If
such a performance is a play on the desire of tourists for personal confi-
dences and emotional engagement, then who gets the joke? There is no
means of getting at the truth of the guide’s affective performance – its
meaning remains indistinct. One can admire the skill of the performer
yet that does not necessarily negate the sincerity of the performance.
Indeed, the impact of the guide’s performance came as much from the
way it unsteadied the usual boundaries of both the guide/tourist rela-
tionship and conventional government scripted narrative as much as
it did from the emotional force with which the account was delivered.
By performing failure, he showed us a private world that is otherwise
denied to tourists. At the same time, however, by taking on the role of
the failure, he relieved the audience of this burden. For a time, we
could forget our complicity (as enemy heirs), absorbed by his account
of becoming an outcast. He drew us into a silent solidarity with him by
showing how he was other in his own country. He was a man compro-
mised who, in turn, performed the compromise of his own role as guide
(accepting the stakes of subverting the Government account). The effect
was almost dizzying, leaving me uncertain. Nowhere else in Vietnam
did a tourist attraction have the same impact. The encounter left me
wondering exactly what I was doing there; almost embarrassed to have
been witness to the testimony of the guide’s misdoings and yet flushed
with the excitement of having heard it.
Meta-theatre
Discussing the role of mimesis in mediating colonial encounter, Taussig

writes that within such performances, ‘it is far from easy to say who
is imitator and who is the imitated, which is copy and which is origi-
nal’ (78). My tour of Cu Chi illustrated just such slippery double-play.
I would finally like to discuss Adrienne Kennedy’s play, An Evening with
Dead Essex, and more briefly Jackie Sibblies Drury’s We Are Proud to
Present, which although moving us away from the tourist context, in
their own ‘doubleness’ continue to tease out the implications for the
audience of unsteadying or reversing the usual boundaries between
the theatrical and the everyday, on-stage and off-stage space. Although
there are a number of other plays that deal more directly with the
Vietnam War than Kennedy’s, such as John Di Fusco’s Tracers or David
Rabe’s series of Vietnam plays – The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel,
Sticks and Bones, Streamers and The Orphan – the meta-theatrical aspect of
Dead Essex foregrounds the paradoxical nature of the truths that emerge
when the stage-as-space-of-dissimulation is given its own reality. Such
reality troubles conventional theatrical representational practice and in
this sense both plays illustrate what Lehman calls the ‘withdrawal of
representation’. The withdrawal of representation is not merely aesthe-
tical device, however, but more importantly political subject: each writer
explores what has been absent or withheld from the historical record.
Within the space that the withdrawal of representation leaves behind
something else occurs and it is the nature of this ‘something else’ that
I am interested in. Where I hope to lead the chapter, through a very
brief discussion of both plays, is to a reflection on the power of indirect
or unfulfilled representation. The most powerful tourist representation
I experienced in Vietnam came by ‘subterfuge’ at Cu Chi. In Kennedy’s
play Essex is most powerfully represented by remaining absent. The
most affective scene in We Are Proud to Present grows organically out of
frustrated rehearsal. How do these indirect representations gather force
through harnessing theatrical affect?
Mark Essex was shot to death on 7 January 1973. An Evening with
Dead Essex was written in that same year and first performed in
November at the American Place Theatre in New York. Between the
two events, in August, American concluded its campaign in Vietnam
(although the War itself continued, without American involvement,
until 1975 when Saigon fell to communist forces). While Essex himself
never served in Vietnam, the play reflects the connections between
Essex’s violence and the violence of the War, primarily in relation to
the politics of racism. In a passage from the first act of the play the
director makes the connection explicit. He evokes ‘the biggest raid on
the Vietnam War demilitarized zone to date’, which he follows by a
description of the shooting of Essex, stating: ‘they very much continue
into each other – they are one and the same’ (A. Kennedy, 125). An
actor playing an ex-GI remarks, ‘we had a lot to say to each other –
about our confusion about the deep racial significance of the war
between the U.S. and Viet Nam, white against non-white’ (119–20).
A few lines later the director encourages the actor, saying, ‘Each soldier
should talk about how brutally used he felt to fight a darker brother for
a country that despises him even more than his Vietnam enemy’ (120).
Indeed, Kennedy’s play pulls no political punches: it is dedicated to
Essex and his family and focuses on illuminating the social context –
church, military, media and Government – that bred his rage against
white people.
The play is divided into three acts, each set in the rehearsal room. The
first act takes place in late afternoon, the evening before the play’s first
performance. It begins with the director reviewing documentary images
related to Essex’s life: him as a child, his family, images of his home
town and its inhabitants, his room in New Orleans, police photos of
the shooting scene. One by one actors enter and the drama unfolds as a
fairly informal preparation of the next night’s performance: an actor
assumes the character of an ex-serviceman and delivers a monologue
about his arrest on the charges of plotting to kill white people, the
cast rehearse songs, an actress delivers a rendition of the Twenty-Third
Psalm, director and actors continue to review archival material. The
second act takes place later the same evening. While the actors take
a break, the director and assistant continue to review clippings and
images, emphasizing the social context of Essex’s actions. The act ends
with an image of slain Essex as if a natural culmination of the events
that unfolded before his death. The third act takes place at night. The
tone of the drama shifts and the short act unfolds almost as if an invo-
cation of Essex. The action closes, firstly with a hymn, and then with
the cast all reading passages from Luke, finally quoting Luke 5:
You know the spirit of the Lord is upon me because he hath anointed
me to preach the gospel to the poor he hath sent me to heal the bro-
ken hearted – to preach deliverance to the captives and recovering of
sight to the blind to set at liberty them that are bruised.
To heal the broken hearted.
(Flash Essex – American sailor – large)
(135)
In the end the play moves from political examination to funereal ritual –
a laying to rest and act of healing.
The fluid and unstructured nature of the rehearsal endows the play
with a feeling of dream-like prelude where the action is close by, but not
yet in full view, emphasized by the seemingly unmotivated entrance
and exit of actors, and the lack of apparent structure of the play being
rehearsed. Kennedy withholds dramatic resolution both by withholding
‘the play’ itself, and by keeping Essex’s character off-stage. The effect is
that the longer Essex remains absent, the more tension builds around
the attempts to depict his life, if not his person. Dialogue in the final act
suggests that the sustained energy of the actors’ work has somehow called
his ghost to presence. The director opens the act, stating: ‘(Very quietly):
O.K. this is it. We’re there now. We’re with him. (Screen empty)’ (132).
Whereas the previous two acts focused on research and rehearsal, here
the action begins to be guided by the invisible presence of Essex himself.
Shortly before the end of the play, the ‘actress’ assumes the character of
Essex and speaks in the first person, the only time that this occurs in the
play. Notably the line is delivered with the actor still in rehearsal mode:
‘(she prepares): The first indication that something was going to happen
came last spring when I purchased a .44 Magnum hunting rifle – that
gun was found next to my body when I was shot that Sunday from a
Marine helicopter’ (134). The line is as if a whisper of Essex’s ghost.
Although no actor in the play has represented Essex, the search for the
truth of his character, coupled with the repeated projection of images
of his face, makes him the dominating stage force. In its self-reflexivity
the play creates the space for Essex’s ghost to make itself felt. The drama
is peppered with documentary sources – with evidence – but this is not
where Essex is to be found. These material objects instead create a kind
of negative space and it is in the negative – the void or shadows – that
something touching Essex reverberates. The play ends with the most
well known photograph of Essex – a headshot framed by his navy uni-
form – projected on the screen: his face leads us into darkness.
Elsewhere I have cited Alice Rayner’s remark that, ‘Theatre is the spe-
cific site where appearance and disappearance reproduce the relations
between the living and the dead, not as a form of representation, but
as a form of consciousness that has moved beyond dualities and the
problems of representation without disregarding them’ (Ghosts xvi). The
ghostliness at the end of the play may be interpreted as a kind of meta
meta-theatricality, which illustrates the very consciousness that Rayner
points to. Kennedy foregrounds this consciousness by concurrently
dramatizing Essex’s story and deconstructing the theatrical situation. In
this regard the work is not so much concerned with the unrepresentable
as it is with the work of representation, which is to say its labour. For
this is what we watch the actors do – they labour. Making the processes
of representation apparent makes a political point: the play refuses to
‘depict’ Essex in the same way that the media that the play criticizes
has done. Instead, the audience are invited into the private space of
the rehearsal room where they, like the actors, must piece together
the account of Essex’ life. Unlike a conventional biographical play, the
script does not resolve the personal or dramatic tensions underlying
the circumstances of Essex’s life and actions. Politically, this is because
such tensions remain unresolved in the world outside of the rehearsal
room – that is, in the social world of the audience. The play shows us
not just the contingencies of making an account of a life, however,
but more importantly the necessity of poetry in providing a language

that is able to express the otherwise inexpressible or incomprehensible.
This is a poetics of incomplete or failed representation, a language that
dwells in the limits of what we can ‘know’, ‘hear’, ‘see’ and ‘sense’, of
another’s life.
We Are Proud to Present, similarly to Dead Essex, points to where narra-
tives of alterity are used as a tool of racial domination. The play features
a group of actors trying to ascertain the best way of constructing a docu-
mentary play that will tell the history of the colonial genocide of the
Herero people of Namibia. We Are Proud to Present (Figure 3.5) is a more
comic take on the meta-theatrical premise than Dead Essex, however. The
youth of the actors and racial distinctions – there are three white actors
and three African-American actors – generates a comedy of cross-purpose
communication. Where the actors in Kennedy’s play are solemn, Drury’s
performers are satirized for both their over-earnest attempts at historical
depiction as well as their collaborative co-op theatre infighting, which
struck a chord with the young audience the evening I attended. The
company muddle their way through known facts, archival remains, and
the central problem that the only remaining evidence they have of the
genocide comes from the letters of white settlers: the Herero themselves
are silent within the historical account. The performance shifts between
rehearsal-room drama, and the rehearsal of scenes where we are shown
glimpses of what the play-in-process might finally look like.
The section of the drama I want to remark upon comes near the end
of the play. The scene is called ‘Processtation’. In the action leading up
to it, things have reached an impasse in the rehearsal room. One of
the actors declares that now is the time to stop talking and ‘stay in it’
(Drury, 160). The scene is set:
1905.
The wall has been erected.
One hundred and fifty miles wide.
On one side, there is home.
On the other side, there is desert.
Black man, you’ve been in the desert for days without anything to
drink.
Go.
(160)
Two actors playing Herero men exiled from their land walk towards
the dangerous zone of the wall that holds them at bay. Gradually other
Figure 3.5 We Are Proud to Present… by Jackie Sibblies Drury. Director: Eric Ting.
Actors, L–R: Jimmy Davis, Phillip James Brannon, Lauren Blumenfeld, Erin
Gann (under Lauren’s arm), Grantham Coleman. Soho Rep, New York, 2012
(Photograph: Julieta Cervantes)
actors enter the scene. The white performers take on the role of German
soldiers (colonial occupiers) and begin a chant: ‘Round them up. Chain
them up. Lead them up. Lock them up’ (165). This is set against a slave
song sung by the African-American actors, which brings another ‘setting’
to the stage, the American South. The white performers become racist
Americans. Drury carefully scores the rhythm of the text and action to
an almost hypnotic level. This is the first time that the action has tran-
scended the meta-theatrical device. The action builds in intensity until
two white performers put a noose around a African-American character’s
neck. The stage direction notes: ‘(They threaten and terrify him and enjoy
his fear)’ (174). All are completely absorbed in their roles until the fear
overwhelms the actor with the noose around his neck. He stops the
action, shattering the tension of the scene.
Gradually, with very little language, the scene returns to the rehearsal-
room setting. Then there is silence. Uncomfortable silence:
(And in that silence something starts to happen. The actors start to process
what just happened. And there is something… Discomfort. Frustration.
Awkwardness. Nerve. Adrenaline. Uncertainty. Buzzing. Embarrassment.

Guilt. Shame. Anger. Excitement. Something…)
(175)
None of them speak. Drury writes for the white actors:
(There might be failed attempts to shake off the moment in laughter. There
might be failed attempts to congratulate each other in the laughter. There
might be failed explanations in the laughter. There might be failed imita-
tions of the performance in the laughter. There might be failed explana-
tions in the laughter. There might be failed attempts to stop laughing
in the laughter… but the performers cannot stop until there is laughter,
and it is genuine.)
(175)
Just as the actors are uncertain as to how to respond, when I saw the
work I wondered whether to laugh or watch in silence. This was the
most highly charged moment in the play. With the action returned to
the rehearsal-room setting the audience was lit just as the actors were.
Throughout the silent (aside from awkward laughter) sequence, vari-
ous actors are directed in the script to ‘(take in the audience)’. Earlier in
the scene, while a white character taunted the actor who was to have
a noose hung around his neck, Drury’s directions note that he should
play to the audience: ‘(a Show for a Crowd of 1,000. The Audience is Part
of the Crowd)’ (169). Finally, the last actor on stage, Another Black Man/
Actor 4, ‘looks to the audience…
He tries to say something to the audience

but…
He might produce the air of a word
beginning with the letter ‘w’ like
We or Why or What.
He tries to speak, but he fails.
(176)
The final question in the play remains unspoken, emphasizing the

sense in which audience members were rendered bystanders to the
racist scene that had just played out – a scene that demonstrated its
persistence in the present. The lighting state remained unchanged after
the last actor exited the stage. The night I attended, the audience sat
in silence for a long time, wondering whether the play had ended. Was
there more action to come? The air was charged with the same qualities
described for the actors: ‘Discomfort. Frustration. Awkwardness. Nerve.
Adrenaline. Uncertainty. Buzzing. Embarrassment. Guilt. Shame. Anger.
Excitement. Something…’ Seated around the action on three sides,
we looked at each other and talked quietly with our neighbours until
we finally realized that we were the conclusion of the play – the action
ended with us. Once this realization dawned, we began to applaud
but the most powerful point came just before we clapped our hands
together, stranded in a zone of uncertainty, unsettled by the incom-
pleteness of the representation.
Curtain call
In War tourism in Vietnam, otherness is caught up in a complex chain of

performances. At one level, tourists expect certain ‘performances’ based
on their pre-existent cultural knowledge. Tourist operators appeal to
these expectations through participating in sometimes crude or kitsch
performances of otherness. That is, there is a Vietnamese performance of
otherness – a kind of meta-performance – that reflects back to tourists
their own assumptions. What might be said to determine the ethical
effect of such performance is whether or not tourists recognize this act
of reflection and the manner in which it frames their spectatorship.
While in most cases this seemed not to be the case, my experience of
the guided tour at Cu Chi, albeit unintendedly, began to make apparent
the complex political layering of mimesis. It did this through attempt-
ing to exploit the power of the off-stage or behind-the-scenes moment,
where what James Thompson describes as ‘murky semantic meaning’
destabilizes identity (111). Such instances reveal the manner in which
identity employs theatricality in order to work itself out. Precisely
because of this theatre as a medium is ideally suited to showing the
liminal spaces that precede the fixing of identity and is able to expose a
kind of pre-performative crisis state where the contingencies of ‘reality’
become painfully apparent.
In the case of the plays discussed, by side-stepping the process of
straightforward historical representation, each are able to explore the
politics of representation with striking effect. Yet more importantly, in
relinquishing dramatic conventions they paradoxically summon forth
theatre’s most powerful aspect: each play ends with a kind of haunting,
a moment that tingles with the consciousness that Rayner describes.
What gives theatre its power in these instances is not its ability to con-
vincingly copy in a way that effaces the act(or), but rather when it shows
that copying produces its own reality. This reality is not equivalent with
its object but uncannily unseats its hegemonic claim – this is the power
of the theatrical double. As Rayner puts it: ‘The Platonic sense of mime-
sis presumes a difference between the true and the false, the original and
the copy. The theatrical double resists their differences’ (Ghosts 134).
The copy is a talisman that when effectively engaged, ‘acquires the
power of the represented’ (Taussig 16) not because of similarly, but
because of difference, or, in the case of the plays discussed, because
of absence: the absence of Essex and a holistic account of his life and
circumstances, and the absence of material evidence of the destruction
of the Herero respectively. At a political level, this reality troubles the
present for it complicates the very pastness of the past. It is not so much
because of the parody of copying that the performances carry politi-
cal and poetic weight, however, as because of what the self-conscious
theatricality that Kennedy and Sibblies Drury employ produces: silence
and disarticulation, which signify the alterity of the absent other. When
such performances are at their most powerful we are drawn to ask pre-
cisely the question: what is it that we are applauding and what does it
say of us that we do so?
4
‘Here was the place’:
(Re)Performing Khmer Rouge
Archives of Violence
The face looks at me and calls to me. It lays claim to me.

What does it ask? Not to leave it alone. An answer: here
I am.
Emmanuel Levinas, Is It Righteous to Be? 127
This chapter takes the distinction made by Diana Taylor between

archive and repertoire as the basis for considering both the performative
aspects of how archives are given affective presence at memorial sites,
and the distinction between such presence and that which is generated
by more conventional performance-based representation. Taylor, in
The Archive and the Repertoire, make a distinction between material and
ephemeral expressions of historical and cultural narratives and argues
for the importance of the repertoire as a foil for the hegemonic power
of the archive. As Derrida points out in Archive Fever, archives are nec-
essarily conservative: they require a dwelling within which their claim
on history is classified and put into order – it is institutionalized (4).
The archive asserts cultural and historical legitimacy precisely because
of the materiality of its evidence. ‘The repertoire, on the other hand,
enacts embodied memory: performance, gestures, orality, movement,
dance, singing – in short, all those acts usually thought of as epheme-
ral nonreproducible knowledge’ (20). The enquiry of this chapter is
located in the context of remembering the genocide that took place in
Cambodia under the Pol Pot regime (1975–79). Tuol Sleng Museum of
Genocide in Phnom Penh, formerly a Khmer Rouge prison called ‘S21’,
and nearby Choeung Ek (‘The Killing Fields’) are the principal sites of
genocide remembrance popularly visited by tourists. Together the sites
tell the story of Khmer Rouge ideology and methods – Tuol Sleng – and
their final result – Choeung Ek. Tuol Sleng is best known for its display
129
of archival photographs. On arrival at S21, every prisoner had their

picture taken as a record of their incarceration. Archivists have salvaged
over 6000 of these images, which are prominently displayed in the
Museum. Of all the examples discussed in this book, the Tuol Sleng
photographs, in their focus on the face, most strikingly invite an appli-
cation of Levinas’s ethics: ‘The face looks at me and calls to me. It lays
claim to me. What does it ask? Not to leave it alone. An answer: here
I am’ (Is It Righteous to Be? 127). The display gives performative force
to the archive by attempting to bring to presence the ghosts of Tuol
Sleng. In doing so it asks visitors to enter into this presence – to reply
‘here I am’ as it were – and acknowledge the pain of those whose faces
make such a plaintive claim upon their viewers. In contrast, Catherine
Filloux’s one-act play, Photographs from S-21, and Rithy Panh’s docu-
mentary, S21: Khmer Rouge Killing Machine, explicitly interrogate the
limits of archival presence. Filloux’s play imagines two of the photo-
graphs’ subjects ‘come to life’ after a day of being looked at by visitors.
Panh’s documentary brings former Tuol Sleng workers – guards, inter-
rogators and a photographer – face to face with a slew of documentary
evidence of their crimes as well as with two former victims. Both works
foreground the human forces behind or beyond the frame(work) of the
archive and explore the insistence of the past in the present. In reflect-
ing on both the Museum and Filloux and Panh’s works, I ask whether
it is possible to locate the silent ‘speech’ of the photographs in ethical
terms and consider the distinctions between the affects of their display
and the performance-based examples.
Facing the past: Tuol Sleng and Choeung Ek
Because the Cambodian genocide has been almost absent from popu-
lar representation (other than the feature film The Killing Fields which
played nightly in my guest house in Phnom Penh), memorials serve to
educate tourists about the country’s painful past and asks that they pay
their respects to those who lost their lives. The sites of remembrance
are altogether more haunted in nature than those in Vietnam, explicitly
invoking the spirits of those who died. They are also more concerned
with a straightforward telling of the historical account (rather than the
heightened historical depiction of Cu Chi, for example), something that
the country as a whole still needs. It was only in 2009 that major trials
(ongoing at the time of writing) began of those who perpetrated crimes
during the Democratic Kampuchea regime. The scope of civil conflict –
the sense in which neighbour betrayed neighbour – means that former
(Re)-Performing Khmer Rouge Archives of Violence 131
perpetrators and victims still live side by side. Further, because of a lack
of judicial address, drawing distinctions between those who suffered
and those who inflicted suffering has been a difficult process. Karen
Coates notes:
Cambodia is perhaps doubly cursed because there is no certain line

between guilty and innocent. The Khmer Rouge [was] Cambodian.
Many soldiers were conscripted, many robbed of their childhoods.
Guards and gatekeepers, survivors and their children, the whole of
society suffers – including former Khmer Rouge […]. And in later
years when the Khmer Rouge split into several factions, many sol-
diers themselves were tortured and brutalized.
(145)
Unlike Rwanda, however, there have been few restorative or reconcili-

ation processes instituted to deal with these deep social divisions and
the current trials are the first major public discussion of what occurred
during the Khmer Rouge period. Furthermore, as public protests against
human rights violations staged during US President Obama’s visit to
the country in 2012 demonstrate, Cambodia has far from resolved
its violent past. In early 2013 Human Rights Watch reported that the
country’s ‘human rights situation deteriorated in 2012 with increased
violence and scripted trials against political and civil society activists’
(Human Rights Watch).
Tuol Sleng and Choeung Ek Genocidal Centre are the most visible
reminders of the Khmer Rouge period. The violent reign of Pol Pot
began when, in 1975, following a civil struggle that had its roots in
the Vietnamese-American conflict, the communist Khmer Rouge party
seized power in Cambodia. The party dramatically invaded the capi-
tal city of Phnom Penh, overthrowing Lon Nol’s government, which
itself had seized power from King Sihanouk in a coup in 1970. (Hélène
Cixous’s play Sihanouk interestingly examines the period leading up to
this point). Upon taking the city the Khmer Rouge declared a new gov-
ernment, Democratic Kampuchea. This regime ruled until 1979 when
it was overthrown by Vietnamese forces. During their relatively brief
period of governance, the Khmer Rouge set about implementing a radi-
cal programme of social transformation. The ideological underpinning
of the party’s plan was a derivation of Marxism, which fundamentally
divided the nation into two categories: Old People, uneducated peasant
workers; and New People, who included city-dwellers, the educated or
educators, artists and intellectuals. Pol Pot and other leaders declared
that their government was for the Old People. Property was nationalized,
currency abandoned and agrarian work camps established as the central
focus for social reorganization. New People were made immediate tar-
gets of suspicion and the Khmer Rouge is perhaps now best known for
its bloody programmatic execution and torture of those citizens. Robert
Turnbull, for example, in an article about the state of performing arts in
Cambodia after the Khmer Rouge, estimates that 80 to 90 per cent of the
country’s performing artists died during the five-year period (133). The
total number of citizens who died during the Democratic Kampuchea
period is unknown, but estimates commonly cite the figure of two mil-
lion, around half of whom died of overwork or starvation. In 1979 the
Khmer Rouge was driven out of Phnom Penh and out of power by an
invading Vietnamese force, which set up a new government called The
People’s Republic of Kampuchea. In 1993 a local government replaced
the Vietnamese-instituted ruling organization in a United Nations-
facilitated election process.
Tuol Sleng, formerly a school, was the most notorious and bloody
prison in the country during Pol Pot’s reign and at the very centre of
the Khmer Rouge attempt to radically and violently reshape Cambodian
society. It was first turned into a museum by occupying Vietnamese
forces in 1979. The major curatorial strategy was to leave the prison as
it was, though some obviously aestheticized details were added, such
as a map of Cambodia made of skulls (since removed) and a display of
prisoners’ clothes. Peter Maguire suggests the overall approach to the
site mirrored the application of similar aesthetic strategies at former
concentration camp sites, reflecting the influence of East German
‘expert’ assistance given to the occupying Vietnamese government
when the Museum was first developed (84). In the first instance the
Museum was not open to the public, but was used by the occupying
Vietnamese to demonstrate to certain targeted visitors the scope of
Khmer Rouge atrocities. In the 1980s it opened to the public and drew
in a largely Cambodian constituency, including a number of expatriates
returning to Cambodia. Visitors from other socialist countries followed,
and finally, particular after the elections, Western and Asian tourists
(Williams, 142). Though government-managed, the Museum has a close
relationship with the politically independent Documentation Centre of
Cambodia, which works to archive evidence of the genocide, interview
victims and perpetrators, and to widely publish and distribute their
findings.
As a museum, Tuol Sleng provides an abundance of material proofs,
from the building itself to selected archival evidence, including the
notable photographs of the prisoners, which offer a kind of silent

testimony. Prominent signage emphasizes an atmosphere of mindful
contemplation: visitors are requested to: ‘Please be concentrated physi-
cally and spiritually in order to pay respect to the souls of the victims
who died unjustly at [this] place.’ Throughout the site other signs
indicate a ban on smiling or laughing. Such instruction of visitors sug-
gests that the ‘souls who died’ have an affective presence that requires
observance and respect. It is important to emphasize that tourists
engage with Tuol Sleng and Choeung Ek principally by way of images,
with writing and narrative working to support the experience of
emplacement, which is foremost. Taylor writes that the relationship
between archive and repertoire is dynamic – ‘in a constant state of inter-
action’ (21). While the archive determines the terms of engagement, the
kinds of knowledge generated through embodied encounter may, and
often does, complicate straightforward interpretations of the archive’s
contents.
The Museum is divided into four parts housed in each of the four
main buildings. Visitors may take a guided visit or walk through the
museum aided by the brochures and signs that help explain the exhibits.
In the first of the three-storied buildings are a series of rooms, each
containing an empty bed accompanied by a photograph that shows the
room as it was when Vietnamese forces liberated the prison in 1979.
The pictures are disturbing, often revealing evidence of bloody torture.
The second of the four buildings fills its rooms with photographs of the
prisoners of Tuol Sleng (Figures 4.1 and 4.2). The photographs were for
me the most affective element of the museum. As emanations of the
past they endow the site with a haunted quality by evoking its ghosts,
or, in Cambodian terms, kmauit – restless spirits. These photographic rep-
resentations are understood as intrinsically connected to the lives whose
incarceration they capture. Building three displays a number of small
cells, which were constructed inside what had been classrooms. In build-
ing four there are further artefacts including a display case containing the
chair that prisoners were seated in while photographed (Figure 4.3) and
pictures of prison staff. There is also an exhibition of paintings by one
of the few survivors of Tuol Sleng, Vann Nath, which depict prison life.
Similarly to other memorial sites discussed, the absence of victims
is both mitigated and amplified through the sense of ‘presence’ gene-
rated by the images. The nature of this presence is twofold. On the one
hand it is a performative affectation, where the faces ‘make themselves
present’ to spectators. This impact is heightened by the sheer number
of images – face after face confronts us as we move through the halls
134
Figure 4.1 Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide, Cambodia, 2008 (Photograph:

Emma Willis)

Emma Willis)
135

Emma Willis)
of building two. The affectation relies on an imagined psychic link

between subjects and images akin to that described by Barthes in Camera
Lucida where:
The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real

body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me,
who am here; the duration of the transmission is insignificant; the
photograph of the missing being, as Sontag says will touch me like the
delayed rays of a star. A sort of umbilical cord links the body of the pho-
tographed thing to my gaze: light, though impalpable, is here a carnal
medium, a skin I share with anyone who has been photographed.
(80–1)
This is perhaps the most powerful potential of the photographs: they

quite simply place us before the face of the other and demand that we
attend to the silence that characterizes the reproduction. The photos
are unspeaking, they are substitutes that signify absence and call us to
remember the other who is no longer present. Seen in this sense, the
exhibition of images calls into being not just the ghosts of the past, but
also the ethical imagination of the spectator. This is the second sense
in which presence is amplified: the pictures ask us to present ourselves as
those willing, in Levinas’s terms, to listen to their claim.
Yet one cannot discount the significance of the fact that the photo-
graphs require us to adopt the perspective of the perpetrator when we
look at them. Does such a performance reverse or reinscribe the original
violent act of photography? Do the pictures rather than recuperating
individual identities, in fact, compound the sense of metonymy that
comes from collecting together the images in a mass display – the
‘famous’ Tuol Sleng photos? Indeed, Rancière asks:
What should we make of a photographic exhibition depicting victims

of genocide? Does it count as a form of rebellion against the perpe-
trators? Does it amount to anything more than an inconsequential
sympathy towards the victims? Ought it generate anger towards the
photographer who turns the victims’ pain into an aesthetic matter?
Or else to indignation against those who view them degradingly only
in their identity as victims?
(Dissensus 136)
When I visited Tuol Sleng there was a further temporary exhibition in

building two by photographer Stefan Jensen called Ghosts of Tuol Sleng,
which attempted to reply to the kinds of questions that Rancière puts.

Jensen’s work followed after the photographic display of the main pho-
tos in building two. His exhibition was of photographs of the Tuol Sleng
photographs. Through replicating the tourist practice of taking pictures
of pictures, Jensen tried to capture something of their affective excess:
‘Photographing the reflection of the image instead of the image itself
a ghostlike feeling passes through the pictures.’ The effect was an eerie
one. Describing his intention in text accompanying the exhibition he
stated:
Ghosts of Tuol Sleng is an attempt to shed new light on the victims

of the Khmer Rouge genocide, by presenting them in a different way
from the usual mugshot that everyone who visits Tuol Sleng will be
familiar with. By photographing the individual pictures in a different
light and conditions and with visitors to the museum interacting, my
aim is to neutralize the victims.
The work of his exhibition was an attempt to negate the reiterative

function of the ‘mugshot’ and recuperate the individuality and huma-
nity of the subjects through transforming those mugshots into portraits.
Jensen’s exhibition also demonstrates the nature of photography as
what Laurie Beth Clark describes as ‘participation’: ‘photographers
attached themselves to the site with each click of the shutter, like what
a suture or stitch might do to two pieces of fabric.’ Interestingly, Jensen
did this through attempting to capture what Matthew Reason, in his
discussion of performance archives, describes as the space between past
object and its archival representation:
This is a space of extra-performance existence and non-existence:

consisting of traces, fragments, memories, forgetting, half-truths and
half-lives; consisting of representations that contain something of
the thing itself, but which are not the thing itself.
(232)
In every engagement with the archive, Reason argues, performances

are reimagined, reconstructed and newly understood. Jensen’s work
provided a punctuation of the exhibition space that explored this
interstitiality, emphasizing spectatorship as a sensory and aesthetic
experience. The work subtly suggested that this spectatorship func-
tioned as an indexical activity corollary to the original acts of sorting
and cataloguing, making the case for a change of viewing perspective.
It both showed the showing and sought to find something more than
was visibly offered.
If nothing else, Jensen’s work makes clear the sense in which the Tuol
Sleng ‘mugshots’ are in and of themselves highly aestheticized despite
their seeming aesthetic neutrality. In The Archive and the Repertoire,
Taylor comments upon photographs of victims of Argentina’s Dirty War
(which different arts and activist groups have drawn upon):
Normally categorized, decontextualized, and filed away in official or

police archives, they grant the government power over the marked
citizen. Photographed in conditions of absolute sameness – white
background, frontal pose, hair back, ears exposed, no jewellery – the
individual differences become more easily accessible to scrutiny and
‘positive identification.’ The tight framing allows for no background
information, no context, no network of relationships. The images
appear to be artless and precise. Yet they are highly constructed and
ideological, isolating and freezing an individual outside the realms of
meaningful social experience.
(176)
Similarly to the Argentinean work that Taylor discusses, in displaying

the archival images Tuol Sleng Museum repurposes them, attempting to
bring the fate of individuals inside ‘the reams of meaningful social expe-
rience’. By highlighting the sense in which archive and repertoire are in
constant interaction with one another, Jensen adds a complicating layer
to this reversal, suggesting that aesthetic intervention is necessary in
order to allow for meaningful engagement where what Taylor describes
as the ‘untranslatability’ of the other is respected (15). Furthermore,
Jensen includes an image of his own reflection, which suggests that
looking brings with it ethical obligation.
My own response to Tuol Sleng was marked by mixed feelings: a
double movement of responding to and recoiling from the affect of
the pictures. In reviewing my journal for notes taken at the time of
visiting, I noticed that I had made very few remarks about the pho-
tographs themselves. I was initially surprised by the omission of my
own personal reflection on the pictures (though I did take a number of
photographs, some of which are included in this chapter). I concluded
that this omission reflected my difficulty in knowing how to face the
images. It seemed easier to reply to the picture with pictures rather
than with words. This uncertainty was underscored by the fact that the
point of view we must adopt in order to look at the pictures, as noted,
is that of the perpetrator, which makes the experience of viewing the

images highly ambivalent. As Susan Sontag writes, ‘To photograph is to
appropriate the things photographed. It means putting oneself into a
certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge – and, therefore,
like power’ (On Photography 4). This is strikingly apparent in the Tuol
Sleng pictures, where each photograph is a demonstration and proof
of the absolute power of the photographer, and the total powerlessness
of the subject. The photograph literally illustrates the moment when
the humanity of the prisoner was negated: in becoming image, the
subject ceased to be regarded as human subject. Does the act of staging
the photos in a memorial context repeat or reverse the dehumanizing
process? Perhaps the potential power of such images lies in the way that
Marianne Hirsch describes the viewer as being ‘deeply touched’ by their
affect: ‘When looking and photographing have become co-extensive
with mechanized mass death, and the subject looking at the camera
is also the victim looking at the executioner, those of us left to look at
the picture are deeply touched by that death’ (26). Might the force of
the photographs be strong enough to shock us out of unselfconscious
spectatorship? Perhaps, in as much as they seem to ask a question of us
that it is both difficult to decipher and even more difficult to discern
how to respond to.
Upon leaving Tuol Sleng, visitors are encouraged to visit Choeung
Ek. During the Khmer Rouge period the road between Tuol Sleng and
Choeung Ek bore the weight of regular trucks that would leave the
prison full and depart the execution site empty. Unlike the busy and
organized enterprise of somewhere like Auschwitz, the process of visit-
ing Choeung Ek is a quiet affair. While guides are available, on the day
that I was there most visitors seemed content to find their own way
around the graves, which are contained within a relatively small area
easily covered on foot. Activities suggested in the brochure include:
‘Participate in mourning and dedicating to spirits of all victims by
offering flowers and lighting incense sticks and candles in accordance
with Khmer culture and tradition’, ‘Meditate to remind [oneself] of
friends and relatives and all victims’ spirits who had been murdered
in memorial area’, and ‘Release stress by viewing sightseeing of large
paddy fields and lake of the Mekong region’ ( JC Royal). As described in
an earlier chapter, the first thing visitors encounter at Choeung Ek is
a large memorial stupa, a tall Buddhist structure located on a concrete
platform from which descend steps. Visitors climb these steps to enter
its base. Inside, the structure is mostly filled with a tall glass case that
reaches up towards the building’s pointed top, and which has been
filled with skulls from the exhumed graves (Figure 4.4). Visitors are
requested to remove their hats and meditate for five seconds. Signage
states: ‘with the commemorative stupa in front of us, we imagine that
we are hearing the grievous voice of the victims […] we seem to be
looking at the horrifying scenes and the panic.’ The skulls within the
stupa are endowed with the capacity to speak to us; our role is to listen
and to affirm our acknowledgement of the suffering that the imagined
voices proclaim.
After leaving the stupa there are a series of signs, each marking the
site of a different component of the camp no longer present. One of
the first of these is titled, ‘The Dark and Gloomy Detention’. It begins,
‘Here was the place where victims were transported […].’ This phrase,
‘here was the place’, is repeated throughout, emphasizing the focus on
the ground itself as containing the store of memory. The sign above
concludes: ‘unfortunately the dark and gloomy detention was disman-
tled in 1979.’ The apology makes apparent the value placed on material
remains as proof of the traumatic past, as a means of combating its
disappearance into the realm of the wholly imaginary. The brochure
Figure 4.4 Choeung Ek, Cambodia, 2008 (Photograph: Emma Willis)

notes: ‘These items were destroyed by nature and human activities. They
will be reconstructed soon in accordance with real and true history.’
Other architectural artefacts that the Centre intends to rebuild include:
‘murderers’ office’, ‘torturing and murdering tools storeroom’, ‘prison’,
and ‘place where victims [were] blindfolded before killing’. The pam-
phlet material indicates a curatorial emphasis on the need for evidence,
whether real or reconstructed. At the same time I wondered whether
such a desire would ever progress beyond the pamphlet, for in recon-
structing such buildings, the very power signified by their absence would
be lost. The pamphlet itself enacted a kind of drama – both showing and
not showing at the same time, suggesting the indivisibility of the two.
Once past the series of signs acting as captions for the absent buildings,
visitors move to the largest part of the site, the grave pits. These pits were
the mass graves upon the edges of which victims were murdered and then
buried. All of the pits, now excavated, are either overgrown with greenery
or filled with water (Figure 4.5). Around the general area a large dyke has
been built to prevent the river damaging the site. This is the area that
the brochure suggests one may go walking as a form of ‘stress release’. As
opposed to the stupa where our gaze is directed upwards, walking around
the pits we are compelled to look down, searching for evidence. It is here,
in particular, that the earlier instruction to cultivate a meditative mindful-
ness before beginning our visit becomes important. Should we be willing
to listen, we may hear ‘the grievous voice of the victims’.
Together the stupa, the evocative story-telling signs, and the pits that
permanently scar the ground, attempt to ‘bring to life’ the voices of
those who died at Choeung Ek. We are asked to affect hearing them as a
way of attempting to express a fundamental sympathy. A plaque on the
stupa asks, ‘Would you please kindly show your respect.’ The dramatiza-
tion of absence at Choeung Ek prompts an imagination of what took
place there as a means of generating respect through enabling acknowl-
edgement. The imaginary status of what we hear suggests that we must
also observe the fundamental silence that characterizes the site. An
awareness of both is necessary – an imaginative invocation of the voices
of the past alongside the recognition of their definitive absence. Indeed,
we must first hear their silence in order to hear the voices that follow.
As noted at the beginning of this section, this affect is troubling
and thwarts simple response: I struggled to write of the images at both
sites just as I struggled to look at them. They seemed to render me
incapable, feeling shame in gazing upon them. This is perhaps because
of the untranslatability of the pain of their subjects. The language of
their experience remains foreign to me. Arthur Frank, in writing of
Figure 4.5 Choeung Ek, Cambodia, 2008 (Photograph: Emma Willis)
the experience of pain, describes it as a kind of chaos marked by its

inassimilable character. Representations of it therefore always point to
what cannot be represented; it is ‘told in the silences that speech cannot
penetrate or illuminate’ (101). He further notes that such chaos is ‘a mys-
tery that can only be faced, never solved’ (112). The chaos of the other’s
pain is presented at Tuol Sleng in a way that does not invite us inside of
that pain, but lays bare its existence nonetheless. The pain in facing what
Levinas describes as the nakedness and destitution of the other signals the
ethical limit point. To return to a quotation cited in an earlier chapter:
[T]he just suffering in me for the unjustifiable suffering of the other,

opens suffering to the ethical perspective of the interhuman. In this
perspective there is a radical difference between the suffering in the
other, where it is unforgivable to me, solicits me and calls me, and
suffering in me, my own experience of suffering, whose constitu-
tional or congenital uselessness can take on meaning, the only one of
which suffering is capable, in becoming a suffering for the suffering
(inexorable though it may be) of someone else.
(Levinas, Entre Nous 94)
In the ethical encounter, one’s own pain gains meaning only in standing
for the unknowable pain of the other. At the same time, the incommen-
surability of that pain remains acknowledged. In turning away from
the pain of the other, one’s own pain becomes an abject one, ‘useless’
in character. My own experience of the difficulty of enacting such an
ethical facing of the other not just at Tuol Sleng, but other sites also,
suggests to me the absolute necessity of artistic practice as a way of
transforming such uselessness. Indeed, Elaine Scarry, as cited in Chapter 1,
has argued for the necessity of proxies; those who give an account on
behalf of the subject in pain: ‘Because the person in pain is ordinarily
so bereft of the resources of speech, it is not surprising that the language
of pain should sometimes be brought into being by those who are not
themselves in pain but who speak on behalf of those who are’ (6). Scarry’s
statement suggests the possibility of an ethical substitute, whose appro-
priated speaking takes into account the fundamental silence – alterity –
that Levinas is concerned with, and recognizes the right to silence
on the part of the person who has suffered. Someone who speaks on
behalf of the other does not so much mimetically represent them, but
rather points to and acknowledges that realm of experience that forever
remains in silence, which is precisely what Filloux’s Photographs from
S-21 attempts to do. In Theatre of Genocide, Robert Skloot remarks that
performances dealing with such crimes give an important ‘theatrical life
to those whose voices have been silenced because they were marked for
exclusion from a place among humanity where they rightly belonged’
(The Theatre of Genocide 6). As Rancière, Judith Butler and others have
argued, and has been cited elsewhere in this book, such ‘voice’ is ethi-
cally important in its designation of identity. What is most intolerable is
not images that show suffering, but rather systems of representation that
render suffering bodies as nameless, as ‘incapable of returning the gaze
that we direct at them […] bodies that are an object of speech without
themselves having a chance to speak’ (Rancière, The Emancipated
Spectator 96). Filloux’s play, in particular, seeks to return the chance to
speak to two of Tuol Sleng’s victims.
Catherine Filloux’s Photographs from S-21
Diana Taylor argues that: ‘performance makes visible (for an instant,

live, now) that which is always already there: the ghosts, tropes, the
scenarios that structure our individual and collective life’ (143). While
performance itself is ephemeral, what it illuminates is both past and ‘future
phantoms’ by way of a process that Taylor calls ‘revisualization’ (144).
Catherine Filloux draws upon this particular canniness of performance
with a short play that brings two of the ghosts of Tuol Sleng to life.
With a specific emphasis on the act of photography, Filloux opens out
the moment – the instant – of the shutter’s click, seeking to expose
both the violence done to those at Tuol Sleng and its reduplication
through the act of exhibiting the photographs as artworks. Photographs
from S-21 was written in response to a 1997 exhibition of a selection of
Tuol Sleng photographs shown at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)
in New York. Two Americans, Doug Niven and Chris Riley, who had
been integral to the process of salvaging and restoring the Tuol Sleng
negatives in the 1990s, put the exhibition together. Niven and Riley
worked voluntarily on the project of gathering together, organizing and
restoring the negatives of the remaining 6000 prints. Controversially, in
the process of this work, Niven and Riley gained copyright to a small
number of the images and subsequently used these in the publication
of a book, called The Killing Fields. The MoMA exhibition was comprised
of this same set of images. Additionally, and what made the pair the
subject of strong criticism, they offered art-quality prints of some of the
images for sale through a dealer gallery. Such an aesthetic commodifica-
tion of the images sat uncomfortably alongside their perceived function
as objects of ethical testimony. Filloux’s play was staged after the MoMA
show as part of a one-act play festival at the HB Playwrights Theatre
in New York. In 2001, Filloux went to Phnom Penh on a Playwright’s
Residency grant from the Asian Cultural Council. During the two and
a half months she was there she staged two plays, with local actors
from the National Theatre, including Photographs from S-21. The images
that accompany this chapter are of the Cambodian production, while
my critique refers generally to the work’s initial presentation for an
American audience.
Addressing the controversy that accompanied the photographs’
exhibition at MoMA, Filloux’s short play directly contrasts image and
testimony, exploring the difficulties of the images’ display within
such an aesthetic context. The play imagines two of the photographs’
subjects, Young Man and Young Woman, come to life in an evening
after the Museum has closed (Figure 4.6). Filloux constructs a critique
of the viewing environment by juxtaposing the warmth and life of
the animated characters with the sterility of the gallery. The action
begins with a focus on the fixed archival images – the initial stage
directions state that the two actors are ‘frozen’ in ‘huge life-size frames’.
They ‘stare at the camera the moment after blindfolds were taken from
their eyes’ (Filloux, Photographs from S-21 113). In the dialogue that
follows, details of the characters’ personal histories are elaborated.
Figure 4.6 Photographs from S-21 by Catherine Filloux. Director: Thenn Nan
Doeun. Actors: Roeun Narith and Morm Sokly. Phnom Penh, Cambodia, 2001
(Photograph: Mak Remissa, courtesy of Asia Motion)
Before going to Tuol Sleng, both were placed in labour camps where
they saw family members killed. The Young Man tried to run away
from the camp and was sent to Tuol Sleng, where he was tortured
to death. The Young Woman was sent to the prison with her infant
daughter. Both were shot. In addition to revealing the stories of those
depicted, Filloux focuses much of the dialogue on what it means for
the two characters to be Museum objects. In so doing, she builds a
critique of what she suggests is an aesthetic (and ethical) carelessness,
which she makes thematically central. The play moves to a climax
when the Young Man, after having coaxed the Young Woman from
her frame, takes her outside to a fountain in order to conduct a funeral
ceremony: ‘A proper funeral, or we will remain ghosts’ (121). After a
short blackout, the lights come up and the Young Man and Woman
are returned to their frames. Filloux writes, as final stage direction,
‘A flash and the click of a shutter’ (121). We, like them, are taken back
to the moment of the ‘shooting’.
Filloux’s work points to the fact, as Reason states, that we can only
ever imagine the perspective of any archival object: ‘[V]iewers cannot
know what is going on outside of the frame; cannot access the context
of the emotion communicated; cannot even pretend that they are seeing
what the audience would have seen’ (121). The demand for conside-
ration of off- or out-of-frame space is explicitly addressed through the
play’s dialogue. Early in the exchange between the two characters, the
Young Man notices a small blur in the bottom of the Young Woman’s
picture: ‘There is something strange at the bottom of your picture. It is
blurred… I cannot make it out’ (Photographs from S-21 115). The Young
Woman denies that there is anything to be seen but later acknowledges
the blur as her daughter’s hand: ‘There was something at the bottom of
my photo… A child’s hand.’ She continues: ‘They took off the blindfold.
My daughter reached up to me. I did not move. (Softly.) Did not move…
They shot her first… I did not protect her’ (120). The inaccessibility
of this information, other than by personal testimony, illustrates the
manner in which Filloux sets archival image and historical experience
in opposition to one another. She attempts to mitigate the absence of
the testifying voice by theatrically reinstating it. This is evident from
the outset in that, within the play, to be an image is intolerable: ‘It is
unbearable. During the day the people pass. They stare into my eyes.
At night, there is no air. Like the inside of a cushion’ (113). To exist
as image means to be alienated and objectified. In this way the play
pivots around the opposition that Rancière describes in The Emancipated
Spectator, as that between ‘two kinds of representation – the visible
image and the spoken narrative – and two sorts of attestation – proof
and testimony’ (89). Filloux’s play demonstrates this opposition, ulti-
mately strongly privileging narrative over the image.
Filloux’s scepticism of the archival image suggests her perception of
the Tuol Sleng photographs displayed at MoMA as fetishized in the
sense explained by Christian Metz. In his article, ‘Photography and
Fetish’, Metz argues that photographs generally are fetishistic in that
they stop the gaze and prevent it from taking in what is outside of
the frame, what is absent. Whilst I am not especially interested in the
Freudian aspect of Metz’s argument, what is interesting is the idea that
the image becomes a kind of salve that actually stops the enquiring
gaze from descending into the horrific abyss of the referent’s experi-
ence. It is certainly this sense of the fetishistic aspect of the image that
Filloux’s play critiques, emphasized by the photographs’ situation in an
art museum: ‘The people always seem to be passing through on their
way to something called “Picasso”’ (Photographs from S-21 114). Further,
the shutter click, which Filloux uses to open and close the play, echoes
Metz’s description of the photographic image as cutting off a piece
of the referent. For him, the click of the shutter ‘marks the place of
an irreversible absence, a place from which the look has been averted
forever’ (217). Metz contrasts the ‘in frame’ of the photograph with the
‘undermined and haunted […] feeling of its exterior, of its borderlines,
which are the past, the left, the lost’ (217). This is quite different from
the restorative implications of Clark’s description of photography sutur-
ing together photographer and subject. Filloux’s play can be read as a
response to the demands of the off-frame space – that which cannot be
sutured – as exemplified by the story of the Young Woman’s daughter.
Stage directions further demonstrate Filloux’s concern. As noted, to
begin with the actors are ‘frozen in huge life-size frames’. The frames con-
strain the characters and are something they must step outside of: thus
the Young Man coaxes the Young Woman out of her frame and indeed
out of the Museum. Metz’s arguments regarding the photographic
object as fetishized help explain what is most problematic about the
Tuol Sleng pictures for Filloux. The intolerability of these images (in the
sense that Rancière speaks of ‘the intolerable image’) lies precisely in
what they do not show; a sense of personal history capable of breaking
through the photographed faces’ generalized metonymic status as
nameless victims.
Filloux makes use of the image of ghosts in order to suggest the
unseen or off-frame aspect of the photographs. In the first instance, the
distance between gallery viewers and Khmer Rouge victims is conceptu-
alized through the image of restless ghosts, introduced when the Young
Woman describes the death of her mother-in-law:
YOUNG WOMAN: I know. In the labour camp. They cracked her skull
with a shovel because she was too slow working.
We could not even bury her. So now she is a kmauit –
a restless ghost…
(Photographs from S-21 115)
The implication is that the play’s characters are also kmauit, their
display preventing their rest. When the play was staged in Phnom Penh
in 2001, the play’s director, Thenn Nan Doeun, took the actors to S21
where they recreated poses from two of the pictures, which were then
photographed and became part of the set. Thus there was a complex
overlaying of the original images and the actor’s mimicking of two spe-
cific pictures. The effect was, to draw again on Taylor (from a different
context), that the actors ‘[wear] the images like a second skin’ (178).
Here, rather than the spectator sharing the ‘skin’ of the photographed
subject, as Barthes describes, it was the more specialized actors who took
on this role. Filloux commented that in the Phnom Penh production
the director wanted to use reproductions so that ‘the souls of the photos
will walk out of their frames embodied by Ly and Narith’ (Filloux, ‘Ten
Gems on a Thread’ 182). The writer’s comment elegantly sums up the
guiding gesture of the play. Whilst Filloux’s critique of the MoMA exhi-
bition is pointed, she nonetheless recuperates the ability of the images
to speak to us through the actors’ taking on of the task of releasing the
souls of the images from their frames. It is important to note that the
two performances of the play, in New York and Phnom Penh, would
have been marked by very different contexts and therefore generated
distinctive sets of meaning. While the critique of the MoMA show was
perhaps less relevant for a Cambodian audience, Filloux nonetheless
relates the emotional impact that the play had on the local audience,
writing: ‘During the performances, by the end of the play, the theatre
is totally silent but for sniffing. And when the lights come up no one
moves from his seat’ (184).
Filloux gives the short play’s ending dramatic force by contrasting
the release of the souls of images through the funeral ceremony with
their imprisonment within the photographic frame. Her critique of the
photographs as gallery objects suggests that such exhibitions enact the
kind of violence implicit in Metz’s language.
YOUNG MAN: I don’t know if we’re really here.

YOUNG WOMAN: We feel real.
(He resumes his position in the frame)
YOUNG MAN: Maybe it’s because we’re in the photographs. And
people pass by. And every time their eyes touch
ours we’re back there again.
(Photographs from S-21 118)
Filloux suggests that the display of the images redoubles the violence
that Metz argues is inherent within them. At MoMA, this appropriation,
or cutting, had a double aspect. The original appropriation of prisoners’
images by the photographer was compounded by the subsequent secon-
dary appropriation by the curators of the exhibition. What is intolerable
for Filloux, as noted, is the context of the images display, which she
suggests negatively reiterates the original crime. In her dramatization of
the Tuol Sleng photographs, Filloux demonstrates the contingencies of
perspective bound up in the shift of gaze of the photographic subjects
from Tuol Sleng guards, to museum visitors who now stand in their
place. The play attempts to mitigate an unreflexive repetition of the
perpetrators gaze through giving a voice, and thus an identity, to the
anonymous pictures. Mid-way through the play the characters address
the issue of who has been looking at them:
YOUNG WOMAN: Who are they, who look?

YOUNG MAN: Ghosts, maybe… Ghosts of the Khmer Rouge.
YOUNG WOMAN: But they do not look the same.
YOUNG MAN: Why else would they come back again and again to
see us? To check on us?
(118)
Filloux significantly conflates the perspective and actions of the Tuol

Sleng perpetrators and the gallery visitors. While the visitors are not
characterized as deliberately pernicious – in fact, in other descriptions
they appear to be thoughtful spectators – Filloux suggests that they
cannot help but reduplicate the conditions of exposure, in both senses,
originally undergone by the photos’ victims.
Her position is bound by a certain paradox, however, in that she
denies the testimonial possibility of the photographs even at the same
time as she extrapolates from them to make her own play. In a sense,
their fetishized aspect is reiterated through the text, perhaps precisely
because of her focus on personal history and the context of display
rather than on the systems of power which produced the images in the
first place. Nonetheless, Filloux challenges her audience to reflect on
the systems of display and spectatorship within which they them-
selves are positioned. She encourages this reflexivity by suggesting
spectators as the off-stage museum-goers who are central to the play’s
narrative and themes. In this way, she generates what Helena Grehan
has described as an ethical ambivalence in the audience, one which
disturbs spectatorial complacency (29). While the play’s power to truly
unsettle spectators, to call them to look closer, look again, is blunted
somewhat by her binarization of image and experience, the play
nonetheless usefully challenges us to think about what might be most
intolerable about such imagery in terms of the context of its display.
In her dramatization of the pictures, Filloux demonstrates the contin-
gency of an imagined ethical claim while at the same time, the very
play itself is a testament to the power of the images to motivate such
ethically reflexive responses to them, which indeed performs a kind of
social suturing.
Broken face: Rithy Panh’s S21: Khmer Rouge

Killing Machine
Where Filloux’s play was concerned with the ethical limitations of

archival objects, juxtaposing this with testimonial narrative, Panh’s
documentary, S21: Khmer Rouge Killing Machine, is more concerned with
the complexity of archival narratives, which he explores through a
highly performative consideration of different forms of testimony and
proof, archive and repertoire. The film investigates the history of Tuol
Sleng through a series of interviews with its former staff (know as party
cadres). Additionally, he talks to two formers prisoners, focusing on one
in particular, Vann Nath. Nath’s role is less an explicitly testimonial
one, and more to act as a kind of conscience for the cadres. In a move
that is highly theatrical, Panh engages the former guards in a series of
re-enactments of their past duties that demonstrate how close to the
surface Tuol Sleng’s violent history lies.
Before discussing the film I would like to briefly discuss the concept of
face in a specifically Cambodian context. While the particulars of this cul-
tural system of signification are beyond the scope of my research, given the
emphasis in Panh’s film on accepting culpability (something that proves
to be near impossible) and the invocation of Levinas throughout this text,
it is important to acknowledge the cultural specificity of the concept. In
his book, Why Did They Kill, Alexander Hinton considers the importance
of the Cambodian concept of face to understanding how widespread kill-
ing became ‘naturalized’ within the social order instituted by the Khmer
Rouge. Whereas for Levinas the singular term ‘face’ is used to signify the
core identity and existence of the other, in Cambodian culture there are
multiple variations of types of faces: one might have ‘full face’, ‘big face’,
‘little face’, ‘shamed face’, ‘high face’ and so on. Each variation contributes
to an agreed upon means of organizing social interactions:
Face is the self-image one asserts in given contexts, depending on

the evaluations and esteem accorded by self and others. Because it
is directly related to the positive and negative evaluations of others,
face is loosely correlated with honour and shame. The Khmer noun
mukh literally refers to a person’s ‘face’ or the ‘front’ of something,
but it includes among its many secondary meanings the notions of
‘reputation’ and ‘place, position, rank, title.’ Face therefore reflects
one’s place in the social order, a position that is strategically negoti-
ated during social interactions.
(Hinton, 252–3)
Hinton points out that face, in Cambodian culture, is a highly

performative concept (253). One gains face by eliciting the approval of
others through exercising one’s duty and elevating one’s social stand-
ing. Conversely, one loses face, or has their face ‘broken’, through a
failure to fulfil social expectations.
The division of the population into New and Old people provided
the basis for the assignment of face status during the Khmer Rouge
period. All New people were enemies, therefore all Old people were
in a constant state of fear, exercising consistent vigilance in maintain-
ing their face as authentically Old, so as not to be revealed or accused
as a traitor. Hinton notes: ‘If a person failed to perform according to
expectations, he or she would not just lose face, but would also quite
possibly be put in prison and executed. Positive evaluations, in turn,
could result in procuring a better position, additional food, or other
advantages’ (258). The sense in which face would normally assist in
the smooth flow of social relations was pushed to the extreme, turning
the most banal of interactions into life or death encounters. While Old
people had to maintain face in order to preserve their lives, the value
of face to Khmer authorities was tied to their ability to prosper within
the regime. Hinton argues that the primary means of gaining face and
honour was to demonstrate one’s willingness to kill for the revolution.
‘Those who had a progressive revolutionary consciousness were given
face and honour’ (263). Political education programmes emphasized
the importance of making the revolutionary cause the centre of one’s
life, purging it of all other relationships. Young revolutionaries were
commonly told that they needed to be willing to kill their own parents
and siblings if those family members were denounced as traitors. In
regard to Tuol Sleng, Hinton comments that within the prison a system
of competition amongst the guards for status exacerbated the discon-
nection and dis-identification between torturers and their victims. To
be at the bottom of the guard hierarchy often meant the likelihood of
becoming a prisoner one’s self, which generated fiercely competitive
and violent displays of loyalty.
Occlusion of the humanity of the other’s face was central to strate-
gies of violence enacted at the prison. All those to be tortured or killed
were aggressively dehumanized through their branding as enemies.
The regime also took the practical step of assigning guards, command-
ers, executioners and so on to prisoners outside of their home districts
so that those whom they had to kill would be unknown to them. In
removing any sense of individuality and replacing this with the label
of simply ‘enemy’, the Khmer Rouge encouraged regime members’
ability to kill with impunity. Hinton cites a former cadre who stated:
‘When they looked at their victims, they didn’t think they were killing
fellow Khmer, just enemies’ (Hinton, 266). This very attitude exempli-
fies the necessity of recognizing the face of the other in order for the
enactment of an ethics that seeks to preserve life; it was by making the
face of the other unrecognizable that the regime was able to so easily
‘break’ it. As Hinton notes, such dehumanizing processes allowed the
relationship between torturers and their victims ‘to spiral towards the
most extreme form of violent domination, the eradication of the other’
(275). Putting the faces of Tuol Sleng on display, therefore, needs to
be read as a reversal of the cultural politics of ‘face’ instituted during the
Khmer period. This is not simply because the pictures ‘put a face’ to the
violence that took place at the prison, but also because while we do not
see the faces of the photographers their actions are equally on display.
Panh’s film makes this implicit reversal explicit through its focus on
the persistence of the regime’s own face-saving efforts, most pointedly
expressed through a former photographer’s denial of responsibility. It is
also worth noting that the signs posted at Tuol Sleng indicating a ban
on smiling faces (Figure 4.7) reflects this social system. In the visitor
context, the signs are instructive and seek to secure proper social deco-
rum and order, which encompasses respect for the dead.
As noted, S21: Khmer Rouge Killing Machine brings perpetrators face to
face with one of their former victims as well as with archival evidence of
their crimes. The photographs, which are the museum’s point of focus,
play only a very small role in the documentary, however. Instead, Panh
uses theatrical strategies to foreground the fundamental emptiness of
the site, emphasizing it as a place of loss. In particular, Panh takes a
long room from the third floor of one of the buildings, presumably a
former classroom, and uses it as a stage upon which to play out various
confrontations with the former cadres’ pasts. The design of the room
changes for each scene: piles of clothes move and accumulate; desks
shift from one space to another; stacks of paper and photographs come
in and out. In one scene a lone individual simply wanders into the
room, as if looking for something it does not contain, then exits. All
of this action seems to have been thoughtfully choreographed (and
edited). Other scenes take place in various rooms of the prison. In a
former communal cell, Nath, a survivor, explains to the former cadres
a painting (made by himself) depicting the prisoners’ conditions inside
that room. In a room containing archives, Nath and former guards read
through old prisoner files, revisiting their stories. A night-time sequence
takes place in another former communal cell that still features the

Emma Willis)
prisoners’ numbers on the wall in front of the small spaces in which

they would have been shackled together.
What makes the documentary particularly theatrical in character is
Panh’s engagement of former cadres in re-enactments of their duties,
ranging from the reading aloud of archival documents, to literally act-
ing out the duties they used to perform. Through these scenes, Panh
inscribes the site with an uncanny dual presence, showing former sys-
tems of violence at the same time as emphasizing their disavowal. Of
Panh’s approach to presenting Tuol Sleng’s history, Rancière comments:
He did not oppose witness to archives. That would unquestionably

have been to miss the specificity of a killing machine whose func-
tioning operated through a highly programmed discursive apparatus
and filing system. It was therefore necessary to treat these archives
as part of the system, but also to make visible the physical reality
of the machine for putting discourse into action and making bodies
speak.
(The Emancipated Spectator 100–1)
In staging – making visible – the actions of the former regime, Panh

reactivated the logic of the machine in order to break apart its discursive
apparatus (101).
Panh’s approach to telling the story of Tuol Sleng was not so much
to expose the individuals who enacted the Khmer Rouge’s programme
of violence, but rather the very programme itself. Through his use of
re-enactment and archival objects, Panh reveals the dark absurdity – the
intolerability – of this programme.
The first of the key re-enactive sequences of the film shows two guards
demonstrating their everyday dealings with prisoners. The mode of speak-
ing moves between an address to the ‘prisoners’ and narrative description:
Number 13, get up. I order him, ‘get up.’ Blindfold him with a kra-
mar, handcuff him from behind, then I remove the bar, I close the
lock again and I lead him out by the arm.
This mode is progressively developed throughout the film and finds its
fullest expression in two further scenes, each featuring the same former
guard. In the first, he walks into the long empty room, which has now
had the desk and chair removed, but two further piles of clothes added.
This addition suggests the persistence of memory, the continual ghostly
presence of those who once wore the clothes. He re-enacts his ordinary
routine of checking on the prisoners:
When on guard duty I inspect the locks four times. I rattle the lock
and bar. I test it. All’s well. I do the next row. I rattle the lock and
bar. All’s well. I come to the middle row. The middle, here. (Shouting)
‘This row. On your feet! Hands in the air!’ I start the body search.
I feel their pockets. I look here and there. They mustn’t have a pen
with which they can open their veins, or hide screws and rivets they
can swallow to kill themselves. Back to the middle row, ‘Sit! No one
move!’ On to this row. ‘Get up! On your feet! Hands up!’
He repeats this sequence a number of times, always using the same words.
The second example takes place in the evening, when he demonstrates
his job as a night guard. He speaks directly to the former prisoners as if
they were present, with no apparent self-consciousness about assuming
his former role:
At 10p.m., the interrogator brings the prisoner back. ‘Stand here!’

I unlock the door. I lead him in. ‘Stand there!’ I open the lock, put the
irons on him. I take off the hand cuffs. I remove the blindfold, I go
out. ‘Be quiet! Don’t make any noise! Otherwise it’s the club!’ I lock
the door. ‘Why are you sitting up? You gonna get it! Lie back down,
and not a sound! You, too! Turn around! If I come back, beware!’
The sequence is long, four and a half minutes, and captured in a single
take. The camera moves with the former guard as he walks in and out
of the room, re-enacting his various duties and speaking to the priso-
ners, who are represented only by numbers on the wall. The former
guard appears completely immersed in his role and at the same time,
utterly emotionally distant from any understanding of its significance.
This is a perverse instance of ‘repertoire’. His willingness to re-perform
his past and his complete absorption in the task indicate how close to
the surface Tuol Sleng’s violent history lies. Rancière notes: ‘Seemingly
without any qualms, this reconstruction is unquestionably an intoler-
able spectacle, as if yesterday’s torturer were ready to adopt the same
role tomorrow’ (The Emancipated Spectator 101). Tuol Sleng is shown
not as a historical peculiarity, an intolerable aberration, but rather as
the result of a sensible system capable of reactivation. The perverted
‘common sense’ of this system (as Rancière terms it), is clearly dem-
onstrated through its re-enactment. The scenes expose the rawness of
the historical wounds and make the case for the necessity of a public
confrontation, both national and international, with the country’s
past. As Sontag suggests of photographs of the pain of others, these
filmed images are similarly an ‘invitation to pay attention’ (Pain of
Others 117). Indeed, such ‘attention’ resulted from Panh’s film, which
in addition to being critically lauded, had real effects in Cambodia,
generating acknowledgment from those formerly associated with the
prison of the scope of its activities (Turnbull, ‘Staring Down the Horrors
of the Khmer Rouge’).
The performance of evidence and testimony, which both under-
pins the re-enactive sequences and was central to the ‘machinery’ of
Tuol Sleng, is further explored in scenes that feature guards rereading
interrogation reports and discussing the methods they used to extract
confessions. Panh often makes these sequences, like the re-enactments,
highly theatrical. In one, a former torturer sits alone in a long room.
It is empty save for a large pile of clothes, and a desk that is covered in
old papers, which he sits behind. He reads aloud, ‘methods for writing
a document [confession]’:
Have them describe a scene from their treacherous lives. Reading it

will reveal the secret story, the enlightening and perfectly clear cause
of the espionage eating at us from within, according to their plan.
In another scene guards explain that they had to interrogate the prisoners
in order to find and prove the reason for their arrest. The Democratic
Kampuchea regime declared they never did anything unjustly and
therefore prisoners were forced to ‘confess’ their crimes in order to
prove the justness of the regime’s actions against them. One of the
guards readily states that the confessions were forced and false:
When a document was drawn up, it was all a sham. We made up an

activity of sabotage, we invented the evidence in order to execute a
prisoner. There was no court to judge him. When the document was
finished, he was taken to his death. Each man has his own history,
his own memory. The aim was to break down their entire memory
and make an act of treason out of it.
The conclusion of the confession meant the conclusion of the prisoner’s

life.
An extremely moving example in the film is a scene where a former
interrogator, Khan, discusses the case of a young woman he questioned.
Khan worked with her to develop a story that confessed her crimes so
that it could be put on her file. He was ordered to beat her, which he did
with a tree branch, but admitted that he felt sorry for her. After beating
her, she asked to make a confession. But when he read it, he realized it
contained no details that would incriminate her as a traitor:
So I explained and suggested how she write it using my method. She

should describe a network, a party, an activity of sabotage, a network
leader. In the end we managed to write up this document.
In the film Nath sits with the former guard as he recounts this story,
the file open and the woman’s photo in front of them. Nath then reads
out the confession, a ridiculous fiction in which the girl was assigned
various missions by the CIA that involved defecating in official places.
He questions the believability of the confession and the guard replies
that, ‘at the time it was believable’. He also confirms that he wrote
the confession himself, saying that she never learnt to write properly.
‘I couldn’t read her writing, she made mistakes. So I wrote for her, cor-
rected her, embellished it.’
The scene exposes the perverse and paradoxical aspect of the regime’s
logic. The former cadres find it difficult to extricate themselves from
this logic – to do so would be to admit responsibility. When another
guard, Houy, defends their actions, saying they had no choice, Nath
rejects his defence, urging Houy, Khan and others to see what is in front
of them.
Look, all this is left. All this evidence is left, all these testimonies. It’s
lying there but you pay no attention. I want to know, for instance…
You, Houy, you worked here. When you took the men away, what
were you thinking?
Houy’s reply to the accusation indicates his unwillingness to reflect:
I was young at the time. I didn’t think so far ahead. I was hot-
blooded. I did what I was told. I was told to compete, so I did, to take
someone to be killed, I did. As long as I was obeying Angkar. Today
when I think about it, it was against the law. I’m ashamed of myself.
But I don’t think about it. When I think about that, I get a headache.
The communication between the men reaches an impasse as Houy

refuses to imagine the point of view of the other. Even in bringing
former prisoner workers and victims face to face, the humanity of the
other, which was masked by the Khmer Rouge, remains, as Hinton sug-
gests, ‘concealed’ (266). The call to responsibility is ignored.
Panh’s attempt to expose Tuol Sleng’s system of violence and reattri-
bute a voice to the other, in a sense, fails: Houy cannot ‘open his eyes’
to Nath. What is most interesting is that the film attempts to counter
this refusal, not with a focus on the faces of the victims – as the museum
does – but by an emphasis on the perpetrators. Despite the guards’
unwillingness to directly face their crimes, as Levinas suggests, their
responsibility for their victims remains, nonetheless, which the film
foregrounds through both Nath’s presence and the affect of the empty
space. Unclaimed responsibility is most poignantly illustrated in Houy’s
headaches, which signify the weight and strain of this refusal of obliga-
tion to the other. The film succeeds in exposing this failure and denial,
and is a powerful demonstration of the consequences of the effacement
of the other. It clearly illustrates the need to expose the mechanisms by
which so many performed acts of violence, and so many more suffered
by them. Panh emphasizes the necessity of facing the other through
showing the consequences of its lack: in order for an ethics that seeks to
preserve life to be enacted one must be willing to face the other; it was
by making the face of the other unrecognizable that the regime was able
to so easily obliterate it. Butler similarly comments, as cited previously,
that dis-identification is the basis for dehumanization: ‘In this case,
we cannot hear the face through the face… The “I” who sees the face is
not identified with it: the face represents that for which no identifica-
tion is possible, an accomplishment of dehumanization and a condition
for violence (145). As Hinton states, the consequence of this is the
violent eradication of the other.
Rancière has described the strategy of Panh’s film as ‘to redis-
tribute the intolerable, to play on its various representations’ (The
Emancipated Spectator 101). For me, what is most interesting about
this redistributive strategy is the theatrical aspect from which it
derives its ethical force. By this I mean that a certain ethical alterity
comes into play precisely because of the distance between lost objects
(lost lives at Tuol Sleng) and their representation. In order to counter
the desire to turn away rather than face the other, the film engages
the former cadres in certain aesthetic and performative practices –
reading, reciting, re-enacting. Whilst the effects of this are marked
by ambivalence and irresolution, they demonstrate the theatrical
character of alterity – that its call is powerfully articulated by way of
substitutive affect. In giving a theatrical aspect to the confrontation of
Tuol Sleng’s violent past, Panh works against any kind of ‘stumbling
objectification’ precisely by continually reiterating the failure of
objectifying practices. In this way the film is a demonstration of
failure at the most catastrophic level.
Demonstrations of difficulty
Filloux and Panh’s works are both concerned with economies of vio-
lence. For Filloux, it is the mechanisms of spectatorship that, through
an aestheticized gaze, reduplicate violence that are at issue. She seeks
to disrupt and reverse the original purpose and point of view of the
prisons’ photographs through providing personal testimonial accounts
that supersede them. In doing so she illustrates the importance of
acknowledging what is outside of the frame. Panh’s film, made before
the UN-backed War Tribunal trials (begun late 2009), is more concerned
with the need to demonstrate and acknowledge Cambodia’s violent
history. As Nath comments in the film:
But to tell us to forget because it belongs in the past… It’s not like
a puddle you step over and get your pants wet. Then dry and you
forget. This is something painful, really painful, and even if it’s been
20 years its not so far back. It hasn’t ‘dried’.
Panh does this by bringing into striking relationship with one another
the archive and the living subjects whom the archive represents. In each
of their works, the artists point to the problem of investing the archive
with what Reason describes as a conventional sense of ‘promise’ (33).
The archive is not simply its objects, just as an image is not simply a
copy of reality. Performative responses to and renderings of the archive
demonstrate that it not so much a repository of historical truth as it is
a set of materials, from which new sensible aesthetic and social systems
might be drawn.
To return briefly to Levinas, the question of the face remains: pre-
cisely what kind of ethical possibilities do aesthetic or substitutive faces
offer? The key issue is not so much whether the aesthetic substitute is an
appeasement to ethical encounter by way of its status as representation
as it is to do with the performance of human values and the assertion
of basic human rights engendered by the image or performance. For
in contexts such as Tuol Sleng, the fundamental alterity of the other’s
experience requires a semiotic framework of some kind. Taylor describes
such alterity, as cited earlier, as a kind of untranslatability: ‘I propose
that we proceed from that premise – that we do not understand each
other – and recognize that each effort in that direction needs to work
against notions of easy access, decipherability, and translatability’ (15).
This does not mean we cannot reach an understanding with the trans-
lated other, but that we acknowledge that any such understanding is
mediated. Memorial sites in Cambodia as well as Filloux’s and Panh’s
works each ask us to pay our respects to the deceased, but also to com-
mit ourselves to justice in the present. It is in such commitment – an
ethical commitment – that a compact between those who do not speak
the same ‘language’ might be made. Filloux and Panh’s works make
powerful claims for the responsibility of viewers, as global citizens, to
affirm these rights. Further, in Filloux’s case, she asks viewers to con-
template the situation of their own gaze within an economy of intoler-
ability. Yet, at the same time, neither are instructive pieces. Rather they
show a disassembling of the human in order that spectators, through
their own intellectual and imaginative engagement, might participant
in its reconstruction. In making such theatrical demonstrations, both
works urgently articulate, or at least point to, the call of the other. The
Tuol Sleng images, Filloux’s play and Panh’s film, each illustrates that
there is no easy ‘access’ to the face of the other. However, through
performative – theatrical – encounter, historical trauma is brought to
bear in the present in such a way that demands continuing response.
It is the very demonstration of difficulty, which lends the greatest urgency

to the ethical claim. That is, it is in the tension between the face that it
offered to us, and the absent face suggested by the aesthetic substi-
tute, which generates the kind of yearning for the other that provides
an ethical starting point. Where Filloux and Panh’s works exceed the
exhibited archive is in their recognition of its ‘unstraighforwardness’.
They make apparent the contingencies of its contents and suggest that
it is only by interrogating its documents and images in the present that
we may come to realize its continuing force, within which our own
spectatorship sits uncomfortably.
5
Lost in Our Own Land: Re-Enacting
Colonial Violence
Muskets are overwhelming ancient tradition – and not just

that of warfare. The way of life, traditions, spiritual beliefs,
tribal structure and Chieftainship are all centuries old, but
are crumbling beneath the strength of the musket. Tribe is
pitted against tribe, Māori against Māori, brother against
brother.
Our story […] begins as the musket-wielding cult arrives in

Te Wai Pounamu – the South Island. We come face to face
with fearsome Te Ao Huri and Uitara […] on the land of Te
Tawhito and the deeply traditional people of the Matuku-
moana village. Be guided by the Storyteller onto sacred land
and witness the dramatic invasion of a peaceful village.
Move through time and see Uitara taking the leadership
mantle as Te Ao Huri dies.
As Uitara’s story unfolds further, you’ll experience the sig-

nificant impact of European religion and education and the
devastation of introduced illness and temptations.
Tamaki Heritage, ‘The Chronicles of Uitara’
This chapter discusses the book’s most explicit example of the inter-
twining of theatre and tourism, Māori tourism re-enactment spectacle,
Lost in Our Own Land, which was staged by Tamaki Heritage Experiences
in Christchurch, New Zealand, between 2008 and 2011 (closed after
the earthquakes of early 2011). Unusually for a ‘culture show’, the
work put centre stage the losses suffered by Māori as a result of colonial
contact. Māori culture was celebrated (and made the object of tourist
consumption), whilst at the same time placed in a more historically
161
and politically specific context than would usually be expected of such

a performance. As the publicity material above makes evident, the spec-
tacle explicitly invited audience members to act as symbolic witnesses
to colonial violence and asked them to acknowledge the continuing
effects for Māori of historical land loss. This loss was seen not simply
from the perspective of settler seizure, but in the broader context of
the erosion and unbalancing of Māori social ecology, most pointedly
illustrated through the conflict ensuing from the introduction of mus-
kets (contrasted above with the normative role of warfare in traditional
Māori society). In most of the previous tourism examples discussed,
theatricality served to heighten and charge marked absences. Memorial
structures, preserved ruins, museum displays and guides, all served as
mediators between visitors and the history at hand. Spectators were
therefore required to perform what I have described as ethical listening
in order to ‘hear’ the voices of those absent; or, to draw on Alice Rayner’s
phrasing, spectators were required to ‘listen at the boundaries of
comprehension’ (‘The Audience’ 262). In the case of Lost, however, spec-
tators were drawn into a relationship of more explicit and sometimes
even uncomfortable presence. Absences were acknowledged within
the performance, namely through the theatrical evocation of tūpuna
(ancestors) and the foregrounding of land loss; however, audience
members were not left to quietly contemplate Māori loss, but asked to
enter into a face-to-face encounter. In this chapter I ask how the notion
of ethical listening might be read in such a setting.
Discussion of the tourist performance, as with other chapters’ tourism
examples, is contrasted with theatrical works, here multiple pieces con-
sidered in brief including: Rore Hapipi’s Death of the Land (1976), Hone
Kouka’s Waiora (1996), Lemi Ponifasio’s early presentation of Tempest
in 2007, and Te Houhi (2011), a dancetheatre choreographed by Maakaa
Pepene for Māori contemporary dance company Atamira. My interest
in this broad range of works concerns their manipulation of theatri-
cal space, particularly their intertwining of European dramaturgy and
theatrical conventions and Māori protocols and ‘symbolic structures’
(Carnegie and O’Donnell, 222). In particular I focus on moments of inter-
face, both within performances, and between performers and audience
members, teasing out notions of contact, enactment and re-enactment to
ask what happens between parties at ‘the boundaries of comprehension’
as constituted by each. I explore the sense in which the reclamation of
Māori space is more than merely symbolic and, in fact, draws its respec-
tive audiences into a kind of inversion where cultural asymmetry is
reversed – the stage is, as Christopher Balme puts it, ‘decolonized’ (181).
Lost in Our Own Land: Re-Enacting Colonial Violence 163
In Hapipi’s play, Māori characters sign a ‘memorial of dissent’ to register

their opposition to the transfer of land process. In their reversal of
hegemonic order, the performances discussed can be understood as
forms of dissenting memory. Indeed, in his review of Te Houhi, Richard
Howard describes it as ‘a living contemporary memorial’ (Howard). Such
living/dissenting memorials contest the division of past from present, of
the living from the dead. Ethical encounter, in this sense, is dependent
upon the construction of a performative relationship of unknowing,
where the role of the spectator is to listen and to acknowledge with
openness and indeed deference the claim of the other. Such listening
allows for the possibility of transformation, restoration and healing,
through fostering what Sharon Mazer describes as ‘dynamic engagement’
between audience and performers (‘Atamira Dance Collective’ 288).
Setting the scene
Before offering a critical account of Lost in Our Own Land, I would like to
place the work in its historical and political context and to locate it as an
example of dark tourism, albeit unorthodox in certain regards. Tourism
generally presents an ideal sphere for Māori to assert their account of
the post-settlement history of Aotearoa New Zealand. As John Taylor
points out: ‘In taking hold of themselves as touristic commodities many
Māori are seeking to undermine the “authenticities” provided by the
more widely Paakehaa (white New Zealanders) dominated industry by
providing their own’ ( J. Taylor, 16). The rise in Māori-controlled tourism
such as Tamaki’s reflects broader shifts in New Zealand society, with the
reclamation of the economies of cultural tourism paralleling the similar
reclamation and restitution of land to Māori. In 1840 the Crown and Māori
signed a contract, the Treaty of Waitangi, which granted Māori a number
of rights and titles in exchange for ceding sovereignty to the Crown. The
Government’s subsequent defiance of the articles of the Treaty led in the
1970s to a major Māori political movement centred around land rights.
Subsequently a commission was set up in the 1980s to hear grievances
from various tribes, make assessments and award compensation. (The
commission’s work is ongoing at the time of writing.) The distribution
of compensatory funds to iwi (‘tribe’) has contributed to the capital
investment required for Māori to start up and run their own tourism
businesses. Further, as Kirshenblatt-Gimblett notes: ‘Some even credit
tourism with stimulating the continued vitality and creative transforma-
tion of Māori performance, carving and weaving’ (164). Lost highlights all
of these in a section of the work that features live demonstrations.
While the fact that Lost incorporates strong political themes reflects
the context of the relationship between the Government and Māori as
indigenous people and needs to be understood as such, the intended
experiential impact of the performance also reflected a government-
driven shift of emphasis in the development of tourism products.
Margaret Werry’s recent book, The Tourist State, comprehensively
discusses the role of tourism in New Zealand political and economic
life, in particular its influence on the production of identities. In a
performance-oriented reading of the industry, she assesses the staging
of race within what she calls ‘the theatre of tourism’ (156). Werry points
out that Tamaki’s various businesses are best seen in light of the focus
of the Government tourism agency, Tourism New Zealand, on the
‘experience-economy’ paradigm (148). Lost in Our Own Land was a deli-
berate development away from the more traditional ‘hāngi and haka’
format of cultural tourism, generally deemed old fashioned, towards what
Werry describes as the desired hallmarks of experience-based tourism:
‘relational, experiential, exclusive and individualized’ (158). In its blend
of elements, Lost sought to immerse tourists in a highly affective experi-
ence, and at the same time to satisfy the perceived traditional cultural
tourism appetite.
The claim for locating Lost in Our Own Land within the rubric of
dark tourism, however, is largely based on the performance’s conscious
modelling of battlefield recreation spectacles. In his taxonomy of five cate-
gories of thanatourism Tony Seaton lastly lists, ‘travel for re-enactments
or simulation of death’ (242), which he then divides into two subcate-
gories: religious spectacles such as passion plays or secular battle
re-enactments – Lost falls into the latter. The battle between two tribes
was the theatrical centrepiece of the work, while the battle for Māori
land rights was its motivating theme. Indeed, the performance ended
with the narrator stating: ‘Today the battle for land ownership still goes
on’ (my emphasis). Whilst not a religious spectacle in the sense meant by
Seaton, it is important to note that the spectacle’s narrative and staging
strategies were underpinned by a spiritual belief in the inseparability
of Māori people and land. The historical events shown were directly
correlated to the current struggles and challenges faced by the Māori
population that have directly flowed from land lost in both the colonial
and postcolonial eras.
In suggesting Lost as at least partially an example of battlefield tourism
(intertwined with cultural tourism) some qualifications are necessary.
First of all, while Lost’s narrative drew upon actual events that took place
locally (briefly detailed in the following section), the specific place of
the performance was not especially historically significant as is usually

the case in battlefield tourism, which relies upon inviting tourists to
precise locations where warfare took place. As Frank Baldwin and
Richard Sharpley note: ‘the essence of a battlefield tour is to visit the
site and to gain a greater understanding of the battle from a study of the
detail of the ground over which the battle was fought’ (195). Instead,
the performance site for Lost transformed what used to be a rubbish
dump into a simulacrum of contested land (though complicated by
ongoing negotiation of land loss at a national level), which functioned
metonymically with the story representing the general narrative of pan-
tribal land loss. Secondly, the performance did not let earnest political
sentiment get in the way of appealing to tourists’ desire for cultural
spectacle. Lost clearly positioned its product within the paradigm of the
experience economy, inviting spectators to participate in an interactive
cultural experience that incorporated both ‘witnessing’ the effects of
colonization and watching a haka, participating in a traditional meal
and so on. When I spoke to creator Mike Tamaki, he referred to Mel
Gibson’s Braveheart as a particular influence on the work, both in its
spectacular aspects and in its narrative claims for indigenous sove-
reignty. The reference says something about the work’s curious inter-
twining ‘razzle-dazzle’ and political claim.
That Tamaki chose to use re-enactment as the vehicle for its tourist
spectacle has broader resonance in the context of Aotearoa New Zealand
historiography. Stephen Turner argues that settler history relies upon a
re-enactive paradigm, which continually reinvents the colonial moment
as not one of arrival on a foreign shore, but rather as paradoxical return
home. That is, historical mythologies of New Zealand nationhood rely
upon a settler identity that is understood as local ‘indigeneity’. Turner
writes: ‘The role of re-enactment is to convert the idea of a new country
that exists in the collective mind of second settlers into a country that
has always existed as such’ (245). He further remarks that ‘While Pākeha
in the first instance stepped ashore in someone else’s country, the reen-
actment of this moment has them stepping ashore in their own country
– the new country of New Zealand. In reenactment scenarios, settlers
are at home’ (245). As I was researching historical re-enactments in New
Zealand, I came across a case that touched upon my own family history.
My great, great, great, great-grandfather was Captain William Cargill,
who sailed the first ship of Scottish settlers into the Ōtākou/Otago
harbour in 1848. On a recent visit home to Dunedin an aunt described
to me a re-enactment of early settlers arriving in Dunedin. As part of
celebrations of the 150th anniversary in 2011 of the Otago gold rush,
a tall ship had sailed up the harbour, disembarking 30 local amateur

actors at a city wharf. The event was pitched as a kind of historical car-
nival. Intrigued, I did a little more research and found an example of an
earlier re-enactment in 1947, undertaken as part of a 100-year anniver-
sary celebration of settlers’ arrival and filmed by a member of the local
cinematography club. The clip opens with grainy footage, scratched and
silent, of a three-masted ship, the John Wickliffe, entering the harbour.
Small boats bob alongside as it steers towards Port Chalmers. Sailors
help women in bonnets and crinoline skirts disembark into swaying
rowboats. An intertitle: ‘Captain Cargill is greeted by the shore party’.
The smiling faces of early settlers stream past a fixed camera. Māori
women in traditional dress are betrayed only by their modern shoes.
People smile, laugh and applaud the now-silent speeches. Another
intertitle: ‘Welcome by Otakou Maoris’. Wind blows the toetoe plants in
the foreground and through it we see Māori men and women (no shoes
now) crowd onto the small stage and perform a haka. The ceremony
finishes with prayer and then a parade. The camera remains fixed as
crowds follow the floats up the hill, their backs turned away from the
documenting eye. Both re-enactments, 1947 and 2011, make a case for
the stability of national settler identity, emphasizing those early arrivals
as ‘ancestor’ figures. The implications are both troubling and compli-
cated. What did it mean in 1947, for example, for local iwi to re-enact
the symbolic moment where their sovereignty was ceded?
In a subtle subversion of such narratives, Lost not only created a
series of Māori spaces within which to re-enact its own version of
settler history, but also co-opted a Pākeha space, the mock colonial
town of Ferrymead, an attraction situated adjacent to the Tamaki site.
Ferrymead is precisely the sort of attraction where the myth of Pākeha
indigeneity is continually re-enacted. In this sense, Tamaki’s temporary
‘occupation’ of the site during its nightly performances challenged
benign settler narratives, by creating a dramaturgy of two opposing
accounts and claims for indigeneity and sovereignty. As one of the crea-
tors of the work, Awatea Edwin, has noted: ‘We’re fighting the idea of
re-colonising over what’s been colonised’ (Christchurch City Libraries).
This disjunction of historical perspectives had the effect of disrupting
the smoothing over of cultural differences usually afforded to tourists
within the context of a culture show. However, the intent of the sub-
versions and reversals enacted by the performance were not always
successfully communicated to the audience. In her discussion of what is
distinctive about re-enactment as both popular pastime and art practice,
Rebecca Schneider focuses on the notion of return: ‘Reenactment troubles
linear temporality by offering at least the suggestion of recurrence,

or return, even if the practice is peppered with its own ongoing
incompletion’ (30). Such return can satisfy nostalgic desire or it can
deeply problematize it. As both commercial cultural tourism spectacle
and politically inflected theatrical performance, Lost attempted to do
both. In regard to the latter, Lost returned its audience to a Māori sphere
given particular dramatic charge precisely because its setting was on the
cusp of land loss. It then finally delivered us to a highly ironic colonial
utopia whose construction was only marred by the Māori presence
that it sought to efface. However, while the performance attempted
to bluntly show the effects upon Māori of Pākeha settlement and land
seizure, it at the same time encouraged conventional tourist practices,
such as picture-taking with costumed performers, which conversely
reiterated the objectification of Māori as subject of the tourist gaze.
In this regard, while the performance enacted a return to the scene of
colonial violence, at the same time it returned tourists to the familiar
repertoire of images of Māori. When the performance finally concluded
with a haka, an Australian man standing next to me commented, ‘Ah,
that’s it’: the desire to see what he already knew was satisfied.
The ways in which the performance unsettled the usual terms of cul-
tural tourism – successfully or otherwise – reflected not just a drive for
more dynamic visitor experiences coupled with the desire to place the
historical of Aotearoa settlement in a specifically Māori context, how-
ever. It also demonstrated the contemporary ambivalences of discourses
of racial identity and belonging in Aotearoa New Zealand. As a Pākeha
New Zealander I bring my own uneasiness to this chapter in offering a
critique that attempts to understand the Māori perspective on a history
that I am myself deeply entangled in, and whose terms are still contested.
Indeed, naming or defining the losses suffered by Māori during and
subsequent to colonial contact and settlement remains controversial.
In 2000, leading Māori politician Tariana Turia was heavily criticized
for describing the suffering of Māori (and other colonized peoples) as
a Holocaust. Similarly, in 2012 Māori academic Keri Opai’s claim that
the persecution of Māori amounted to a Holocaust was roundly criti-
cized, with local media fervently reporting on foreign condemnation of
Opai’s statement. Such controversy regarding application of the terms
‘genocide’ or ‘Holocaust’ are not unique to the Aotearoa New Zealand
context, but worth making note of, nonetheless, as it helps illustrate
the complexity of racial politics often obscured by the a-historic veneer
of cultural tourism. I certainly felt ambivalent when I attended Lost,
which was specifically targeted at and attended by (at least when
I was there) foreign tourists. Such tourists are in certain ways relieved
of the discomfort – shame, anger, embarrassment – that a local Pākeha
audience might feel. Foreign manuhiri (visitors) are designated as wel-
come witnesses: ‘We have waited 150 years to tell our story… See what
we have seen, hear what we have heard, but most of all feel what we
have felt (Tamaki Heritage, ‘Tamaki – the Story’). When I attended the
performance I felt doubly outsider: neither Māori nor foreign manuhiri.
Despite the welcomed presence of foreign visitors (both as ticket buyers
and as ‘witnesses’), however, the relationship between performers and
audience was, as noted above, marked at certain moments by unease.
This was most explicitly expressed in the various challenges laid down
by the work. These were both cultural theatre – the challenges and haka
at the beginning and end of the work – as well as thematic and political.
Most interestingly, in the Ferrymead section of the work, the cultural
‘neutrality’ of the audience was challenged by a shift in identificatory
perspective. In the first instance tourists were welcomed as witnesses,
but by the end of the performance (at Ferrymead) were positioned as
Pākeha settlers and therefore complicit rather than disinterested. The
shift cannily illustrated what Kirshenblatt-Gimblett calls ‘the divided
consciousness of settler societies’ (141). As with many other chal-
lenges laid down, however, its terms were unexplained and sometimes
misunderstood: near the later stages of the work, I heard one tourist
comment that she felt like they’d really been put through the mill,
while the other joked in reply that he’d pay not to come. Thus what was
implicitly (and quite unintendedly) re-enacted by the performance were
the very misunderstandings of colonial contact in altogether uncanny
restaging of the collision of Māori and non-Māori cultures. As with the
colonial process, relationships were not constituted in simple dialectical
terms, but rather tangled together in much more complicated and con-
founding ways.
The performance
Whereas in previous chapters human life was the focus of memorializa-

tion, in Lost it was Māori land that was the absent object. The title of
the work, Lost in Our Own Land, recognized the effect of the forced dis-
identification of Māori and land, of tangata whenua (the people of the
land). To map out the significance of how the audience was figured
within the work’s scenography – its landscape – I would like to lead
the reader through a critical account of its staging. Tamaki Heritage
Experiences began their tourism business in Rotorua in the 1980s. Their
first attraction, the Tamaki Village, was a replica pā (fortified village),
which served as the venue for various forms of cultural demonstration,
including kapa haka elements of song and dance. The site was subse-
quently developed into a more integrated show called Te Karanga – The
Calling. The move towards explicitly theatrical staging is mirrored across
the company’s projects. Together Te Karanga and Lost in Our Own Land
formed two parts of an intended trilogy, collectively titled The Chronicles
of Uitara. Uitara, a singular fictional figure, represented the genealogical
thread tying together differing eras of Māori life. A new attraction
planned for South Auckland (2013) would have completed the col-
lection of works by showing Uitara’s journey through the Asia Pacific
region to Aotearoa. Te Karanga chronologically follows the planned
Auckland attraction, representing Māori prior to European contact, and
Lost, following Te Karanga completed the historical journey.
Described by creator Mike Tamaki as a ‘true account’ and not merely
‘entertainment’, Lost in Our Own Land was in fact a dramatic fiction
based on real historical events. The story of Uitara was inspired by
real-life Chief Te Rauparaha’s bloody series of conquests during the
Musket Wars: ‘We’ve based the re-enactment here around portions of
the Kaiapoi Pā story’ (qtd. in Darling). During the period in which
the work was set, Te Rauparaha, on whom the character of Te Ao Huri
(whose name means ‘the changing world’) was loosely based, sacked
the settlement of the South Island iwi (tribe) Ngai Tahu, Kaiapoi Pā. The
central dramatic conflict in the work was between Te Ao Huri (along
with Uitara) and Te Tawhito, leader of the ‘deeply traditional’ fictional
village of Matuku-moana, which represented the Kaipoi Pā. While Lost
incorporated traditional elements of a cultural display – song, haka,
demonstration of aspects of traditional life and so on – these were
subjugated to the dramatic storyline, which in turn represented real
historical events.
The performance played out over an area of roughly 20 acres, within
which there were multiple sites. Action moved between five different
stages: a liminal welcome space, similar to a marae ātea (land in front
of the marae meeting house); Raro Heka – House of Understanding;
Matuku-moana, a replica Māori village; a battlefield; and lastly the
Ferrymead Heritage Park. Ferrymead is a long-standing Christchurch
tourist attraction, which, as noted in the previous section, was unused
in the evenings and therefore available to Tamaki as a canny theatrical
setting. The replica colonial town not only provided a convincing back-
drop for the conclusion of the story, thematically it offered a parabolic
analogy between the struggle for theatrical space and the struggle for
land. Lost enacted a reversal of the colonial legacy by taking over the
Pākeha space for the duration of the performance.
The evening I attended the work, Mike Tamaki, as spokesperson,
personally welcomed the audience. He described Lost as depicting the
‘most horrific period of time in the development of this country’. He
explained that the performance, as noted earlier, was a ‘true account’ of
the effect on Māori of Pākeha settlement of Aotearoa. Tamaki’s presence
and authority worked in tandem with the forceful performances of the
cast, who themselves combined elements of traditional Māori perfor-
mance such as haka with role-based character acting. The use of kawa,
Māori protocols, was central throughout the performance. The work
followed the pattern of a challenge to manuhiri followed by a karanga
(call to enter). The audience was then welcomed into various performance
spaces analogous to wharenui (meeting houses) where oral presentation
played an important role. The whole performance finally concluded with
a shared meal, which took place in the wharekai (eating house).
As a re-enactive performance, Lost’s ability to locate its audience
within its parafictive realm (spatially and psychologically) was key to its
success; that is, how successfully it was able to draw the audience into
a feeling of ‘being there’. Co-creator Edwin states:
We make (the audience) part of the show. When they come through
the bush they are slowly inducted into the feel of it. We try to touch
them on three basic levels – we tell them that we are going to take
you in to see what we’ve seen, to hear what we’ve heard, but more
importantly to feel what we’ve felt.
(Christchurch City Libraries)
One of the key devices for inducting the audience into a credibly Māori
sphere was through the evocation of tūpuna (ancestors). In remark-
ing on the relationship between past and present when history is
re-enacted, Schneider writes that the ‘mutually disruptive energy’,
where past and present disturb one another, means that ‘the bygone is
not entirely gone by and the dead not completely disappeared nor lost,
but also, and perhaps more complexly, the living are not entirely (or
not only) live’ (15). Such a statement, in fact, sits neatly within a Māori
cosmology, where identity is conceived of as trans-temporal. When intro-
ducing oneself, one introduces not just one’s tribal affiliations but also
one’s detailed ancestral line, including mountains and rivers. Tūpuna
are forces who have power in the present. Māori playwriting com-
monly harnesses this cultural convention to build dramatic scenarios
where characters are caught between the worlds of the dead and the
living: the relationship between past and present must be reconciled
in order for characters to move on from their suspended state. Lost not
only drew on theatrical tropes and conventions to make the past matter
in the present but also invoked a specifically Māori ethos, which under-
stood that presence is always underlined by the figures of the past. This
was most explicitly expressed by the prosopopoeian function ascribed
to the invisible tūpuna, whose voices ‘haunted’ certain areas via audio
recordings.
After the opening section of the work, where the audience was wel-
comed, a challenge laid down and the narrator introduced, a woman
cried out in Māori from inside the gates at the rear of the welcome area.
The publicity material for the work described the woman as a ‘seer,’ or
matakite, who channelled and embodied the presence of tūpuna. The
matakite then led the audience on a journey past an urupā, (cemetery)
and through a Pathway of Prophets and Pathway of Ancestors on the
way to Raro Heka. At the foot of the bridge to the House she offered a
karakia (prayer) to announce the arrival of the visitors and ask for their
protection (Figure 5.1). As the audience crossed the bridge, the voices
of tūpuna whispered through a concealed sound system. The audience
was asked to become present to these invisible figures and implicitly
to acknowledge that it was they who foremost granted access to the
lands represented by the performance space, which was now figured as
a sacred place.
Inside Raro Heka, which Edwin described as a spirit world – ‘the
underworld, where the spirits go to drop all their human baggage’ –
the audience was shown a survey of Māori protest. An audio-visual
presentation told the story of Māori land struggle from the time of
colonial contact to the present, capturing iconic moments including
the Land Marches (1975), the occupation of Bastion Point (1977–78)
and more recent protests such as the occupation of Moutua Gardens in
Whanganui (1995). This cast of past historical actors on screen formed
another set of ghosts and in introducing them near the beginning of the
historical narrative, Tamaki not only attempted to provide the audience
with historical context, but also implied that the current performers
were continuing what was described elsewhere in the performance as
the ‘battle’ for land. As the short presentation progressed, the sound-
scape evolved into a pastiche of talkback radio sound-bites evoking
Pākeha prejudice: ‘when they had the land they didn’t do anything
with it.’ The voice of an American tourist filtered in and asked – ‘What is
a May-ori? Are they like our American Indians? Do they have problems
Figure 5.1 Lost in Our Own Land, performed in Christchurch, New Zealand, 2008
(Photograph: Emma Willis)
with gambling?’ The conversation then moved to contemporary Māori

issues, such as health and education, and ended with a rendition of the
national anthem, coarsely sung with a strong and defiant tone. The
specificity of what was shown on the screens, significant moments of
racial conflict in Aotearoa New Zealand, was not explained in a his-
torical sense, however. Instead, these charged moments of cultural and
political encounter were overlaid in an affecting multimedia collage,
designed to provoke an emotional response through the intercutting of
imagery, voice and music. Tamaki noted in an interview that the pur-
pose of this multi-screened presentation was to ‘bypass your intellect
and go directly to your subconscious’ (qtd. in Darling).
The scene-setting given by the presentation’s strong statement of
position was followed by the entrance of Te Ao Huri, Uitara and Te
Tawhito, while soft strains of a haka filtered over the sound system.
One of Te Ao Huri’s people shouted, ‘you will learn to tread lightly.’ The
terms of the conflict between Te Ao Huri and Te Tawhito, essentially the
clash of old and new values, were laid down through speeches directed
to the audience, which were designed to align our sympathies with Te

Tawhito, who represented tradition. The audience then exited Raro
Heka and entered the replica traditional Māori village, Matuku-moana,
now figured as ‘their’ village: ‘By the time they come into the village
they should feel that they are coming into their village’ (Edwin qtd. in
Christchurch City Libraries). Various whare (huts) were dotted around
the Pā and inside different performers engaged audience members in
dialogue about various aspects of traditional Māori life, while also per-
forming demonstrations.
At the same time as Matuku-moana attempted to incorporate the
audience into, according to Edwin’s description, ‘being where we’ve
been – tasting the sense of reality that we tasted and experiencing the
journey that our people took’, the section also most strongly ceded
to a conventional cultural tourism mode. In deference to tourists’
expectations of souvenirs, audience members were encouraged to have
their photograph taken with Māori performers (Figure 5.2), which
had the effect of breaking the dramatic suspension of disbelief and shift-
ing the terms of engagement. Indeed, throughout the performance, Lost
concurrently appealed to the motivating desires of cultural tourism – the

pleasure of otherness – while also attempting to communicate a specific
political and historical narrative. These two ends did not always sit easily
together. The framing of an ‘authentically’ Māori space whose claim
stood in and of itself, issuing from the relationship between Māori per-
formers and the land, and the transformation of the space into a series
of dramatic stages – illustrated through convincing sets, costumes and
so on, as well as by performance – was sometimes at odds; that is, the
‘showiness’ of the performance tended to undermine the attempted
inscription of the site precisely because the former is understood as
extrinsic and the latter intrinsic. The effect of halting the narrative
progression in order to fulfil the cultural tourism criteria of putting
indigenous otherness on display was confusion in the audience as to
how to respond. When I attended, one particular Australian tourist in
our party consistently tried to jokingly engage with the actors. At the
climax of the action, when Te Ao Huri cried out ‘Who will lead my peo-
ple?’ the tourist casually replied in the affirmative – ‘I will’. To shift the
actors from commanding the performance to the position of subjects of
souvenir photographs had the effect of reiterating the culture tourism
paradigm of putting the ‘foreign’ bodies on display as objects of con-
sumption – Māori bodies were pacified and ‘recolonized’ by the camera.
The misunderstanding – or defiance – of the terms of the drama, as
exemplified by the tourist cited above, stemmed from the perceived
inauthenticity of the spectacle. Alison McIntosh’s study of international
visitors to New Zealand writes of their desire for authentic cultural
interaction. Tourists wanted to see ‘Māori people at home’ and to have
‘a genuine encounter’:
I think there are certain times when you are a tourist and you see
things that aren’t really proper culture and you feel like your are, not
cheated, but it’s a bit of a tourist gimmick. I think it’s important that
you see things really how they are not just for a show.
(9–10)
McIntosh concludes that tourists appeared to be seeking meaning-

ful experiences from ‘informal personal contact […] in contrast to
experiences of staged cultural events’ (12). Lost’s impact relied upon
inviting audience members onto the stage, as it were. This was framed
in terms of a bond – contact – between performers and audience. In
its promotional material Lost promised a ‘significant, deeply integral
visitor encounter with our nation, our landscapes and our people’. This
strategy spans Tamaki’s various businesses. Of their Rotorua Heritage

Village, Werry writes:
Racial recognition is the political metaphor at the core of Tamaki’s

dramaturgy, which immerses visitors in a feel-good fantasy of liberal
reciprocity, built on the model of Māori manaakitanga, in which two
distinct and sovereign peoples – Māori and non-Māori, visitors and
host – meet in mutual respect.
(167)
The interactive aspect of Lost worked for and against the intended
impact of the performance. On the one hand, spectators were invited
to feel what Māori have experienced. On the other, the very distance
between Māori experience and our own was only emphasized through
the fact that such an invitation could never be fulfilled, either partially
or wholly. This was compounded by the theatrical clumsiness of certain
aspects of the performance, which undermined the identificatory poli-
tics upon which it relied.
The hiatus in the work’s dramatic narrative was broken when Te Ao
Huri’s warriors burst into the village and threw down a final challenge
to Te Tawhito. After a fiery dialogue exchange between characters the
audience was given directions to move up the hill behind the village.
As we trudged up the slope the performers’ agitation, building upon
the conflict in the village, increased. We were hurried on with gruff
instruction, clearly addressed as Te Tawhito’s villagers. The climax of
the Musket Wars narrative (though not of the wider land stakes) took
place on the hill above Matuku-moana with a musket battle com-
plete with replica rifles, taiaha fighting (wooden spears), smoke and
ambient soundscape. After a choreographed combat sequence, Te Ao
Huri and Te Tawhito agreed to fight warrior to warrior to settle the
dispute. Te Ao Huri overwhelmed Te Tawhito and slit his throat.
The narrator announced: ‘So with that the world of traditional
Māori changed forever.’ Te Ao Huri’s victory was brief, however. He
re-entered stricken with disease. Lamenting the curse of sickness that
had overtaken his people, he passed the mantle of his chiefly status
to Uitara. The storyline of societal and cultural decline was ampli-
fied when the dead body of his daughter (also claimed by disease)
was brought onto the stage and laid out on the ground. The moving
image was designed to capitalize on the dramatic identification estab-
lished by the preceding action, shifting our sympathy from Te Tawhito
to Uitara.
The unresolved aspect of the tragic narrative was emphasized in

the journey by vintage steam train from the battleground to adjacent
Ferrymead. The short ride passed by a collection of rusty buildings,
described by the narrator as a ‘fringe dwellers’ settlement’. Images of
illness and depravity abounded: bottles of alcohol were apparent and
punches thrown, while prostitutes solicited for business. The train
paused in front of this scene and Māori men and women boarded. The
journey moved the audience and characters collectively forward in
time to a post-Treaty era, some sixty or so years after the Musket Wars.
The first of the two major Ferrymead scenes took place inside a church.
A Pākeha minister and his wife warmly welcomed the audience and
invited them to participate in a service. Shortly after it commenced,
the sermon was interrupted by Māori characters who performed a haka
and challenged the minister before being thrown out of the church
(Figure 5.3). This kind of institutional conflict was repeated in a second
scene that showed an argument between a Māori woman, who formerly
played the matakite, and a lawyer in front of the Land Court office. The
Māori woman was defeated in her argument, rhetorically out manoeu-
vred by a pompously characterized Crown lawyer (played by the same
actor as the minister). Once the characters departed, the narrator con-
tinued the story, stating that at the time in which the argument took
place Māori still owned 66 million acres of land. Now, Māori only own
2 million. ‘Today the battle for land ownership still goes on.’
The audience, now fully incorporated into the sphere of Pākeha
power, was finally moved on from the Land Court to a clearing at
the end of the street where they were told that the performance was
over. Māori characters performed a waiata (song) and then a haka.
Mike Tamaki reappeared and gave a concluding speech, attempting to
contextualize the historical drama. ‘Fundamentally we are a bicultural
country’, he stated as the Māori and Pākeha performers came together
and sang. Tamaki took a final bow and summarized the work as being
a celebration of the survival of the Māori people. The grandness of
Tamaki’s closing speech made it clear that the stakes the work set up
extended beyond the outcome of the fictional dramatic conflict, or
even the ways in which it represented a dialectic of tradition versus
change. The essential stakes raised were to do with the survival of Māori
culture and its ability to stake its claim to Aotearoa New Zealand history
through its connection to the land.
It was in the final section of the work that the complexity of the role
asked of audience members was most apparent. Generally spectators
were asked to act as witnesses to the painful effects of colonial settlement
upon Māori society. The work used an interactive dramatic narrative

to construct an identificatory relationship that shored up this role.
However, when the spectacle reached Ferrymead, audience members
were identified by the performers as performing the role of the socially,
legally and politically dominant Pākeha – a highly ambivalent position.
This repositioning of the audience was correlative to the shift in the
status of the Māori characters as Uitara’s people were dis-located, and
in a sense relegated to the fringes of the setting, while the audience
sat in the town’s pews. While the Ferrymead sequence was intended
to maintain the dramatic identification already established, the very
nature of the site complicated its dramaturgical ambition. In its normal
operation Ferrymead generally glosses over the scars of colonial history.
Historian James Belich has argued that after initial colonial settle-
ment, New Zealand went through a process of ‘recolonization’ where,
although reliant on Britain, the country forged an identity based on a
better Britain (11). The late nineteenth-century Ferrymead endures as
not just an example of a historical process of recolonization, but also
as evidence of its ongoing aspect. There are other similar sites in cities
such as Auckland and Tauranga. The mock towns allow visitors to steep
themselves in nostalgia for a time in which independent national iden-
tity was formed. As Turner notes, it affords spectators the experience of
‘“being there” as if you, here in the present, were already there in the
past’ (251). Tamaki unsettled this nostalgic experience through prob-
lematizing what ‘being there’ in the past meant from a Māori perspec-
tive, which in turn soured any of the usual pleasure that tourists might
gain from visiting such a site. The dramatic use of Ferrymead created
an affecting sense of disjunction as Uitara’s men and women desolately
wandered around the fake town full of painted storefronts, almost
inadvertently staging an unresolved clash of two historical narratives,
each seeking to undo the other. That is, while Tamaki employed the
site for its effective ‘realism’ as a stage setting, it was in fact its painful
fabrication of settler narratives that gave it both political and ethical
force, in the sense of unsettling the role of the audience. Indeed, the
sense of loss in the title, Lost in Our Own Land, was most clearly depicted
through the work’s delivery of the audience to a space of loss for the
performers – the ideologically unsettling image of the colonial town as
kitsch utopia. Thus one can conclude by saying that the work’s political
dramaturgy was most effectively expressed in spatial terms. It was in
the clash of Māori and Pākeha space, on-stage and off-stage space,
that the ethical implications of spectatorship to colonial violence were
broached, though in no way fully met.
Lost in Our Own Land is now itself lost to the past. A story in the
New Zealand Herald that covered its failure to re-open post earthquakes
wrote:
Two gateways and a bridge are all that’s left of the Tamaki’s first
foray into the South Island tourism market. The Heritage Village,
opened in 2007 amid much fanfare after a multi-million makeover
of a former dump site beside the Ferrymead Heritage Park, now looks
more like an abandoned wasteland.
(Cropp)
Such an aporia is common in Christchurch, which (at the time of writ-

ing) is a city of vacant spaces. The Tamaki performance is now another
absence. The land, first unclaimed, then rubbish dump, then stage,
now lies empty, returned to the City Council after Tamaki negotiated
an early end to their lease of the site. The mutability of the land itself
speaks to the role of performance in demonstrating its possession. Lost
transformed the empty space into sacred Māori space, a simulacrum
of a pre-treaty site in the throws of contestation. The solidity of the

Ferrymead colonial village (and its endurance into the post-quake
era) indeed suggests the serious reality of its make-believe, a point
made poignantly albeit perhaps unintendedly by the now past per-
formance, its re-enactment of the silencing of Māori voices strangely
prophetic.
Memorials of dissent
Because Lost in Our Own Land was a theatrical performance in its own
right, even as a piece of tourist theatre, the comparison or contrast
between its confrontation with the effects of violent colonial history
and that of the following theatrical examples is different in this chapter
than in others. Unlike previous memorial sites and tourism attractions
discussed, the work privileged presence rather than absence. This was
not ghostly memorial tourism, but a hybrid of dark and cultural tourism
that aimed to absorb the spectator rather than position them outside
of ‘understanding’. Furthermore, the presence of performers was vital
for the claim for the restoration of lost land. In discussing aspects of
Māori and Pacific performances, I will finally reflect upon how direct
contact between audience members and performers might be read
and framed in ethical terms, and in particular how theatrical space is
manipulated to this end. I will discuss how the performances referred
to variously politicized both the stage and the sphere of the audience,
and how claims for sovereignty and the restoration of land were embo-
died. Lastly, I will examine how a dialogic of speaking and listening
as performed on a marae is enacted in the various works and ask what
happens at the ‘boundaries of comprehension’ when linguistic terms
are not shared. How might embodiment – shared presence – forge,
if not understanding, the terms for transformation and for the building
of new social relationships.
Firstly, the significance of the stage as a space of Māori korero (speech).
Rore Hapipi’s play Death of the Land was written in 1976, shortly after the
Māori Land March (hikoi), a landmark event in Aotearoa New Zealand
cultural history (footage of which was shown during Lost’s audiovisual
presentation in Raro Heka), which sought both to put an end to the sale
of Māori land and to ensure restitution of lands illegally taken. Over three
scenes, the drama follows the forced sale of a piece of Māori land as it
passes through various judicial stages. A character called Rongo, a spirit/
ancestor figure provides critical commentary on the action by engaging
various protagonists in dialogue. Hapipi describes him as: ‘A supernatural
and omnipotent being. He is the manifestation of the conscience and

consciousness of the Māori voices whose thoughts would otherwise
be unsaid’ (16). He is both ancestor who represents the values of the
past, and a kind of theatrical trickster who provokes the characters in
the present. His interrogations of Māori characters, who both oppose
and support the sale, constitute a trial of conscience, which mirrors the
legal one. The drama polemically argues for both judicial change and a
change in Pākeha attitudes and at the same time illustrates the divisions
between Māori as a result of the integration of Pākeha values into every-
day life. In the made-for-television broadcast of the play, screened after
its theatrical premiere, documentary scenes showing the hikoi arriving
in Wellington (also shown in Lost’s audiovisual presentation) punctu-
ated the breaks between scenes, clearly locating Hapipi’s play within a
broader political and cultural movement.
One of the key points of distinction between Lost and Death is in
their respective settings. In Hapipi’s play the specific land in the pro-
cess of moving out of collective Māori ownership and into the hands
of farmer Atkinson is only ever talked about and never seen. It is the
Pākeha spaces of a schoolroom and then courtrooms that are the set-
tings for the dramatic action. These settings reflect the fact that even
at the beginning of the play, the land has already been lost. Indeed,
the drama opens with, and is framed throughout by, the traditional
wailing that accompanies a Māori tangi, or funeral. Rongo comments,
‘the land was lost long before that meeting in the classroom in Matua’
(Hapipi, 46). Rongo then taunts Māori characters who are alienated by
the language and formalities of the court. What the judicial settings
mean for spectators, similarly to any play that takes such a setting, is
that they are required to make judgments concerning the justice served
by the court. They observe a triangulation of three main points of view:
Pākeha, represented by farmer Atkinson and various representatives of
the Crown – ‘Look, those people had the land for over two hundred
years and what have they done with it. Look at it, just lying there idle,
useless. They’ve done nothing with it and never will, you know as well
as I do, despite what they say’ (34); a continuity of traditional Māori
values, represented most significantly by Rongo and an elder, Wehi; and
contemporary Māori who have assimilated Pākeha values and perspec-
tives – ‘Look nuisance, I’m saying to you and I’ve always said it, there’s
no room for Māori values these days, not regarding the land anyway.
Just sitting on the land for sentiment’s sake is out now. It might have
been all right once, but these days unless the land is used, people might
as well give it up. Give it to someone who’ll use it. It’s the only way
the country can go forward’ (33). The drama clearly privileges Rongo
and Wehi’s points of view, expressed not just through the tangi wail-
ing, but also in lines such as Rongo’s which challenge the terms of the
courtroom: ‘The Māori always gets the justice, but the Pakeha always
gets the land’ (43). The absence of the land on stage underscores the
case. Indeed, it is only within the virtual space of a ledger entitled the
‘Memorial of Dissent’, where the characters’ presence is legitimized and
given force within the proceedings. The political point of Hapipi’s play
is potently underscored by making Pākeha space primary. In an alter-
nate opening for the play, Hapipi has a narrator describe a scene where
local Māori are gathered around a ‘cloth-draped plaque on the neat
clipped lawn to [a] Pakeha house’ (49). What was Māori land, ‘for as far
as the eye could see’, is reduced to the plaque, ‘one foot high embedded
in the square foot of soil’.
The broader question that the issue of how lost or absent lands are
represented (or withheld) inevitably draws us back to considering the
significance of the transformation of so-called ‘neutral’ theatrical space
into Māori space. Hapipi’s play was an early example of Māori playwriting.
Examples that followed have much more forcefully claimed the theatri-
cal stage as a liminal space capable of being figured as Māori, despite
the European conventions that frame it. As with Lost, elements of Māori
protocols and symbolic structures commonly frame and structure Māori
stage dramas in ways that expand upon the tangi wailing employed
by Hapipi. These include various forms of powhiri (welcome), haka
(challenge), karakia (prayer), waiata (song) and poroporoaki (farewell).
Furthermore tūpuna are commonly evoked and often given dramaturgi-
cal force within narratives, as is the case in Hone Kouka’s play Waiora,
where aggrieved tūpuna use their force to summon a living character,
Rongo, to the spirit world of her ancestors, attempting to separate
her from her family, just as her family has been separated from their
ancestral land. Dance and dancetheatre similarly ‘call forth’ ancestors:
Peter Sellers remarked, when introducing Samoan choreographer Lemi
Ponifasio’s company Mau’s production, Requiem (2007), that the work
had the stated aim of the ‘opening up of mass graves’. Lastly, stage space
is commonly suggested as various kinds of whare: Richard Howard
describes the set of Atamira’s Te Houhi as resembling a whare tūpuna
(house of ancestors), Dorita Hannah’s stage design for Hone Kouka’s
Nga Tangata Toa has been described as suggesting a Māori wharenui
(meeting house) (Carnegie and O’Donnell, 223), while Sharon Mazer
describes another of Atamira’s productions, Ngai Tahu 32 as similarly
evoking a wharenui (‘Atamira Dance Collective’ 287). By inscribing
theatrical space as specifically Māori, such productions enact a form

of poetic protest – Kouka has commented: ‘I see art as a form of pro-
test’ (243) – that both culturally and politically animates Māori claims
for tino rangitiratanga (sovereignty or self determination). The stage
becomes land, which is occupied and read in Māori terms. The political
significance of such occupation is evident in the quotes from Hapipi’s
play given earlier. From the Pākeha perspective, the specific piece of
land at issue is untamed swamp in need of transformation into produc-
tive farmland: it is perceived as an ‘empty space’ in need of animation
through ‘working’ the land. One the other hand, Māori elder, Wehi,
points out that in the past the swamp acted as fortification, providing
protection for the land’s inhabitants. Furthermore, and perhaps most
importantly, the land contains the bones of its Māori owners’ ancestors –
it is not empty and useless but embodied. Similarly, on stage, it is
through the embodied presence of Māori performers that the ‘life force’
of Māori culture – spanning past and present – is given vital expression.
The related notions of the land as embodied and of the interrelation
of land and bodies is succinctly expressed in the poster for Atamira’s
Te Houhi, which featured a landscape made out of bodies, the curves
of shoulders and arms forming a mountain range. The dancetheatre
work focused on a particular historical incident that saw Tuhoe Māori
illegally forced from their lands. In its opening section, similarly to the
poster, the work evoked a world in which land and bodies were one,
an image later contrasted with performers wrenched and ripped from
their homeland. As a form, dance is particularly capable of expressing
such interrelatedness through providing potent imagery rather than
didactic argument. For example, the section in Te Houhi that showed
the machinations of the Land Court demonstrated the same aliena-
tion that Rongo makes evident in Death of the Land through the use
of paper and through the deconstruction of legal voices. A montage of
audio recordings reading out court judgments, each layered over the
top of others, played as sheets of paper fell from the ceiling. In contrast
with Hapipi’s play, which showed Māori characters alienated within a
judicial sphere, in Te Houhi the very notion of justice was abstracted,
disembodied and framed within the setting which, as noted earlier,
recalled a whare tūpuna. Because of the careful construction of stage
space as Māori space, such productions present Māori bodies on their
own terms, both politically and aesthetically. Elements of kapa haka
in dance, for example, are adapted in order to construct contemporary
movement vocabularies that are both distinctly Māori and formally
inventive. The landscapes and meeting places to which audience are
invited combine elements of European theatrical convention and Māori

symbolic structures and values, often politically foregrounding the
latter while dramatically adapting the former.
What does this mean for the experience of spectators, particularly in
regard to the notion of challenge discussed earlier? How are spectators
made receptive to the political challenges of both Lost and the other
performances briefly described? In what ways might they respond to
these challenges? In her analysis of Ngai Tahu 32, Sharon Mazer writes:
The Atamira Dance Collective’s nod to Māori protocol and spatial

signification gives a hint of something deeper, the possibility of
difference and dialogue, exchange and change. Yet, while the perfor-
mance appears to mark itself as belonging to marae culture, ultimately
the question is not so much of culture as of aesthetics. The performance
is hermetically sealed, in a way that precludes the dynamic engagement
that an encounter on the marae would demand.
(‘Atamira Dance Collective’ 288)
The observation suggests an uneasy or at least unsatisfying amalgam of

different systems of cultural and aesthetic signification – what Balme
calls ‘syncretic theatre’ (180). Mazer further notes: ‘We thus appear both
implicated in the performance and detached, part of its pattern of signi-
fication without actually taking part in its action’ (288). Reading Mazer’s
critique, I could not help but reflect once again on the alienation of
Māori characters at Ferrymead. In that case, it was the characters who
were unable to ‘take action’. Their detachment reflected the frustration
of displacement for many Māori in general – a claim iterated at the end
of the performance. Therefore, that in the interplay of colonization,
recolonization and the ‘battle’ against this still-very-much-live process,
the stage itself might privilege both Māori kaupapa and aesthetics, whilst
at the same time reflecting back to audiences the cultural exclusivity of
European staging conventions is not surprising. It is also not without
political effect for the very questions, unresolved as they are, of witness
and responsibility, participation/action, challenge and reply take centre
stage. What is staged, in a social sense, is fragile contact: it is both uneasy
and uncertain and at the same time underscored by a restorative desire,
whose shape is as yet unformed.
While, because of their very different spheres of reception and artistic
motivation, there is little value in trying to make aesthetic comparisons
between Lost and the Māori performance works briefly referenced here,
building upon Mazer’s critique, one can comment upon the significance
of the interactive aspect of Tamaki’s work, which may in turn allow us

to think about what ethical participation may or may not look like. It
seems first of all important to address the notion of cultural authentic-
ity, for in describing a ‘nod to Māori protocol and spatial signification’,
Mazer seems to suggest that cultural authenticity – in the sense of how
relationships are structured and enacted in a wharenui – is lost in the
theatrical transfer. Elsewhere writing about kapa haka, Mazer writes
that: ‘[W]hat we see […] is always framed by European structures and
precepts, it is impossible to see past the fact of colonisation as it remains
ever-present in the present performance’, and further remarks that ‘the
proscenium-arched stage represents the ongoing crisis of colonisation,
its force even in an arena that is so clearly set outside and against the
everyday world’ (‘“Still Our Song is Sung”’). That is, she identifies the
tension inherent is cultural staging generally, where the very nature of
the event always-already undermines perceptions of authenticity. Works
such as Nga Tangata Toa, Ngai Tahu 32, Te Houhi and Lost appropri-
ate the proscenium in Māori terms – indeed, in their traverse seating
arrangement Nga Tangata Toa and Ngai Tahu 32 make the audience
part of the scenographic frame, whilst Lost attempts to immerse them
entirely. But is such an immersive strategy capable of the ‘dynamic
engagement’ that Mazer seeks? One would struggle to credibly argue
for the aesthetic value or impact of Lost as more successful than the
aforementioned performances – its uneven dramaturgy, unexplained
terms and uneasy melding of culture, show and play mitigated against
its potential in this regard. Yet its focus was firmly set on fostering what
John Taylor describes, in contrast to authenticity, as sincerity, here per-
haps best understood as manākitanga (hospitality). Taylor writes:
Rather than solely playing on authenticity, with its attendant essen-

tialization of Maori as a mythological pre-contact society, cross-
cultural encounters based on sincerity allow for the communication
of more localized identities. In doing so they may undermine such
essentialization and communicate important local values.
( J. Taylor, 16)
Sincere contact was perhaps best achieved at the conclusion of the

Tamaki performance, where the audience was invited to share a meal
with the performers. Significantly, this action took place ‘off-stage’.
This returns us to the dialectical notion of the stage as a space of
dissimulation. How, then, can the re-enactment or restaging of past
violence make audiences ethically present to its continuing effects
rather than giving either an objectifying spectacle or a ‘hermetically

sealed’ performance? I suggest that this might take place when the very
line that demarcates stage and auditorium is disturbed in a way that
transforms the interstitial space from one of interpretation to one of
embodied crisis. I would like to share one final example to illustrate my
meaning. In 2007, I attended a performance of Ponfiasio’s Tempest. The
work was a development season for what would later become Tempest:
Without a Body. The work was performed at the company’s home in
West Auckland, a converted former winery warehouse space. Although
part of a local arts festival, the context of the work was fairly informal
with an invitation to share a meal with the artists after the performance.
Tempest took the basic pretext of Shakespeare’s play as the basis for
examining the alienation of Māori from ancestral lands, which it wove
into a broader critique of political sovereignty, contemplating themes
of exile and dispossession. The work-in-progress notably featured two
very public New Zealand figures at that time: Tuhoe Māori activist
Tame Iti and detained Algerian political dissident Ahmed Zaoui. As with
other performances discussed so far, the work incorporated aspects of
traditional cultural forms, namely haka and Māori korero. The perfor-
mance was both challenging in a normative sense and culturally and
performatively unsettling, with Ponifasio carefully critiquing our cul-
tural expectations: his adaptation of the haka, for example, was almost
parodic, adding balletic changements and grotesque facial expressions.
Our expectations of ‘dance’ were further challenged by the large part
of the performance taken up by Iti’s recounting of episodes from his
life, some given in English but mostly delivered in Māori. This created
a striking contrast within the performance between, on the one hand,
a highly symbolic realm of movement that privileged a-temporal spiri-
tual presence; and on the other, long, often untranslated, speech that
pushed at the limits of what we consider to be theatrical action. Alexa
Wilson’s review of the performance noted both the political significance
of the oral address and its effect for a non-Māori speaker.
[B]ecause he spoke most of his monologues in Māori, as a man would

if he were delivering a speech on a marae, this […] emphasis[ed]
the claiming back of his native language in public (outside a Māori
context specifically). This either created an identification with those
Māori speakers in the audience or a challenge to those who could not
understand to learn the language, in order to understand properly.
I felt this need to do so myself strongly while I listened, although much
was communicated through the intense and generous expression
of his eyes and traditionally tattooed face, along with the gestures of
his body. Hearing his story and seeing him perform was […] a special
and unique opportunity to listen and watch closely.
For Wilson, myself and other non-Māori speakers, the kind of listening
required of us was that which was open to what was beyond our lin-
guistic comprehension, and at the same time highlighted the need for
finding a form of shared speech.
The work-in-progress showing of Tempest ended with a direct chal-
lenge to the audience that exemplified both the fusion of horizons
suggested above and the disturbance of the boundary line between
actor and spectator. Iti led the male performers of the company in a
powerful haka. As it was enacted, Iti stepped down from the stage and
into the liminal space between the raised rostra and the front row where
I sat. Iti directed his cry to members of the audience, holding them in
powerfully direct eye contact. At this climactic moment we were both
captivated by Iti and at the same time socially unsettled, as our aware-
ness of being spectators and perhaps cultural tourists, albeit in an aes-
thetic context, was heightened. However, and foremost, the challenge
produced the kind of ‘dynamic exchange’ asked by Mazer through
disturbing the demarcation between stage and auditorium, drawing
us into a moment of theatrical and ontological crisis. This disturbance
did not so much incorporate us within the space of the other as charge
the zone of contact between us. Our listening function as audience
was heightened paradoxically through our inability to translate what
we heard into our own terms. In Lost in Our Own Land our listening was
not heightened by the ‘untranslated’, precisely because the impulse to
make legible silenced the a-temporal ‘saying’ underlining the work’s
political claims. Or more simply, it lacked the theatrical sophistication
to be able to draw its spectators into an experience of ‘witness’ that had
any real power. The demands of the work as cultural spectacle muted
its speech.
In writing about the care of Māori taonga (cultural treasures),
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett writes of the life force that is associated with these
objects: ‘The life force of taonga depends not on [museum] techniques
of animation but on the living transmission of cultural knowledge
and values’ (166). She further comments that such transmission ‘lives’
in performance: ‘It must be performed to be transmitted. This is the
source of its life. This is the source of its vividness’ (166). The power of
reception depends upon the nature of the performed transmission. In
contrasting Tempest and Lost (while bearing in mind their completely
different aesthetic contexts and intended audiences), it is the character

and terms of transmission that are most distinct. As a highly aestheti-
cized work, Tempest refused a typical identificatory paradigm and played
precisely in the spaces between understanding, thus making the gap
or distance between ethics and the law, Māori and non-Māori, and the
places of listening and speaking, politically and dramaturgically central.
The challenge given at the end, in contrast with the challenge that
ended the Tamaki performance, was therefore the fullest realization of
the political charge of the interstice. Rather than asking the audience
to ‘play a part’, Tempest required audience members to be fully pre-
sent as themselves and drew them into a relationship that culminated
in heightened consciousness of the act of reception. The distinction
between a local and foreign audience is, of course, vital to acknowledge
here; however, the main point I wish to make is that ethical listening
does not rely on conventional understanding, but on the sharing of
experience. The meal that ended Lost in Our Land was most significant,
as noted, because of the way in which it broke from the theatrical struc-
tures that mediated the relationship between performers and audience
members. Actors abandoned their roles and sat with audience members,
answering questions about their lives, their experiences as actors, and
aspects of what contemporary life was like for Māori. Audience mem-
bers also had the chance to talk with one another and to share some
of their own stories. The production of Tempest also concluded with
sharing freely given food. What is common to each occasion is that the
‘breaking of bread’ was made meaningful (or sincere) precisely because
of the theatrical ‘crisis’ that had gone before. In comparing the two, one
can say that the construction or reconstruction of new social relation-
ships and new social language had most ethical force when what had
gone before challenged us in such a way that we were, as Levinas puts it,
taken captive by the claim expressed – clearly this was more powerfully
achieved in the Mau production. However, the crisis or ‘catastrophe’ of
each performance, which Rayner reminds us means a turning of events,
helped formed the conditions where a ‘space for a shared if not identical
experience’ (Audience 257) was possible.
6
‘The world watched’: Witnessing
Genocide
In representing genocide, we need to take great care that we are

not trading on the double delight of witness to suffering – the
enjoyment through moral filters of proxied power (and on
the other side, moral surrender – the wish to be taken – to
be taken from accountability); also the self-reward of a
kind of colonial empathy – where the subject of witness
becomes the virtue of the witness (replacing the suffering of
what we see with the suffering of our seeing…).
Erik Ehn, ‘Witness as Torture’
Between April and May of 1994 around one million Rwandans, mostly
Tutsi at the hands of Hutu, were killed in waves of massacres that
erupted throughout the country. Coming at the close of the twentieth
century, the genocidal event shocked with its vicious brutality and the
sense in which it undermined the rhetorical promise of ‘never again’,
which followed the Holocaust. Paul Kagame, leader of the Tutsi-led
Rwandan Patriotic Front and then president of Rwanda famously
commented, ‘never again became wherever again’ (qtd. in Mirzoeff,
‘Empire of Camps’ 23). The unwillingness of international forces to
intervene despite the colonial roots of the conflict, coupled with the
notorious withdrawal of the UN on the eve of the massacres, set the
stage for a genocide that continues to haunt both African and Western
consciousness. This chapter returns to the question of witness and
to the ways in which spectators are asked to be present to genocide
as either tourists or members of a theatre audience. In stark contrast
with the memorials marked by absent bodies in earlier chapters, and
the presence of Māori performers discussed in the previous one, this
188
‘The world watched’: Witnessing Genocide 189
chapter contemplates the affects of the physical presence of the dead

at Murambi Genocide Memorial Centre, where preserved corpses are
put on display. Rwanda’s memorials to 1994 are a demonstration of
the country’s commitment to remembering and is usefully described
by Nicholas Mirzoeff as a ‘performative network of visibility’ (‘Invisible
Again’ 1). Of the many memorials, a select number explicitly invite
foreign visitors. These sites are charged with both explaining the origin
and details of the genocide as well as honouring its victims: visitors
are asked to enter into the space of the dead in order to bear witness
to their loss. Even for foreign tourists, such spectatorship is in no way
passive, neutral or innocent. Through the emphasis at each site on
Western complicity in the genocide (through passive inaction), foreign
visitors’ presence is highly charged and spectators are strongly impli-
cated as interested audience.
The analysis of Murambi and other sites in Rwanda is prefaced by a
discussion of American playwright Erik Enh’s play about a Rwandan
nun convicted of genocidal crimes, Maria Kizito. Discussion of the
text helps to give context for the aesthetic-ethical considerations that
follow. Reflecting on the role of artists and audience, Ehn continually
returns to the term ‘witness’, describing the role as one of social and
personal commitment. Like Diana Taylor, Ehn understands witness
as transferable, commenting at a post-show talkback that theatrical
performance may, ‘expand the circle of witnesses’. Yet, as Ehn himself
cautions, we must be wary of the dubious pleasures of assuming such a
role – critical reflection is imperative. I have deliberately steered away
from employing the term throughout the book precisely because of
the very problems that Ehn points to and in other chapters I have
suggested, drawing on the work of Alice Rayner, that the function of
spectators at scenes of past violence is one of theatrical listening. Here
I would like to finally return to the question of witness and to inter-
rogate it in a specifically theatrical context. Might theatrical witness
function not as a weak corollary to action-in-the-world, but as a
powerful vehicle for becoming present to the suffering of others?
Through suggesting the presence of those absent and asking us to be
present to this loss, both the memorials and Ehn’s play bring to the
fore the fact that although we are always separated from others and
cannot share their private suffering, we are at the same time bound to
them for their very suffering constructs us as subjects. To be present
is to recognize this fact and to let it, as Ehn writes, ‘operate as a lever
into the future’ (‘Lever’).
Maria Kizito: understanding the connectedness

of the world
In 1994 a massacre took place at Sovu Monastery near Butare in Rwanda.

Over 6000 local Tutsis who sought shelter in the monastery were killed,
either by machete, gunfire or burning. In Belgium, six years later, two
nuns, Sister Maria Kizito and her Superior, Gertrude Mukangangwa, along
with two militia men who lived near the monastery, were convicted of
crimes against humanity. Kizito was found to have provided the militia
with the gasoline that was used to burn alive refugees who had barricaded
themselves inside a garage. The church-abetted massacre at Sovu was not
an isolated one. The shock of this complicity – ‘Nuns watched from the
terrace and served tea to the militias during their breaks’ (Edmondson, 65)
was the impetus for Ehn’s work, Maria Kizito. Ehn’s research, which he
makes note of in the introduction to the play in Skloot’s edited collec-
tion of genocide plays, included ‘witness accounts from African Rights’
Obstruction of Justice: The Nuns of Sovu, along with material from Maria’s
trial’ (qtd. in Skloot, The Theatre of Genocide 178). I saw Maria Kizito when
it was performed at LaMaMa theatre in New York in 2012. It was directed
by Emily Mendelsohn and performed by a cast of Ugandan and American
actors. The performance was part of Soulographie, a cycle of 18 of Ehn’s
plays written over the last 20 years, each genocide related. None of the
plays are straight documentary-style theatre, although some draw on
testimonial evidence, but are rather a particularly singular investigation
of genocide. Indeed, at a Souolographie talkback Ehn described the plays
as both making his personal experience public property and as ‘how his-
tory happened to me’. Such self-aware subjectivity is at the heart of Maria
Kizito, which is as much an exploration of the desire to know genocide as
it is of the world of one of its perpetrators.
The play is complex, both in terms of its subject matter and its
demanding language. Ehn has called the work a meditation rather
than a play (Ehn, ‘Maria Kizito’ 178) and it is perhaps best described
as an abstracted and elliptical composition of dramatic choric poetry
(Figure 6.1). The play requires nine performers to play the parts of:
convicted nuns, Maria and Gertrude; Teresa, an American nun who
comes to observe the Belgian trial; Rekeraho, a militia man (this actor
also provides the voice of the Radio); six sisters; and a variety of diffe-
rent refugees and survivors. The script calls for singing, chanting, pup-
pets and other heightening effects, which Ehn indicates should create
a ‘liturgical’ effect (178). The work is divided into 12 sections. Ehn uses
elements of the Liturgy of the Hours to structure these divisions, evoking
the daily routines of the nuns. Each of the 12 sections opens with
prayers lead by Teresa. The first begins, ‘Third Nocturn of Vigil. Sisters
Pray from the Bible of Genocide’ (183). The Hours are woven around
a secondary temporal framework that elaborates the actual events of
the massacre, which is where testimonial voices infiltrate the dramatic
action. The effect is a dizzying interweaving of past and present. The
third spatio-temporal arena of the drama is that of Belgium and the
trial. The play moves between these different times and places within
sections as well as between them.
The interweaving of different temporalities is mirrored in a layering
of different modes of language, including: the unadorned language of
testimony, the ornate language of prayer, and the poetically heightened
prose of the sisters. These different modes continually bump up against
one another. For example, the testimony of survivor-refugees concern-
ing breaking into the monastery complex is interrupted by the chorus
of sisters: ‘Tooth, crack on rain’s cold sunk Mouth all thumbs, Baby,
tight, broken breath’ (185). Later a chorus of rain appears, telling the
story of the refugees from its own perspective. Poetic language gains its
force by way of its contrast with the plain-speaking testimony of survi-
vors: ‘She locked all the doors. We tried to climb in. Pregnant women
were climbing. Others managed to get through the cypress hedge in
between the barbed wire’ (185). Exchanges between the characters of
Maria and Teresa, take place at a poetic level that collapses the distance
between them in space and time. For example:
TERESA: In a hundred days a million

In one hundred years millions, millions
If my number seems low, add from adjacent holes.
I pray to Maria
I pray to Maria Kizito
[…]
MARIA: Go to hell.
I have ate my fill. I am
Original from this hill.
Tutsi, Tutsi – easy death

Died too quick, ha ha ha…
(Maria Kizito 209)
The use of poetry is also for Teresa a way of finding answers. Kizito’s
experience is inaccessible and remains hidden – Teresa lacks the language
Figure 6.1 Maria Kizito by Erik Ehn. Director: Emily Mendelsohn. Actor: Esther
Tebandeke. La MaMa, New York, 2012 (Photograph: John Eckert)
to decipher it. Further, she does not know how to use the language that
she does have to express the scraps and fragments that she has stitched
together. In the face of inexplicability she turns to poetry, as does Ehn,
as a way of trying to make an account of it.
Kizito is hiding. She is hiding from me. I am hiding. I am hiding from

language. I speak no Dutch or French or Kinyarwandan […].
I am ashamed of poetry but it is how I believe in anything. I hide

by counting according to base poetry rather than rational numbers.
(192–3)
For Ehn the ritualistic and heightened aspect of the play was very
important. He commented that through it, ‘a change is made between
the visible and invisible. Something you weren’t paying attention to is
with you’ (Ehn, personal interview). Mendelsohn further remarked that
as the play advances, ‘we move from outside to inside the genocide’
(Mendelsohn, personal interview).
As outsider, Teresa stands as a proxy for our own interest in the geno-
cidal figure of Kizito:
TERESA (to her unseen superior): May I have your permission? Your per-
mission to travel? To travel to Belgium?
To see the young nuns? My father will
pay. May I deceive you? May I leave
aside the veil and stay in a narrow
hotel near a construction site? May
I take an unscheduled leave to see
Maria Kizito? May I watch and dis-
cover what our sister was thinking?
There are enough dead finally to make
one wonder. She is enough an indi-
vidual to expose something in myself,
or, well, someone nearly like me.
(Maria Kizito 181)
Teresa’s opening text, which is marked by ambivalence, illustrates the

concern Ehn articulates in the epigraph to this chapter. While Teresa
yearns to understand her connection to Kizito, the visit is at the same
time a secret that must be withheld: fear, shame and desire comingle
as Teresa sits in the courtroom gallery. In an interview Ehn described
Teresa as a foil for Maria’s mind, but also an expression of his own
encounter with Sovu’s bloody history. He called the play both confession
and self-examination – a kind of anxious contemplation that takes on
the moral confusion and dubious allure of genocide as subject (Ehn,
personal interview). Speaking to Edmondson, Ehn stated that the purpose
of the play was, as noted earlier, to let us be with Maria:
The play is not meant as an explanation – not even as a condemna-

tion […]. It’s meant to provide a space of time in which we can be
with Maria. I try not to judge her guilt. I try to let us be with her in
her guilt, because her kind of guilt is a key to understanding who we
are in the world today.
(qtd. in Edmondson, 70)
The time that Ehn provides for the audience to ‘be with Maria’ is signifi-
cant precisely because of its ambivalence, which Edmondson describes
as an ‘aesthetics of discomfort’:
As it struggles to speak this particular example of unspeakable vio-

lence, Maria Kizito generates an ‘aesthetics of discomfort’ through a
systematic dismantling of boundaries between nightmare and reality,
poetry and fact, the quotidian and the extreme. The play’s unique
poetics of violence illuminates the intricate political web in which
narratives of the 1994 genocide are entangled and categories of sur-
vivor, bystander, and murderer intertwine.
(66)
Edmondson’s turn of phrase suggests a willingness to attend to the unre-

solved and difficult aspects of the Rwandan genocide, which Ehn does
by deliberately confusing observer and perpetrator in the text as a way
of destabilizing the event as distant and other – by making it present.
Using a courtroom, a highly codified social sphere, as a theatrical
setting is a common dramatic device, which implicates the audience as
either jury or interested public. In Ehn’s play the courtroom is more a
point of departure and contemplation than a literal setting, however.
The device allows Ehn to shift between past and present and to evoke
multiple voices, which means a number of different ways of being with
Maria: Teresa watches Maria, the refugees relate their testimony directly
to the audience who function as juror/spectators, Maria and Gertrude
watch the rising violence outside, refugees watch Maria, waiting for her
to act, and so on. Maria herself even comments on the fact that she is
watched by Teresa:
([Teresa]Cleans her glasses. Maria cleans her glasses too, and studies,
Teresa.)
MARIA: She watches me sit in my station: the defendant’s glass box
Watches me in glasses behind the glass,
Watches from my left.
(Maria Kizito 189)
The chorus of sisters also comment on Teresa’s watching.
The young white nun sits to observe Kizito. Kizito and codefendants
hear testimony while secured in a big glass box. There are men on trial
too, but these are not – strange enough for Teresa, not as strange as
family. Teresa doesn’t know there are Hutus and Tutsis in the audience –
she doesn’t yet understand the connectedness of the world.
(216)
Although the space of the trial is evoked in a fairly abstracted manner, it

still functions to implicate the audience within its sphere: in seeking out
the trial, Teresa’s attendance mirrors that of the audience to the play –
spectators to genocide. More importantly than functioning as court-
room attendants who watch the acting out of testimonial material, the
audience watches the act of an outsider attempting to bear witness and
is implicated in the ambivalences of this act.
Writing about the instability of appropriated witness, Caroline
Wake acknowledges the power of the desire to have seen, which is
what characterizes Teresa: ‘In our absence, we wish that we were pre-
sent and sometimes we wish with such force and imagination that
for a moment we might really believe that we were witnesses’ (Wake).
The transformative desire, which causes one to feel that one really
was there, is what characterizes Teresa. Section 8 of the play is called
‘April 23–25. Massacres: Second Wave’. Teresa begins the action with
prayers, stating, ‘Praying Vespers I saw’ (206; emphasis mine), situat-
ing herself at the scene of the crime. Teresa’s desire to see transports
her to Sovu in a way that upturns what Wake would describe as the
distance in space and time of tertiary witness. Teresa’s participation
in what took place at Sovu is given dramatic concretization through
Ehn’s designation of her as the figure that leads the nuns in daily
prayers, and it is from this position that she observes much of the
action. Mendelsohn also commented that the production attempted
to position Teresa so that she ‘listens from within’ rather than sees
from outside, which her staging supported. Teresa was subtly placed
within the action at Sovu, making her able to ‘touch the world she’s in’
(personal interview).
Ehn’s dramatic construction of Teresa as both imagined bystander
and substitutional actor in the genocidal event highlights the ethical
problems that arise from the desire to bear witness. Through watching,
Teresa is absorbed into the sphere of violence in a way that suggests she
must now be at least partially answerable for it. As a watcher, Teresa
also points to the sense in which, as the Kigali Genocide Memorial

Centre states, ‘the world withdrew and watched as a million people
were slaughtered.’ There is no neutrality in the act of watching – it is
a highly charged act. Having seen or heard, even if this watching or
listening takes place through aesthetic substitution, one is implicated.
As audience we are drawn into the sphere of the genocidal aftermath
and asked to reflect on what relationship and responsibility we might
take for it; that is, we are called to address, in the sense meant by Butler
when she writes: ‘we come to exist, as it were, in the moment of being
addressed.’ This address comes from ‘elsewhere, sometimes a name-
less elsewhere, by which our obligations are articulated and pressed
upon us’ (130).
The final moments of the play reinforce the ethical address made to
the audience by foregrounding the issue of responsibility. In the section
‘Old’, at the end of the play, we see Maria continue her denial of her
role in the killing. Her last line in the play is one of self-defence and,
implicitly, also one which denies her culpability: ‘No – they lie – we
tried to save lives’ (220). She is finally rendered as an abject figure,
unwilling and unable to face her violent crimes. This demonstration
of the unclaimed responsibility of the perpetrator raised the problem of
how responsibility should be assumed for those who have most barbari-
cally denied the fundamental right of existence to others. The question
is pressingly explored through the character of Maria, who is ultimately
(as she has been throughout) presented as much as pathetically human
as strangely monstrous. This humanization of the perpetrator, and the
way in which we are asked to be with her, is important. What Ehn cre-
ates in his poeticization of her violent thinking and action (and which
Mendelsohn strongly realized in her production), is something of the
affect of Maria’s interior world. He attempts to bring us inside this world
not so that we may figure it out, but rather so that we may feel its force
as a way of recognizing that, in this instance, the impossible did indeed
become possible, and humanly so. In the sense that Levinas describes
the face of the other making a claim upon us, the theatrical invocation
of Maria’s face does just that. This claim is not easily responded to.
Teresa’s last line suggests this. After breaking bread and offering a prayer,
she states ‘There is nothing –‘ (Maria Kizito 220). This ‘nothing’ is left
unexplained; nothing else to say, nothing else to do, nothing in the
places where Teresa searched for answers.
The play finally ends, however, not with Maria or Teresa, but with a
refugee ‘re-enacting a memory’ that is cut off amid violent action. Maria
is described as ‘shadowing’ the refugee, she becomes the ghost who

haunts remembering:
REFUGEE (re-enacting a memory,

Maria shadows her): One of the militiamen at the roadblock
knocked me to the ground with a blow
from his club. The militia then stripped me
completely naked. One of them took me
for his wife. He – [The End].
(220)
It is significant that after the dense poetry of the text, the play ends
with a piece of testimony. The story, however, is halted mid-action,
leaving the audience with an abrupt violent image. Ehn’s deliberate
interruption of the text suggests an endlessness to the violence: because
the image is not completed, it continues, violence becomes itself tex-
tual. Read another way, the interruption signals enough. It is a reaction
against continual reiteration of violence. For me, the interruption
is most powerful in the sense that it leaves the audience suspended.
Spectators must confront the unclaimed responsibility at the heart of
the drama. In being with Maria, we are asked to face her and, through
this substitutive taking on, asked to reflect on what responsibility we
might bear for her. The question is a painful one.
Ehn’s play is a challenging work, both in terms of its subject and the
form that it takes. In its repudiation of a straightforward plot, stable
identifiable characters or clearly defined environments, the play signals
the very limits and difficulties of constructing what Lehmann calls a
dramatic ‘fictive cosmos’ (31) that might contain the excesses of the
genocidal subject at hand. Whilst an identifiable character whose jour-
ney is plotted from beginning to end, Teresa is more significantly a free-
floating proxy for the spectator who calls into question our attempts to
‘attend’ to the catastrophe as much as the event itself. She is a tourist
of sorts, whose depiction usefully illustrates the ambivalence of the-
atrical witness. In the end the work’s desire to bring us inside Maria’s
world is tempered by the limits of our ability to do so. These limits are
reflexively recognized within the play itself. Not only do Maria and
Teresa themselves directly comment on this, but the construction and
content of the play’s material consciously explores such limit points.
Ehn described the complex language as having the feeling of always
going around a corner, of meaning always moving over the crest of the
hill (personal interview). In describing the scene in which a refugee is

overcome by a personified fire character, Mendelsohn described the
challenge as that of trying to stage ‘something as if you can’t quite
see far enough in to reach… something breaking down on the inside’
(Mendelsohn, personal interview).
REFUGEE: I do not recall my child’s name to call it. The woman next
to me has choked to death on smoke. I remember the name
of my child and cannot call.
FIRE: Move or don’t move. I can take your place.
REFUGEE: Every system in my body created to signal pain flashes,
taking pictures, bulbs in perpetual bursts till pupils explode
too. I have to let this go. I cannot talk to you anymore.
FIRE: I am the white at your lips. I will hear your every whisper.
REFUGEE: What they’re saying is right. I am not right for this job.
FIRE: What job?
REFUGEE: The job of feeling this pain.
FIRE: You are not expected to do well. You are expected to die.
REFUGEE: What do you get?
FIRE: A space in which to be until you are not.
(Maria Kizito 203)
In this sense the play interrogates the responsibilities of exteriority:

what does it mean to arrive as a belated witness to the aftermath of
genocide (as Ehn and Mendelsohn have done, both having spent
extensive periods in Rwanda and the surrounding region). Reflecting
on Teresa, Mendelsohn framed the character not as choosing to see, but
choosing to reject not seeing. In the end this seems the most pertinent
ethical question, in the sense that Western nations were very much
criticized for looking away as the Rwandan genocide unfolded.
The intense theatricality of the play, which comes from the disjunc-
tions of time and poetic language, seem to be a response to a question
that Ehn himself proposes: ‘How does fiction represent a very real reality?
What does it have to offer that adds to direct testimony?’ (‘A Space for
Truth’ 72). The play does not attempt to depict events ‘realistically’, but
rather filters what is known of those events – evidence gathered from
the testimony of primary witnesses and made public through the trial
process – through the imagination of Maria’s state of mind. The work
deliberately complicates the contingencies of both witnessing, through
Maria, and spectatorship, through Teresa. While the witness, forever
bound to their secret and to solitude, is a forlorn figure in Derrida’s
essay, ‘Poetics and Politics of Witnessing’ (Sovereignties in Question 96),

in Ehn’s play, Teresa yearns to have been present: presence is prized.
Teresa attempts to make herself present by attending the trial, where
she can observe Maria bear witness. Ehn responds to Teresa’s desire by
allowing its force to imaginatively situate her at the scene that Maria
describes. In making such a shift, as noted, Teresa becomes implicated
in violence enacted. That is, in transgressing, in breaking the prohibi-
tion of witnessing for or on behalf of, she herself becomes a figure on
trial. Finally, however, the questions that Teresa seeks answers to remain
unanswered. Maria’s testimony cannot bring to presence the genocide
in such a way that makes it understandable. The poetry of the play
breaks with linearity and causality – testimony is finally unending and
irresolvable. Ehn’s play, like Akropolis, shows that the pains of history
can never be proven in the sense meant by Derrida. What is required,
rather, is belief and faith. Derrida writes that the testimony given by
the witness, as distinct from proof or certitude, offers belief as its only
response – ‘you have to believe me’:
‘I bear witness’ – that means: I affirm (rightly or wrongly, but in all

good faith, sincerely) that that was or is present to me, in space and
time (thus sense-perceptible), and although you do not have access
to it, not the same access, you, my addressees, you have to believe me,
because I engage myself to tell you the truth, I am already engaged
in it, I tell you that I am telling you the truth. Believe me. You have
to believe me.
(Sovereignties in Question 76)
Such an exhortation appeals to ‘an act of faith’ (79). Maria’s testimony,

which is a denial of responsibility, might be understood as an act of
bad faith (both literally and figuratively). Yet at the same time, Derrida
points out that all witness remains alone and without proof and that
even the perjurer upholds the sanctity of the oath, in that the oath does
not mean to offer proof, but to bear witness to one’s own lack. Similarly,
Alice Rayner writes that ‘The demand to remember, however, cannot
depend of facts as they are written, recorded and archived’ (Ghosts
xxvii) and urges that we must open ourselves to the ghosts that exceed
the law, and, indeed, prevent them from becoming domesticated by
the law. That is, in the case of either Maria or those who survived what
took place at the monastery, none can speak on behalf of the dead. The
poetic text, however, brushes as closely up to this limit as possible, most
remarkably in the scene where Fire speaks to its victim. Of witness, Ehn
at a talkback commented that the outcome of witness is to ‘cause belief

in others’. The witnessing role of the artist or the audience, therefore,
is ‘to believe that something has happened and to become part of that
story, to put ourselves in relationship with what happened’. Ehn’s play
foregrounds the role of spectators within the process of confronting the
aftermath of genocide, recognizing the uneasiness of the act of imagi-
ned witness at the same time as affirming its necessity, nonetheless:
The essential action of the artist, the audience, is to see, to experi-

ence, to witness (and deriving from witness to give testimony), to
trust.
Seeing can be a moral act: we consent to take in, we draw our
attention to focus, we turn our heads and open our eyes – we change
our own place to put ourselves squarely in the presence of a unique
event. We invest will.
In seeing in this way, deliberately committing to a new perspective,
we allow ourselves to be shaped by the event – to be created by it.
(‘A Space for Truth’ 36)
In describing the Soulographie event as a whole, Ehn remarked that the

presence of the audience – by this I mean being present to rather than
simply at the performance – served to expand the circle of witness to
the genocide. At the talkback, he further commented that ‘to witness
is to promise […] to be an ambassador for what you have heard’, and
that the event itself asks the audience to ‘enter into something that asks
us to change our lives’. In an earlier online comment, he wrote: ‘Theatre
isn’t make-believe, it’s make-belief. The making results in belief – which
is social, invisible, permanently imperilled, and is the fulcrum essential
for the past to operate as lever into the future’ (‘Lever’). Like Jill Dolan,
Ehn identifies theatre’s utopianism in its inter-subjective aspect (Dolan
471). None of the Soulographie plays depicted idealized futures but
instead gathered together communities of artists and audiences who
were asked to make the commitment to do this work in the future as
well as in the present through allowing what they had seen to shape
their subjectivity.
Murambi: the affect of the dead
Rwanda’s memorial sites play an important role in local community life

by both remembering and acknowledging the past and providing a space
within which the commitment to a different future may be regularly
renewed. They are also sites that invite an international audience and,
as already noted, include the role of Western nations within their nar-
rative. When I spoke to artist Carole Karemera about how Rwandans
perceive tourists’ engagement with the memorials she commented, ‘It’s
not about sharing suffering, which is impossible, but about knowing’,
a role that is both politically and aesthetically distinct from the task
for locals (Karemera, personal interview). What is striking about the
memorials is the highly affective nature of such ‘knowing’. To varying
degrees the sites intertwine educative and affective or poetic strands.
The Kigali Genocide Memorial Centre leans most towards the former
and Murambi to the latter. The question that arises, taking into account
Karemera’s statement, concerns how tourists engage with the sites’
affective aspects. What does the experience of witnessing the preserved
bodies of the dead at Murambi, for example, mean when the cultural
and historical realities of those bodies is so distant from us? James
Thompson writes that ‘by yielding before the display, something of the
power of performance outside a communicative paradigm is hinted at’ (95).
How might such yielding avoid the very surrender of accountability or
the ethically useless (in the sense meant by Levinas) ‘suffering of seeing’
that Ehn flags in his reflection on witness? In order to reflect on this
questions, I will briefly discuss the Kigali, Nyamata and Ntarama memo-
rials before focusing in the main on Murambi, which most explicitly
brings visitors into contact with the dead.
The Kigali Genocide Memorial is the central memorial in Rwanda.
Funded in large part by the UK-based Aegis Trust, the comprehensive
Memorial is home to the mass graves of some 250,000 victims, the
Documentation Centre, visitor exhibition and Education Department.
In addition to depicting the events of 1994, it also features exhibitions
on genocides in other parts of the world, connecting its own narra-
tive and purpose to a global context. The site is divided into the three
main sections: the outside gardens, the main exhibition concerning
the Rwandan genocide, and the exhibits depicting foreign genocides,
which are housed upstairs. The grounds are comprised of a number of
highly symbolic gardens such as the Garden of Unity and the Garden
of Division and so on, and the mass graves, which are comprised of a
number of ground-level concrete tombs. The exhibition inside is com-
prehensive in its narrative of the genocide, which clearly locates its
genesis in colonial racial policy. It details the events that led up to the
killings, the actions (or inactions) of Western countries, and the after-
math of the slaughter. The manner in which international tourists are
asked to acknowledge the genocide is charged by the ways in which they
are drawn into the narrative of the conflict through the emphasis on the
fact that ‘the world watched’. Subtly, this phrase asks questions about the
watching that tourists now perform: they are ambivalently positioned,
both invited to see, and implicated within that which they are seeing.
Following the historical narrative there are three more poetic and
affective displays, each housed in their own round room. The first
features multitudes of photographs clustered together in a series of
vestibule-like spaces. The photographs, provided by the families of
victims, are largely informal snaps, which emphasize the ordinariness
of the people who died – that is, their likeness rather than their diffe-
rence. The affect is quite distinct from that at Tuol Sleng. The pictures
powerfully illustrate not violence, but the scope of what was lost by
showing the time before the genocide. The faces appeal to us not in
the sense that the inmate processing photographs at S21 captured the
perspective of the perpetrator, but rather by showing the innocent
exchange of gazes between family members. The pictures show their
subjects before dehumanization and restore this as their primary iden-
tity (Figure 6.2).
The second room, dark and dimly lit, features bones and skulls of the
dead. I notice that many skulls have been broken and rejoined. Some
remain shattered, missing parts. The room is the antithesis of the previ-
ous: here, all personal identity has been definitely removed. In its layout
of rooms the memorial illustrated the dialectical nature of the task of
remembering: the first room restored identity to the victims of genocide,
whereas the second provided a sombre illustration of the lack that
prompted the restoration. The dead are forever hidden from us and yet
require us to continually bring them to presence in order to acknowledge
such loss. The third room features belongings of the victims. The clothes
are hung in shapes that strongly suggest the bodies of absent wearers.
The clothes do not so much represent the dead as signify themselves.
They are objects that once lived so intimately with the deceased but are
now set at odds with one another, shirts and pants hung on awkward
angles, divided by the loss of the unifying body of the wearer.
The three round rooms, adjacent to one another, are connected by
a central round space, chasing each other as if, like Ehn’s play, mean-
ing is always just around a corner you are forever turning. To return to
the quote by Carole Karemera, ‘It’s not about sharing suffering, which
is impossible, but about knowing.’ The memorial at Kigali asks us to
reflect on what it means to live in a genocidal world and, at the same
time, preserves the uniqueness of Rwandan suffering. For foreign tour-
ists, the site importantly tells the story of the genocide and attempts
Figure 6.2 Kigali Genocide Memorial, Rwanda, 2013 (Photograph: Emma Willis)
to evoke the scale of the loss both through historical facts, personal
accounts and poetic acts of remembrance. The latter two, as Karemera
notes, do not ask us to share the suffering, but to know it at an emo-
tional level. Such knowledge does not make us bearers of victims’ pain,
but rather asks us to let the painfulness of this knowledge affect us. The
distinction is a fine but important one.
The Nyamata and Ntarama Memorials are located within close prox-
imity to one another, about 30 kilometres east of Kigali, each housed in
the churches in which Tutsi fleeing the genocide sought refuge. While
different in scale, their presentational strategies are similar. Visitors
are lead through the site by a guide, who explains what took place
there and puts this in the broader context of the causes and scope of
the genocide. The smaller Ntarama, which was a branch church staffed
by priests only on Sundays, is the rougher of the two. Similarly to the
memorial in Kigali, the main church building contains the skulls and
bones of the dead as well as victims’ clothing. My guide pointed out to
me a sharp metal blade still embedded in one of the skulls. Other coffins
lay around the church. The guide explained that the dead were still in
the process of being buried. In a small outhouse that used to contain
the church kitchen, the guide points to a large darkly stained area on
the wall and explains that this is the blood from where children’s skulls
were smashed again the wall as a means of murder. Nyamata was a
larger church and is somewhat more formally presented than Ntarama.
Its most striking feature is the piles of clothes contained within the large
main building. Row after row of pews is covered with the musty cloth-
ing of the dead. The sheer mass of it all makes you shudderingly aware
of how many people had crammed themselves into the building, vainly
hoping it would provide a place of refuge.
On the way home from both memorials the local driver said to me,
‘you can see the pictures in the book, but to see the scene is important.’
Tours of both churches are always guided by narrators, who not only
detail the events that took place there but also provide a broader context
for the genocide itself. But this kind of factual information is only one
part of what the tour provides. The other is the affect of ‘being there’.
This is a kind of non-intellectual knowing that settles into your bones,
imprinting itself there. There is a difference between being told of chil-
dren’s heads being smashed against church walls as a method of killing
them and seeing the wall still marked by darkened blood stains. The
sensation is sickening, overwhelming. The churches induced a kind of
claustrophobia in me – it was difficult to remain present. It was also
difficult to hold at bay the sense of shame incurred in looking at the
cracked skulls and piles of clothes that signified the sheer numbers of
people who had died. In death they were anonymous and yet painfully
exposed to a public gaze that framed the instant in which they were
most degraded. I asked the guide at Ntarama why the bones of the dead
had not been buried. He remarked that while the burial process was still
ongoing, some bones would always be left present as a reminder of what
happened. From beyond the grave, the dead are called to testify to the
genocide by way of their bones. What is most fearful about this is their
depersonalization. Skulls are lined up in neat rows, distinguished only
by variances in fracture or size. Bones are piled on top of one another,
no longer individuals but an assemblage that utterly undoes our under-
standing of the human. As outsiders to the genocide the distance we
must travel to identify the bodies is great and the ethics of attempt-
ing to do so precarious. By their presence at sites such as Ntarama and
Nyamata, tourists visibly perform the role of Western outsiders who are
now made contrite by their acknowledgement of the genocide. Such a
role infinitely complicates any individual or personal experience, which
can never be taken on its own terms but, as Ehn writes, is part of allow-
ing ourselves to be shaped by what we see involves seeing ourselves as
part of the story.
If Kigali bases itself on providing an authorized account of the
genocide, and Ntarama and Nyamata present themselves as evidence-as-
memorial, then Murambi, with its lime-preserved bodies most explicitly
seeks to unscore the continuing presence of the genocide in Rwandan
life. This is not a buried history. As with other tourist sites considered,
I suggest that theatricality arises through the ways in which we map an
affective presence onto the bodies, something that Thompson describes
as paradoxical liveness (103). At the same time, I would like to return
to the proposition put at the beginning of this book, which is that such
a theatrical affect can be usefully compared to Levinas’s ethical propos-
als. That is, if, as Levinas suggests, ‘the human consists in opening itself
to the other of the other, in being preoccupied with his death’, might
the imaginative aspect of theatrical affectivity – which is the work of
the spectator – be understood in ethical terms? That is, is it, in fact,
theatricality that makes ethics possible in a situation such as Murambi?
To work through these questions my own responses to the site will
be contrasted with two others: an article from Australian artist and
academic, Jeff Stewart (‘Being Near: Visiting the Rwandan genocide
memorial site at Murambi, Gikongoro’) and James Thompson’s already
cited book chapter (‘Academic Scriptwriters and Bodily Affects’).
Murambi was the scene of the murder of somewhere between 40,000
and 50,000 local Tutsi. People seeking shelter from the killings were
advised by officials to go to the former technical school site, where they
were told they would be safe. However, this was merely a ploy to round
up as many people in one place as possible. The buildings sit isolated
on top of a hill and, once assembled, refugees were effectively entrapped

and left vulnerable to attack. Water supplies were cut off so that by
the time the killers arrived people were already weak with hunger and
thirst. Despite repelling initial attacks, on 21 April Interahamwe and
others managed to kill virtually all of those at Murambi by mixed means
of gunfire, grenades, machetes and so on. The next day bulldozers were
used to carve out mass graves into which the bodies were shovelled and
buried. A year later, Government authorities dug up the graves. While
many bodies had decomposed, some 18,000 were able to be reinterred
in the memorial gravesite that now sits in front of the main memorial
building. Another 1000 bodies were preserved with lime and are dis-
played in a series of classrooms, which sit adjacent to the main building.
Such display makes Murambi unique amongst Rwanda’s memorials.
The exhibition inside describes the bodies as providing, ‘a witness to
the horror that occurred on Murambi hill’. In his account, Thompson,
as noted already, writes, ‘By being on open display, an awful past could
bear upon the present – they were paradoxically “live”’ (Performance
Affects 103).
Visitors to Murambi begin by viewing the exhibition located in the
main building. The exhibition is similar in character and content to the
Kigali memorial and also developed by staff of the Aegis Trust. It takes
visitors through a series of displays that give the background to the
genocide, detail its enactment and consider its consequences. As with
Kigali, the memorial confronts the role of the UN and Western nations.
Exhibition texts state:
The Tutsi genocide constitutes an irreversible failure for the inter-

national community, which carries a heavy responsibility […] [B]y
their passive observation and lack of reaction United Nations Peace
Keeping soldiers and various diplomats became accomplices to the
massacres, which they could have acted to prevent or stop.
It is worth noting that both Stewart and Thompson’s visits took place
before the exhibition opened in 2011. While each of their accounts
focus on the affect of the bodies, the present exhibition tempers this
in the sense that it grounds their presence in a political reality that
involves Western tourists. As visitors leave the exhibition, the final text
reads: ‘Now that you have heard the story of Murambi, what is in your
heart and what are you moved to do?’ From there we moved to the
preserved bodies.
The first thing that hit me was the smell. Inside the small dark rooms
acrid lime conspires with the shock of the bodies and it is difficult not
to recoil. The remains are entirely white save for some small patches of
dark hair on a few of the skulls. There are adults and children, all tucked
in tightly together as they would have been in the earth. The figures
are frozen not so much in the moment of their death as in the process
of their visible disappearance. Bodies appear shrivelled, flesh lost from
bones, expressions impossible to decipher. Their presence unsteadies
the gravity of the viewer. They serve us by remaining suspended between
death and rest and in doing so shame us. Writing of this suspension,
Thompson employs the image of an archaeological dig within which
tourists take on the role of forensic investigators:
These bodies […] seemed to suspend traditional investigatory modes

of memory and reconciliation. They were presented as a provisional,
half-finished exhibition: a mid-dig display. They appeared to be a
frozen, epistemological project, stuck in a limelight, ready for a case
to be made, but with no evidence that a case was being made […].
Here the bodies did not appear to be coerced into a narrative or easily
co-opted into a memory programme.
(93)
Unlike the exhibition inside, which provides context and explanation,

the bodies thwart such understanding. They are exhibit – evidence –
and witness. The bodies both signify, or point to, those who once
inhabited them and at the same time are those victims. They disturb
the normative rules of displaying death by exposing its materiality
and its persistence. For Thompson, the suspension of the usual inter-
ment of the bodies means that, ‘We do not stand mute and still in
front of [them], but question our ethical relation to this death’ (94).
As Gertrude, my guide, lead me through the rooms I was overwhelmed
by questions. How do we conduct ourselves in the presence of the
bodies? Do we stop and acknowledge each figure? As we progressed
from room to room it progressively became more difficult to enter
each one. I wondered what it was that I might see in one that I had not
already seen in another – that is, my repeated looking seeming exces-
sive. But at the same time, I thought, did this perceived similarity not
reflect the very sense in which the individual identities of the victims
were destroyed? After a time, I began to feel hesitant as the question –
what do you hope to see? – made itself more pressingly felt. We perceive
that something is expressed through the bodies that is more than

the work of representation, or what Thompson calls the ‘communicative
paradigm’, but what is this ‘more than’? Via embalmed remains, the
dead are at once both powerfully present, viscerally demanding, and at
the same time silent, signifying a fundamental absence. The ‘presence’
of the dead derives not so much from an auratic quality that the
corpses possess, but rather from the palpable affect we map onto
the bodies as a way of combating the absolute senselessness of their
deaths.
In his description of being a tourist at Murambi, Jeff Stewart writes:
It is difficult to comprehend that you are amongst the dead; but at

the same time those who have been killed are so present that they
manage to make you as present as they. The shocking acuteness of
this coupling is something I am not familiar with.
In a theatrical reversal, Stewart gives the paradoxical presence of the

dead precedence, emphasizing the claim that they make upon him. As
Butler suggests, ‘we come to exist, as it were, in the moment of being
addressed’ (130). Further, as a means of responding to the ambivalence
of his touristic perspective, Stewart assigns himself the role of witness:
‘They and I coincided in this uncanny space, unsettling my understand-
ing of what a home and a school may be. I was at once displaced, but
simultaneously found in place by my act of complicity, which was to
bear witness.’ What differentiates Stewart’s use of the term ‘witness’
from that of Kurash’s Associated Press headline – ‘Tourists visit genocide
memorials in Rwanda: Travellers can bear witness to the mass slaughter
of innocents’ – (cited earlier) is the way he connects it to complicity,
here understood as the acceptance of responsibility for having seen, in
the sense of ‘the world watched’, as touched on earlier. The dialectical
tension between opening oneself to the evacuation of meaning on the
one hand, and resisting this unsettlement through locating oneself as a
witness on the other, is marked throughout Stewart’s account:
Standing here in the doorway of this classroom there is a bodily

sensation of falling into the racks of the dead, of tilting forward, or
backward, recognizing that you too are this person this victim and
that you too are the one who killed. Being so close to death, witness-
ing this smell of decay I fall into the bodies lying before me. There
is no escaping. I am displaced, and not allowed any comfortable
re-settling, to anywhere that can be named.
He describes an uneasy form of spectatorship in which responsibility

is problematized in the extreme – ‘you too are the one who killed.’ His
observation of the fact that the bodies invoke both the dead as well as
their killers is important, as it reveals the fragility of the viewer’s pers-
pective. It also clarifies why he reiterates himself in the role of witness –
it seems the only way of responding to the extremity of the claims that
he imagines the dead make upon him.
The susceptibility and contingency of perspective is the central point
here. Whilst ethical responsibility may, as meant by Levinas, precede
all else, in order to make such an ethics manifest, effort is required. The
efforts that Stewart makes are significantly theatrical ones, by which
he attempts to take hold of the ambivalences of being a spectator at
Murambi in a way that makes his presence there ethical. The contin-
gency of these theatrical efforts is particularly apparent in one of his
reflections, in which he notes:
There are a number of long dormitory-style buildings, some closer

together; others set apart, each divided into six classrooms. The first
red door of the first classroom in the nearest dormitory is unlocked,
and then another and another. Bodies have been placed onto
racks, hundreds and hundreds of bodies, all treated with lime, their
stretched and dried flesh retaining what is still their humanness.
Some have tufts of hair. One woman wears a blue dress, and a child,
probably two years old, is clothed in an ashen red t-shirt with a faded
yellow border around the neck and sleeves. I realize while writing
this that I added the yellow edging to the t-shirt, making it one I have
had for many years and wear myself.
His perception of the t-shirt reveals an identificatory process.

Significantly, this happens at a subconscious level; it is only later,
when writing, that he realizes his augmentation of the image. What
his account makes apparent are the difficulties of establishing an ethical
mode of seeing; the fine balance between taking on or taking over the
experience of the other.
What both Thompson’s and Stewart’s accounts make apparent is the
engagement of theatricality as a way of situating the encounter with
the dead of Murambi in ethical terms. This does not mean that they
make claims for the ethicality of their individual experiences, but rather
that they seek to find a stance whereby the dead are given primacy. Or,
to borrow again from Ehn, both writers resist the temptation of ‘colonial
empathy’ where the sorrow of the sufferer takes precedence over the
subject who provokes it. Indeed, both have the impossible task of
deferring to the ‘saying’ that issues from the bodies at the same time
as having only their own voices to express this, and each points to
the difficulty of putting their experience into words. Stewart wonders
whether descriptions of violence are akin to an abject re-enactment of
it, while Thompson asks how he might make the ‘troublesome quality
[of affect] spread across the page’ (133). What is troublesome about this
affect is that it unsettles the subjectivity of the ‘I’. It is a claim for subjec-
tivity grounded in ‘being for’ the other. Within this framework Levinas
calls for the ‘I’ to be positioned, ‘For-the-other, straightaway in obliga-
tion and straightaway as the only one who is ready to respond and to
bear this responsibility, like one who is the first to have hearkened to
the call and the last, perhaps, to have listened to it’ (Is It Righteous to Be?
117–18). His positioning of the ‘I’ reveals its theatrical aspect in the use of
the word ‘like’, in the phrase, ‘like one who is the first…’. This suggests
that it is from taking on a role as if one is the ‘first to have hearkened to
the call’, and ‘last to have listened to it’, that an ethical relation might
arise. For this ‘as if’ to take effect, however, it must be performed in some
way. What both Thompson and Stewart do is attempt to construct such
a performance. As cited earlier, Thompson remarks that, ‘by yielding
before the display, something of the power of performance outside a
communicative paradigm is hinted at’. A Levinasian ‘as if’ arises inasmuch
as they both assign a kind of speaking capacity to the bodies that
exceeds their status as objects: ‘they make you as present as they’,
and are ‘paradoxically live’. Within this address, the spectator cannot
disentangle themselves from the ethical conditions of his or her own
viewing experience. The bodies are not problems to be solved, artefacts
for which ‘a case must be made’ (Thompson, 93). Instead, they are a
powerful manifestation of the ethical right to existence, made through
a disturbing presentation of the result of the denial of this right. The
violence of the display – the exposure of the other in death – in the first
instant of contact strips us of certainty. It is theatricality that sustains
this instantaneous reversal of the privileges of presence and which
allows us to reply to the bodies, ‘here I am’.
Finally
As I travelled by car to Murambi, located about 30 kilometres from

Butare in Rwanda’s Southern District, we passed by the local prison.
To my right, in the valley below, I saw scores of pink-shirted prisoners,
convicted genocidaires, working in the swampy fields. On the ridge
above, locals carried on with their ordinary lives. While those that died
in the genocide are absent, perpetrators remain painfully present. A little
later we passed by a sign indicating the driveway to Sovu Monastry,
the location of Ehn’s play. A genocide remembrance banner hung over
the entrance. Such scenes make painfully apparent the doubling up
of time whereby past and present are made to cohabitate. While those
that died are absent, the genocide itself remains present – it is something
bigger than the violence that took place in 1994. Genocide continues
as memory, psychic force, trauma.
In affecting the voices of the dead, theatre and tourism take up the
role of articulating a substitute call which allows an ethical claim to be
placed upon spectators. The affective nature of this call is important in
a Levinasian sense. He states: ‘In every death to which one attends […]
the resonances of this extraordinary unknown are heard. We apprehend
this unknown irresistibly in the other man’s encounter with death’
(Is It Righteous to Be? 126). The emphasis that Levinas places on the
unknown signals the affective aspect of the ethical claim – the sense in
which the ‘inexplicable becomes palpable’. Theatre, I have argued, is
uniquely able, in the best of instances, to provide this unknown with a
manifest form, whilst simultaneously maintaining its alterior character.
What the particular examples discussed here show, tourist and theatri-
cal, is the ambivalence that marks such theatrical encounters with the
death of the other. As Grehan notes: ‘Levinasian ethics, with its focus
on the other and the subject’s responsibility for the other, provides a
framework for subjects who feel compelled to respond, but who also
understand that any action or response is contingent. It is a framework
in which both responsibility and ambivalence are generated’ (29).
The bodies at Murambi are the other exposed in death, an exposure
which commands us. To be with the other in the space of their death is
to be with a failure of responsibility: it is to be in the presence of failure
and embarrassed by it. In seeing the bodies one cannot help but weep,
as the scale of loss presses, bears down upon the viewer. However, to be
in the presence of failed responsibility is more powerful and important
than sorrow, which, while an expression of the pain caused in us by
the bodies, is, as Levinas describes it, a useless pain. In the instance of
Murambi to be with failure is more profound – or ethical – than to be
with suffering. This is why Stone and Sharpley’s account of dark tourism
visitor motivation falls short. If our subjectivity is constructed in rela-
tionship to the other, then what happens through our presence in the
space of the death of the other is not a release from ontological anxiety,
such as that which would help us construct meaning for our own lives,
but precisely the opposite. We realize the very precarity of our identity
when we see that it occludes the responsibility we bear for others.
These sites should, and do, shake us, effecting a kind of de-realization
or perhaps re-realization of the world. Such a reversal begins to bring us
somewhere towards what Levinas prescribes when he says, ‘I think that
the human consists precisely in opening itself to the other of the other,
in being preoccupied with his death’ (Is It Righteous to Be? 124).
But what more can be said of the distinctions between attending
Maria Kizito and visiting Murambi? Here I defer very much to my own
experiences. First of all, Ehn’s play effectively demonstrates the sense in
which theatre is able to shift more fluidly between different times and
perspectives. By its nature it is not bound by the same fixity as memo-
rials. Indeed, when I interviewed Ehn and asked him about the Rwandan
memorials, he commented that he was pleased that he had seen the
same memorials at different moments in time and had seen how they
had changed. This meant that for him their image was dynamic and
evolving rather than frozen: the ghosts of the first visit lived on in the
second. This was his concern with the memorials generally: how might
they resist the desire to fix their histories: ‘How can a memorial admit to
corruption and moral confusion?’ (Ehn, personal interview). In addition
to being able to move between different times and perspectives, theatre
does not have to pretend to be real, but instead creates its own reality,
which, again, is mutable. What Rayner contends, as do I, is that the illu-
sions that theatre manufactures still have their own reality. She writes,
‘At issue is the refusal in the deep sense of theatre to consent to the idea
that invisible, immaterial, or abstract forces are illusions, that the spirits
of the dead are imaginary, or that the division between matter and spirit
is absolute’ (Ghosts xi). Such a perspective productively complicates the
notion of audience as witness. For, like theatre itself, the audience is
understood as also governed by ‘dynamic contradiction’, where they
both are and are not witness to the historical event being played out
before them: ‘The double in this sense in not a reflection or imitation of
an original but an appearance of a dynamic contradiction or opposition
that cannot come to rest in either what is visible or what is invisible’
(Ghosts xii). The realm of theatrical ghosts is important for its ability
to keep remembering open and dynamic. Unlike fixed memorials, the
remembering of theatre is changeable, responsive and contingent, and
in many ways lacks authority. Rayner writes:
Some secrets can wait forever. Some compel their ghosts to appear,
and the ghosts are impatient for the living to set them right, do them
justice, and release them into time. Theatre is where ghosts make
their best appearances and let communities and individuals know
that we live amid secrets that are hiding in plain sight.
(Ghosts xxxv)
Theatre is more easily able to express ambivalence and ‘confusion’

precisely because it is a time-based art and not charged with the same
kind of authorization of history as memorials. Reflecting on my visit to
Murambi, I am also drawn to say that theatre does not ask the dead to do
the work of remembering, but instead takes on this task itself. Through
its substitutive speech, theatre creates the space for silence to make itself
felt as performance’s alterior shadow. Finally, theatre’s human presence
works against the abjection that sometimes marks memorial experi-
ence. It is the affirmation of creativity and life in the face of unbearable
violence. Maria Kizito demonstrated the closeness and persistence of
genocide, but at the same time reaffirmed the commitment to oppose
it and included the audience in this community (particularly by way of
the talk-backs which took place after each performance).
The contrasts given here are not intended to negate the power of
sites such as Murambi, but to highlight their limitations. My visit to
each memorial, despite the guide’s accompaniment, was fundamentally
solitary. While they invite contemplation, it is difficult to prevent such
contemplation from tipping over into ‘the suffering of our seeing’.
When this occurs the pain we experience is ontological rather than
ethical. It may, as Bataille contends, somehow bring us closer to under-
standing the discontinuous nature of our lives – but what of this, in
what sense is this purposeful knowledge? We are right to be sceptical
of the ethical value of dark tourism and even of the term itself, which
is hopelessly compromised by the way in which it is embedded in neo-
liberal rhetoric, which posits tourists as seemingly innocent consumers
divorced from contemporary violence (Phipps, 75). For the most part,
tourism is not about commitment to community, but about individual
pleasure – we might return again to the flâneur as a proto-figure in this
regard. Further, the very political naivety of tourism means that it all
too willingly participates in what Rancière describes as the culture of
mourning, which masquerades as ethical practice. Thus whilst our will-
ingness to engage with the suffering of others is important, this is most
effective when we are made to realize our own ambivalent position in
regard to such spectatorship; that is, when as spectators we are made to
understand our role as participants. I do not mean that we must assume
some kind of guilty stance, but rather that we need to acknowledge that
our engagement is not neutral or innocent but always already political.

Ethics begins when we start by acknowledging the asymmetry of the
position of the spectator. By foregrounding the call or claim of the other
through its affective aspect, theatrical practices, I have suggested, may
enable us to do this.
7
Phantom Speak
The twentieth century was marked by a series of social catastrophes

that profoundly challenged humanist values. It was also the century of
the tourist: economic and technological changes opened the world for
viewing. This book has been interested in a particular kind of viewing
that has resulted from such opening, not that of the picturesque, but
its dark opposite. The dialectical, ethical, representational and theatrical
problems that run through this book have been addressed and brought
into relation with one another, but yet not finally resolved, however.
This irresolution reflects the very nature of the subjects that they
speak to: catastrophe, genocide, unspeakable loss. While the question
of inexplicable suffering may never be answered, our very humanity
depends on the ceaseless pursuit of a world in which such suffering is
diminished. This study has therefore been concerned with the man-
ner in which tourists or spectators may become present to the fragi-
lity and ‘destitution’ of the other through both theatre and memorial
sites’ creation of an outside, which acts as a ‘face’, in the sense meant
by Levinas. I have asked how sites and works might balance an inside/
outside dialectic where the spectator must themselves negotiate the
point of ethical precarity (given such eloquent description by Butler),
alert to the flows of power that provide the context for their experi-
ence. In this sense, to identity the other (not to identify with the other),
means to begin to understand the nature of one’s own relationship to
that other from outside of our own inside perspective. What is to be
‘deciphered’, as Diana Taylor puts it, is not therefore so much what
happened to the other, but to understand the meaning of one’s own
position in relation to that suffering.
I would like, finally, to remark briefly on a performance that subtly
put this very question. In 2010 Kathrin Mädler directed a production of
215
Peter Weiss’s The Investigation for the Staatstheatre: Schauspiel Nuremburg

(Figure 7.1). In her adaptation of the play, Mädler made radical changes
to the basic premise of the staging and dramaturgy. Firstly, rather than
the ‘neutral’ zone of staged courtroom, she located the performance
within the old Nazi Party Rally Ground buildings in Nuremberg, where
the audience were led through a series of five different locations.
Secondly, she transformed the mode of delivery of the text. Rather than
the cast of thirty required by the original script, Mädler employed a
small chorus of five ghostly men, dressed in white suits with whitened
faces. She also heavily cut the lengthy text. Explaining these choices,
Mädler stated that it was made in response to Primo Levi’s assertion
that there can be no complete witnesses to Auschwitz. Because it is
impossible to know the suffering of those in the camps, Mädler stated
that she didn’t want the actors to ‘play’ victims and perpetrators in a
conventional identificatory manner, as is set out in Weiss’s script. Thus
her small chorus collectively shared roles between them, preventing
any particular actor being associated with any particular role. Mädler’s
Figure 7.1 Peter Weiss’s The Investigation at Staatstheater, Nuremberg (Congress

Hall, Nazi party rally grounds), June 2009, awarded the Nuremberg Theatre
Award in October 2010, director: Kathrin Mädler (Photograph: Marion Buehrle)
Phantom Speak 217
direction shifted the actors between recounting, as if relating what they

had heard, and role-playing, in which they dramatized the accounts
that Weiss provides via courtroom testimony. Mädler emphasized that
the chorus of men should be thought of as voices of the past, messen-
gers of a sort who cannot be redeemed from their memories, but not
witnesses.
Because of the theatricalization of the script and promenade structure,
the audience’s engagement was dynamic in nature. Between the five
sections of dramatic action the chorus addressed the audience directly,
making them collaborators in the historical invocation. One particular
dramatic gesture stood out for me in this regard. In the second space
that the audience entered, there was an apple on one of the chairs. This
apple stayed there for a while until one of the actors picked it up and
began polishing it against his jacket. Another actor related an horrific
incident in which the apple was central:
A motor van drove up outside

with a load of children
I saw it through the window of the office
A young boy jumped down
He held out an apple in his hand
Out came Boger through the door
The boy stood there with his apple
Boger went to the child
and picked him up by the feet
and dashed his head against the barracks wall
Then he picked up the apple
and called out to me and said
Wipe this off the wall
And later as I sat at an interrogation
I saw
him eating the apple.
(Weiss, 64)
Shortly after this, at the end of the section before moving on to the next
location, the actor holding the apple gently handed it to one of the
audience members while the rest looked on. The gesture was steeped in
ambivalence. In one sense, the prop was nothing more than a piece of
fruit. Yet, by way of the shared contract between actors and audience,
it became a symbolic object that had meaning migrated onto it, strik-
ingly illustrating how theatricality makes our responsiveness available
as a fact in the world – we may choose to accept the apple. By way of an

imaginative substitution the ethical presents itself as a fact that might
be responded to. The apple also had other connotations: a biblical
symbol of man’s failure, of his weakness in the face of temptation; read
another way, it was a gesture of giving and of releasing the dramatic ten-
sion built around the object. The haunted object momentarily collapsed
spatio-temporal distinctions and in so doing charged what Rancière
described as the ‘activity of the spectator’, whose responsibility for gene-
rating meaning was sharply foregrounded.
The connection between the performances discussed in this book
and the theatricality of memorial practices lies precisely in their ghostly
aspects. In many instances I have spoken of the voices affected at
memorial sites and the manner in which spectators are called upon to
‘hear’ these voices. Derrida addresses such ghostliness in Archive Fever
when he writes that despite the impossibility of the past’s phantoms
speaking to us, their voices persist:
So here is what we believe we know, at least, here is the appearance:

the other will never again respond. Now in spite of these necessi-
ties, these obvious facts and these substantiated certitudes, in spite
of all the reassuring assurances which such a knowing or such a
believing-to-know dispenses to us, through them, the phantom con-
tinues to speak. Perhaps he does not respond, but he speaks. A phantom
speaks.
(Archive Fever 62)
At the sites discussed it is precisely the dialectic interplay of absence

and presence that gives the memorials their charge and which I describe
as their theatrical aspect: it is the medium that makes the phantom’s
speech audible, if not comprehensible. The paradox of the speaking
phantom is more forcefully realized in theatre, however, because of the
dialectically charged mimetic play (alternately transparent and opaque)
that constitutes it. The liveness of the act gives it its own reality, which in
turn carries with it ethical questions and obligations that also have their
own reality. Ehn puts the question of the ethical aspect of memorials
succinctly when he asks whether they are able to admit to ‘corruption
and moral confusion’. In their very fixity memorials often struggle to
respond to such a charge, binding spectators to an a-temporal state
of mourning that whilst demanding recognition of past suffering also
directs attention away from the more unsettling realities that, as Rayner
suggests, are ‘hiding in plain sight’. Theatre, in its haunted aspects,
Phantom Speak 219
makes ghostly presences palpably felt. This is a suspension of disbelief

that interrupts the temporally separated relationship between self and
historical other (mediated by the performer), which has the effect of
powerfully foregrounding the obligations of the living in the present.
As has been argued throughout, ‘ethical theatre’ is not an aesthetic
prescription, but contingently bound to social and historical contexts
and best understood as a form of responsiveness. This responsiveness
affirms a politics of life (and legibility of human rights) even as it
enacts a spectacle of death that resists humanization. In most of the
performances considered, a mode of theatre that resists both conven-
tional narrative and interpretative structures has arisen in response to
the representational challenges posed by genocide. In so doing, such
performances reveal the ideological force of conventional forms, thereby
making spectatorship an uncomfortable experience through foreground-
ing the politics of both social participation and aesthetic perception.
Importantly, however, I have maintained that ethical theatrical prac-
tices need not necessarily preclude more conventional dramatic forms.
The discussion of Charlotte Delbo’s production of The Hypochondriac
exemplifies this. In emphasizing identification and mimesis as well
as examining examples of postdramatic practice, which Lehmann
describes as an ‘aesthetics of responsibility’, I have sought to present a
balanced perspective on how we might approach the notion of ethical
spectatorship – spectatorship where our relation to the performed object
is not taken for granted. For there is an obvious question that arises in
response to performance strategies that foreground unsettling the audi-
ence: what space do they offer for connection, empathy, understanding?
Levinas’s ethics does not preclude the value of these aspects of human
relationships. He himself wrote:
Our relation with the other (autrui) certainly consists in wanting

to comprehend him, but this relation overflows comprehension.
Not only because knowledge of the other (autrui) requires, outside
of all curiosity, also sympathy or love, ways of being distinct from
impassable contemplation, but because in our relation with the other
(autrui), he does not affect us as a concept. He is a being (étant) and
counts as such.
(Basic Philosophical Writings 6)
The coolness of ambivalence and division – ‘impassable contemplation’ –

sits somewhat uncomfortably beside the ‘sympathy or love’ that our
ethical relation with the Other overflows from. Elsewhere, Levinas writes
of peace as ‘love of the neighbor’ (167) and, drawing from Dostoyevsky,

of the necessity of ‘insatiable compassion’ (52). Further if, as Lehmann
writes of postdramatic theatre, we are to reject ‘theses and messages’
as aesthetically and ethically naïve, then what of speaking plainly,
or of speaking from the heart. It is surely in the interplay between
‘straight-talking’ and relinquishing the logos of the self, contingent and
contextual, that ethical engagement and critical reflection takes place.
Otherwise, in terms of theatre, do we not risk valorizing an aesthetic
elitism, which, in rejecting theses and messages, and in privileging
disintegration and deformation, obscures rather than articulates common
human values, precisely in order to present the other as concept?
Throughout the book I have therefore suggested that our understand-
ing of the ethical in relation to performance cannot be thought of
solely based on aesthetics, but needs to look more broadly at the various
interwoven praxes that constitute the performance event. I have also
suggested that in its liveness, theatre is more able to make life, not death,
the memorial object. This is aided by the ways in which theatre makes
the boundaries between past and present unsteady. Theatre makes the
past available and in doing so unsettles its very pastness. It frightens us
precisely both because it shows how easily the role of violent perpetrator
is taken up and because we see how theatricality – aesthetics – is implicated
in the exercise of violent power itself. It is this that makes us shudder:
theatre in the shadow of the crematoria is theatre that recognizes its
own negative double. Listening at what Rayner calls ‘the boundaries of
comprehension’ (The Audience 262) requires both critical reflection and
self-appraisal and identification inasmuch as such identification recog-
nizes that the suffering of others concerns me also. Whether at memorial
sites or in the theatre, it is these conditions that are required in order
for ethics to take effect. In the theatre particularly, the usual distinctions
between fiction and reality are blurred. Such blurring need not be read
as either diminishing the force of history or appeasing the need to real-
world action, but rather can be understood as a means of configuring
(or reconfiguring) a vision of the world and the relationships that sus-
tain it. Mimetic action demonstrates that we can suspend disbelief and
ontological anxiety in order to enter into the space of the other. In order
to reach a ‘new […] and unexpected shore’ (Lederach, 39), the ability to
see things otherwise is vital. For memorials and dark tourist attractions
to be ethically effective, they need to both acknowledge death and affirm
life. That is, they need to break from the mooring that seeks to tether
them to ‘a culture of mourning’ in order that such a journey might be
undertaken.
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Index
Note: page numbers of illustrations are enboldened.
Abramovich, Marina (Lips of tattoos, 79–80, 81

St Thomas), 49 tour of, 41, 60–4, 67
absence, 6–7, 11, 17, 21, 31–3, 46, see also concentration camps; Delbo
63, 68–9, 74–5, 84–5, 88–9, 99, authenticity, 37, 69, 79–80, 110–11,
102–3, 121, 128, 141–3, 146–7, 113, 119–20, 151, 163, 174, 184
162, 168, 181, 195, 208 Avram, Wes, 45–6
absent others, 2, 6, 13–14, 128
see also dialectic of absence and Bacchae, 34
presence Barba, Eugenio, 89, 94
Adorno, Theodor, 57, 89, 97 Barthes, Roland, 136, 148
affect, 6–8, 13, 20–1, 25, 32, 36–7, 67, Bataille, Georges, 24–6, 28–9, 99, 213
76, 110, 133, 136–9, 200–11, 218 Beckett, Samuel (Catastrophe), 119
embodiment, 7, 33, 79–80, 84, 88–9, Belich, James, 177
99, 124–6, 179, 182, 186–7, 195, belief, 55, 199–200
emplacement, 8, 27, 67–9, 71, 75–6, see also testimony
133, 170, 173, 178, 204, 208–9 Bennett, Jill, 76
see also theatrical affect and alterity Berk, Philip, 73
Agamben, Giorgio, 9–10, 27–8, 51, Boal, Augusto, 33
60, 85 Borowski, Tadeusz (This Way for the
Alneng, Victor, 109–10, 117–18 Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen), 70, 96
alterity, 8, 17, 20, 43–4, 46, 57, 80–1, boundaries of comprehension, 52,
128, 143, 159 162, 179, 220
political alterity, 103–10, 123–4 Brecht, Bertolt, 33–4, 39–42, 49
see also ethics; Levinas; theatrical Brook, Peter, 86, 99
affect and alterity Buchenwald, 83
ambivalence, 3, 6, 23, 50–1, 57, 60, Burns, Elizabeth, 20
102, 139, 149, 167, 177, 193–6, Butler, Judith, 1–2, 15, 32, 52–3, 57,
202, 208–9, 211, 213, 217, 219–20 81–2, 106, 157–8, 196, 208
archives, 6, 10, 78–9, 122–4, 129–60, bystander, 12, 39–40, 126, 194–6,
199, 218 201–2, 208
archive and repertoire, 12, 38–9, see also observer
129, 133, 138
Aristotle, 50–1, 88 Cambodian concept of face, 150–2
see also catharsis see also Choeung Ek Genocidal
Artaud, Antonin, 33–4, 49 Centre; Tuol Sleng Museum of
Atamira Dance Company, 181–3 Genocide
audience, see spectatorship Cargill, William, 165–6
Auschwitz, 10, 13, 26–7, 35, 46, 51, Carnegie, David and David
62–3, 67–8, 71, 72–4, 78–80, 85, O’Donnell, 162, 181
92–4, 96, 99, 216 Caruana, John, 43–5
231
232 Index
catharsis, 27, 87, 96 see also Lennon and Foley; Seaton;

see also Aristotle; tragedy Sharpley; Stone; theatrical affect
Caton, Kellee, 17–18, 25 and alterity
Choeung Ek Genocide Centre, 21, 22, Dark Tourists, 4–8, 5, 7, 47, 47–8, 51
31–2, 129, 139–41, 140, 142 Darling, Stan, 169, 172
claim of the other Delbo, Charlotte (staging of The
see Levinas Hypochondriac), 71–4, 97, 219
Clark, Laurie Beth, 3, 17–18, 21–2, 40, Derrida, Jacques, 37, 55, 129, 198–9, 218
41, 119, 137, 147 dialectic of absence and presence, 10,
Clough, Patricia, 32 13, 15, 18, 24, 31–2, 39, 56, 69,
Coates, Karen, 131 75, 86, 95, 122–3, 133, 136, 189,
Cohen, Erik, 112 208, 211, 218
Cohen, Stanley, 40–1, 42 see also absence; presence
Cole, Tim, 26, 78 Dolan, Jill, 200
commitment, 40, 45, 55, 159, 189, dramatic time, 71, 76
200, 213
concentration camps, 27–8, 36–7, Eaglestone, Robert, 80
56–86, 99–100 Edensor, Tim, 30, 34
reconstruction, 58, 60, 77 Edmondson, Laura, 190, 194
theatrical aspects, 68–9, 75–9, 84–6 Edwin, Awatea, 166, 170, 173
see also Auschwitz; Sachsenhausen Ehn, Erik, 188–9, 205, 212, 218
Memorial and Museum; Dachau; Maria Kizito, 12, 51, 190–200, 192,
Buchenwald 212
contact, see encounter Soulographie, 190, 200
Correa, Ana (Confessiones), 38–9 embodiment
Cropp, Amanda, 178 see affect
Cu Chi Tunnels, 10, 28, 101–2, encounter, 24, 37, 46, 54, 48–9, 68,
110–20, 111, 114, 116, 127 85–6, 99–100, 120, 133, 143,
see also guided tours; Vietnam; war 159–60, 162–3, 167–8, 174–5, 178,
tourism 183–4, 186–7, 193, 209–10, 211
Cull, Laura, 14 Erickson, Jon, 14, 46–7
cultural tourism, 113, 163–7, 173–5, 179 ethics, 1–2, 8–9, 13–15, 42–55, 57,
71–2, 130, 187, 205, 209, 211,
Dachau, 56, 65–6, 70 214–15, 215–20
tour of, 64–8 ethics and representation, 43, 71–2,
dark tourism: 85, 86–9, 123–4, 127–8, 141–3,
battlefield tourism, 19–20, 164–5 148–9, 158–9, 178, 200, 205
characteristics, 2–4, 18–21, 35–43 ethics and responsibility, 8, 14, 29,
historical antecedents, 19–20 40, 43, 45, 48–52, 55, 69, 79–81,
Institute for Dark Tourism Research, 3 88, 98, 109, 138, 156–7, 159,
motivations, 3–4, 19–21, 23–4, 26, 196–7, 198, 206, 208–12, 219
34, 36, 103, 211 ethics of spectatorship, 4, 8–9,
ontological aspects, 3, 24, 26–7, 34, 13–15, 31–2, 46–55, 88, 95, 97–9,
36, 211, 213 126–7, 149, 160, 178, 186–7, 197,
political contexts, 26–9, 33, 38, 58, 209, 213–14
92–3, 107–10, 127, 130–2, 163–5, 172, ethics and theatricality, 37–8, 57, 69,
177–8, 188–9, 200–2, 206, 213–14 71–2, 123, 209–10, 212–13, 217–20
theatrical aspects and dramatization, ethics of vitality or life, 85–6,
30–5 99–100, 152, 157
Index 233
ethical problems and questions, Hapipi, Rore (Death of the Land),

14, 18, 24–9, 34, 45, 79–80, 83, 162–3, 179–82
119–20, 136, 138–9, 144, 147,189, heritage tourism, 23, 31, 78, 174–5
195, 201, 207–8, 215 Hinton, Alexander, 150–2, 158
ethical turn, 14–15, 28 Hirsch, Marianne, 139
see also Levinas Hollinshead, Keith, 108
experience economy, 21, 164–5 Holloway, Christopher J., 13,
112
face of the other, see Levinas Hollywood, Amy, 25
faith, see belief Holocaust (artistic representation of),
Fellini, Federico (Roma), 45 13, 50–1, 70–1, 86–9
Felman, Shoshana, 98 see also 80064; Grotowski, Akropolis;
Féral, Josette, 26 The Investigation
and Leslie Wickes, 26, 48, 49, 50 Howard, Richard, 163, 181
figuren, 80, 85, 89, 98 Human Rights Watch, 131
see also muselmann/muselmänner Hunt, John Dixon, 85
Filloux, Catherine (Photographs from
S–21), 11–12, 130, 143–9, 145, identification, 30–1, 43, 50, 52–5,
158–60 76–82, 87–9, 95, 105–6, 151–2,
Fischer–Lichte, Erika, 19, 49, 98 157–8, 175, 177, 219–20
Fine, E. J. and J. Speer, 111–12 see also Levinas, association and
Fitzpatrick, Lisa, 13, 88, 89, 95 substitution
Flaszen, Ludwig, 57, 91–9 Jaar, Alfredo (The Silence of
Frank, Arthur, 141–2 Nduwayezu), 52–3
Foley, Malcolm, 2, 103 Jaeger, Suzanne, 84
Fuchs, Eleanor, 82, 87 Jensen, Stefan (Ghosts of Tuol Sleng),
136–8
Gallipoli, 36 Jewish Museum Berlin, 59, 74–5
Garland, Alex, 20–1 judicial theatrical settings, 176,
Genet, Jean, 56, 68–71, 72, 74, 82–4, 180–1, 182, 194–5, 216–17
100
ghosts, 7, 10, 12, 46, 99, 130, Kagame, Paul, 188
136–7, 143, 145, 147–9, 171, 199, Karemera, Carol, 201–3
212–13, 218 Kennedy, Adrienne (An Evening with
kamuit, 133, 147 Dead Essex), 11, 121–4, 127–8
tūpuna, 162, 170–1, 181 Kennedy, Dennis, 46
Grehan, Helena, 14–15, 50, 149, 211 Khmer Rouge Government 1975–1979
Grotowski, Jerzy, 48–9 and genocide, 130–2
Akropolis, 57, 86–99 Kigali Genocide Memorial Centre, 40,
guided tours, 13, 111–12 196, 201–4, 203
Auschwitz, 60–4 Kirshenblatt–Gimblett, Barbara, 31,
Cu Chi Tunnels, 113–20 163, 168, 186
Murambi Memorial, Rwanda, Kouka, Hone (Waiora), 181–2
206–10 Kluger, Ruth, 29
Nyamata and Ntarama Memorials, Kyle, Donald, 19
Rwanda, 204–5 Kumiega, Jennifer, 94–6
Sandeman’s New Berlin
Sachsenhausen Concentration Laderman, Scott, 108–9
Camp Memorial Tour, 57–60 Lederarch, Paul, 1–2
234 Index
Lehmann, Hans–Thies, 8, 50–1, 89, Nyamata and Ntarama

121, 197, 219–20 memorials; Tuol Sleng Museum
see also representation of Genocide; United States
Lennon, John, 2, 19, 29, 35 Holocaust Memorial Museum;
and Malcolm Foley, 2, 18 Vietnam Veterans Memorial
Levi, Primo, 36–7 Washington DC; War Remnants
Levinas, Emmanuel, 1–2, 9, 14, 17, Museum Ho Chi Minh City
43–7, 49–50, 55, 83, 89, 95, 129, memory, 3, 8, 23, 38–9, 56–7, 76,
136, 143, 150, 157, 159, 205, 79–80, 83–4, 95, 98–9, 129, 140,
211–12, 219–20 154–6, 196–7
aesthetics, 43, 49 Mendelsohn, Emily, 193, 195, 196,
association and substitution, 32, 46, 198
56, 79, 81, 84–5, 195–6, 218 meta-theatre, 120–8
claim of the other and responsibil- Metz, Christian, 146–8
ity, 8, 10, 13, 43–5, 52, 55, 81–2, Miles, William, 76
129–30, 136, 142, 149, 159–60, mimesis, 43, 46, 50, 53–5, 80–3,
163, 187, 196, 208–11, 214 87–9, 101, 120, 127–8, 131,
face of the other, 7–8, 25–6, 46–7, 218–20
52, 59, 82, 85, 95–6, 119, 123, see also representation
129–30, 133, 136, 152, 157–60, Minca, Claudio and Tim Oakes, 34
196, 202, 215 Mirzoeff, Nicholas, 188–9
saying and said, 45–6, 52 Molière, see Delbo
theatrical aspects of philosophy, 44–7 Müller, Heiner, 7
useless suffering, 27, 100, 142, 201, Murambi Genocide Memorial Centre,
211 10, 200–14
see also alterity; ethics muselmann/muselmänner, 89, 94–5, 98
Libeskind, Daniel, 74–5 see also figuren
Linenthal, Edward, 33–4, 37
Lippard, Lucy, 3, 23, 27, 31, 35, 37, Niven, Doug and Chris Riley, 144
39, 75 Niziolek, Grzegorz, 90–3, 98
listening, see voice Noys, Benjamin, 25, 32
liveness, see presence Nyamata and Ntarama memorials,
204–5
MacCannell, Dean, 113
McIntosh, Alison, 174 observer, 40–2, 194
Mädler, Kathrin, 216–17 see also witness; bystander
Maguire, Peter, 132 other, see Levinas, face of the other
Mazer, Sharon, 163, 181, 183–4, 186 see also absence, absent others;
Mbembe, Achille, 28 alterity; ethics; identification
memorials and museums, 3, 6–10, Owens, Margaret, 19
21–3, 26–9, 30, 32, 36–42, 55,
56–7, 68–9, 74–86, 99, 103, 129, Panh, Rithy (S21: Khmer Rouge Killing
139, 162, 163, 179, 188–9, 212, Machine), 12, 130, 150–60
213–14, 215, 218–20 participation and interaction, 33–4,
see also Auschwitz; Buchenwald; 41–3, 48–50, 110–12, 137, 165,
Choeung Ek Genocide Centre; 170, 174–5, 177, 183–4, 195, 219
concentration camps; Cu see also encounter; spectatorship
Chi Tunnels; Kigali Genocide Patraka, Vivian, 50, 69, 88
Memorial Centre; Murambi Pearce, Philip L., 112
Genocide Memorial Centre; phantoms, see ghosts
Index 235
photography, 25–6, 38–9, 52–3, 133, 49–51, 55, 57, 74–5, 82–5, 87–9,
136–9, 145–7, 174, 202 95, 101–2, 124, 127, 141–3, 207–8
see also Tuol Sleng Museum of withdrawal of representation, 51, 121
Genocide; Filloux (Photographs see also ethics, ethics and
from S–21) representation; mimesis;
pilgrimage, 35–6, postdramatic theatre
Pine, Joseph and James Gilmour, 21, Resnais, Alain (Night and Fog), 13
28, 34 responsibility, see ethics
see also experience economy Ricoeur, Paul, 45, 53–5
Plunka, Gene A., 98 Ridout, Nicholas, 49–50
Ponifasio, Lemi (Tempest), 181, 185–7 Rokem, Freddie, 7, 13, 57, 73, 87–8
postdramatic theatre, 8, 50–1, 89, Romanska, Magda, 90–1, 96
219–20 Róz·ewicz, Tadeusz (‘The Museum
see also Lehmann; representation Tour’), 27
presence, 7–8, 13, 24–5, 38–9, 46,
50–1, 75–6, 83–4, 88–9, 95, 122–3, Sachsenhausen Memorial and Museum,
129–30, 133, 136, 153–4, 162, 27, 57–60, 68, 77–8, 84, 99
170–1, 179, 181–2, 185–7, 189, 195, satire and parody, 60, 101, 104–7,
199–200, 205–10, 211, 213, 218–19 124–8, 185
see also affect; dialectic of absence see also Delbo; meta-theatre
and presence saying and said, see Levinas
prosopopoeia/personification, 56, Scarry, Elaine, 32, 143
77–8, 85, 171 Schneider, Rebecca, 166–7, 170
see also voice; Levinas, substitution Schumacher, Claude, 50, 87–8, 90
Pringle, Lyne, 4–5 Seaton, Tony, 2–3, 18–20, 21, 24, 164
settler identity, 165–6, 168, 178
Rae, Bernadette, 4 Sharpley, Richard, 18
Rancière, Jacques, 50, 136 and Philip Stone, 3, 24, 26, 28, 34,
emancipated spectator, 13–14, 48, 103, 211
49, 218 and Frank Baldwin, 165
ethical turn, 14–15, 28–9, 42, 55, Sibblies Drury, Jackie (We Are Proud to
57, 99–100 Present …), 11, 124–8, 125
intolerable image, 143, 146–7, silence, 13, 39, 52, 60, 75, 77–8,
153–4, 155, 158 125–7, 128
Rayner, Alice, 46, 51–2, 57, 82, 99, see also affect; listening; voice
123, 127–8, 162, 187, 189, 199, sincerity, 120, 184
212, 218, 220 Skloot, Robert, 143
Reason, Matthew, 137, 145–6, 159 solidarity, 23, 53, 55, 120
re-enactment, 19, 41–2, 82–3, 153–6, Sontag, Susan, 21, 139, 155
158, 161–2, 164–8, 170–1, 177–9, spectatorship (incl. audience and
184–5, 196–7, 210 viewers), 3–4, 6–9, 13–14, 17–29,
see also Tamaki Heritage Experiences 31–2, 33–43, 46–55, 69, 75, 79,
relief, 73, 97 80–8, 93–5, 97–9, 102–3, 106–10,
representation, 8, 19–20, 25–6, 27, 118–20, 123, 126–8, 133, 136–7,
34–5, 39–42, 43, 45, 54–5, 71–2, 139, 141, 149, 158–60, 162–3,
77–9, 97–8, 118–19, 123, 127–8, 165–8, 170, 174–5, 177–8, 180,
129, 137–8, 146, 158–60, 181, 183–7, 189, 193–6, 197–8, 200,
183–5, 188, 198 205–14, 215, 217–20
unrepresentable or limits of see also dark tourism; ethics;
representation, 11, 13, 15, 29, Rancière, emancipated spectator
236 Index
States, Bert O., 46, 54, 119 Tumarkin, Maria, 35

Stewart, Jeff, 206, 208–10 Turner, Stephen, 165, 178
Stone, Philip, 3 Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide, 7,
and Richard Sharpley, 3, 24, 26, 28, 10–11, 12, 129–30, 132–9, 134–5,
34, 103, 211 143–55, 153, 157–9, 202
substitution, see Levinas Tunbridge, J. E. and G. J. Ashworth,
Szulsztein, Moshe, 77 23
Turnbull, Robert, 132
Tamaki Heritage Experiences (Lost in
Our Own Land), 161–2, 164–5, Ubersfeld, Anne, 31
166–79, 172–3, 177, 183–4, United States Holocaust Memorial
186–7 Museum, 33, 37, 39, 69, 77
Taub, Michael, 87
Taussig, Michael, 101, 119, 120 Vietnam Veterans Memorial
Taylor, Diana, 26–7, 38, 68–9, 129, Washington DC, 21, 22
133, 138, 143, 159 Vietnam, dramatic representation,
Taylor, John P., 163, 184 120–1
testimony, 20, 28, 38–40, 55, 76, 78, Vietnam, theatrical propaganda
144, 146, 155–7, 191, 194–5, during the War, 103–7
197–200 Vietnam, war tourism, 10–11, 26,
see also witness 101–3, 108–11, 127
theatrical affect and alterity, 8, 11, vitality, see ethics
21, 30–5, 46, 52, 68–9, 75–86, 95, voice, 9–10, 13, 27, 31–2, 33, 69,
102–3, 121, 124, 128, 158, 205, 75, 78, 85, 89, 140–1, 143,
211–14, 220 146, 149, 157, 171, 211,
see also affect; alterity 217–18
theatricality (definition), 8, 13, 18, listening 39, 51–2, 56–7, 136, 162,
26, 31, 68–9, 84, 217–18 179, 186–7, 196, 220
anti-theatricality, 29, 33, 37–8, 78, see also affect; silence
80 void, 59, 74–5, 82–5, 89
see also Aristotle; ethics, ethics and see also Genet, Jean
theatricality; identification;
meta- theatre; mimesis; Wake, Caroline, 39–40, 195
participation and interaction; War Remnants Museum Ho Chi Minh
postdramatic theatre; City, 109, 109–10
spectatorship; tragedy Weber, Samuel, 13, 70
thanatourism, see dark tourism; Wiedmer, Caroline, 78
Seaton Weiss, Peter (The Investigation), 217
The Deer Hunter, 107 Weissman, Gary, 37, 75–6
The Investigation, 215–18, 216 Weiwei, Ai, 52–3
Thompson, James, 32, 127, 201, 205, Names of the Student Earthquake
207–10 Victims Found by the Citizens’
Tilley, Christopher, 67 Investigation, 54, 54
tragedy, 50–1, 87–8, 95 Werry, Margaret, 164, 175
see also Aristotle; postdramatic Wilkerson, Cathy, 104–7
theatre Williams, Paul, 30, 36, 69, 75, 77–8,
transgression, 25, 34, 199 85
trauma, 3, 28, 40–1, 99, 159 Wilson, Alexa, 185–6
Index 237
witness, 9–10, 13, 20, 28, Wyspiański, Stanisław, 86, 90–2

36–40, 67–8, 99, 75–8, 109, see also Grotowski, Akropolis
162, 168, 186, 188–9, 195,
197–201, 207–9, 212, Young, James E., 56–7, 67–8, 70, 79,
216–17 83–4
see also bystander; observer; pilgrim;
·
testimony Z mijewski, Artur (80064), 79–81, 81

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Theatricality, Dark Tourism and Ethical Spectatorship

Theatricality, Dark Tourism

Typeset by MPS Ltd, Chennai, India.

Notes for the Traveller: Introduction to

2 Performing Museums and Memorial Bodies:

3 Vietnam: ‘Not the bullshit story in the Lonely Planet’ 101

4 ‘Here was the place’: (Re)Performing Khmer Rouge

5 Lost in Our Own Land: Re-Enacting Colonial Violence 161

6 ‘The world watched’: Witnessing Genocide 188

7 Phantom Speak 215

Works Cited 221

0.1 Dark Tourists, Wellington, New Zealand, 2008 (Photograph:

3.3 Cu Chi Tunnels, Vietnam, 2008

entitled ‘“All this is left”: Performing and re-performing archives of

‘Between History and Memory: Auschwitz in Akropolis, Akropolis in

for ‘Ensemble Cast of Starts Create a Galaxy of Images’ on Theatreview

If the humanities has a future as cultural criticism, and

To fully understand the moral imagination we will need

I think that the human consists precisely in opening itself

Emmanuel Levinas, like Lederach, urges us to think beyond ourselves,

A small act, a question

drawing from the word ‘thanatopsis’, suggesting the tourism under

return and identity politics to unpack the phenomenon from an explicitly

The theme of Dark Tourists – the growing trend for holidaymakers to

seeming disconnection between tourists and others’ suffering, which

disturbing gesture was both a memorial act and an attempt to under-

turning away. In Dark Tourists, bodies were caught in this interplay of

The chapters of this book, which provide a mapping of its ‘geographies

The theatrical performances, brought into relation with the histories

images, Filloux foregrounds the out-of-frame ghosts that haunt them,

is as ‘translator’ (The Emancipated Spectator 13) of the experience they

work of mourning’ played out in pervasive testimonial aesthetics that

The histories memorialized by both tourist sites and performance works

Tourism is an ideal metaphorical context for the messy col-

Rather than a debased or trivial engagement, tourism

The spectator is an actor.

Whilst this is foremost a book about theatre and theatricality, it rests

motivate it? In what sense is it theatrical? How might we understand

Dark tourism: a peculiar entertainment

also include elements of re-enactment and symbolic representation.

Spectators would crowd around the corpse after an execution in

have a transformative effect. These various historical precedents show a

I wanted to witness extreme poverty. I saw it as a necessary experi-

The emphasis in Garland’s text is not on acts of observation or witnessing

The range of visitors […] varies widely to include victims, survivors

students and scholars and intentional and accidental visitors. They

The quest to draw conclusions as to visitor motivation is therefore

place at the various sites discussed. Therefore I would like to introduce

as Benjamin Noys argues, essentially an aesthetic one, which uses

For Bataille, inner experience begins with dramatization and medi-

The image that Bataille notoriously used as exemplar is that of the

ecstatic expression on Fou-Tchou-Li’s face, so too with the Falling Man

talismanically, drawing pain towards themselves so that viewers might

The camp as dislocating localization is the hidden matrix of the

Agamben suggests that the essential relationship between sovereign

exposure to death. If this is the case, do visits to former concentration

Similar to the way in which the combination of consensus and

firmly rooted in the neoliberal context. Tourism can indeed be seen as

‘Dark tourism’ sites are important testaments to the consistent failure

The drive at dark tourism sites, particularly those considered in this

Tourism and theatrical affect

At this juncture it is useful to think further about the aspects of tourist

Paul Williams employs similarly theatrical vocabulary when he describes