Speaking about Reality: Verbatim techniques in contemporary Finnish documentary theatre

Gröndahl, Laura

doi:10.7146/nts.v28i2.25601

Cited by 3 publications

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“…For Del Arco, the staging plays an important role because of the aggregate of signs that it implies and because of the logic that governs this aggregation in relation to the choice of the thematic, dramaturgical and scenic referent (Araiza Elizabeth, 2000). The concept of staging has been extensively discussed in literature (Bordwell, 2005) and has been widely used as a form of analysis for documentaries (Araiza Elizabeth, 2000; Gröndahl, 2017; Hammond and Steward, 2008). The staging attends to the bodily attitudes of the actors or to the harmony of a gesture with their space.…”

Section: Documentary Theater: the Mise-en-scène Of Jauría As A Break ...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Jauría: Documentary fiction and the transformative potential of sexual violence testimony

Puente

Gelado

2022

European Journal of Cultural Studies

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In this article, we examine the various strategies that Jauría employs to bear witness to sexual violence. Jauría’s script is based on the official court transcripts of a trial for the gang rape of a woman at the San Fermín Festival in Pamplona, Spain. Our analysis focuses on how the narration of violence from new representational frameworks questions the hegemonic paradigms in which violence makes itself intelligible. We address how sexual violence testimony, in the form of documentary fiction, has the transformative potential of appealing to a shared responsibility with the audience. To that end, we analyze the mise-en-scène and conduct a long series of interviews with the play’s actors, director and playwright. To carry out this analysis, we use the framework of ethical testimony that we apply as an analytical model both to the mise-en-scène and to the interviews conducted, which have been categorized along four dimensions of analysis. This article contributes to the current studies around the transformative potential of sexual violence testimony and ultimately proves how the testimony’s ethical dimension can transform the discursive conditions in which this type of violence is typically interpreted.

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Section: Documentary Theater: the Mise-en-scène Of Jauría As A Break ...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Jauría: Documentary fiction and the transformative potential of sexual violence testimony

Puente

Gelado

2022

European Journal of Cultural Studies

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“…Wake 2013, 105-6. 11 Wake 2013 12 For discussions of authenticity in verbatim and testimonial spoken theatre, see for exampleMartin 2010, Long 2015, Stegemann 2015, Garde and Mumford 2016, Gröndahl 2017 …”

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confidence: 99%

Migration and Opera Old and New

Severn¹

2023

NTS

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This article uses Eva Noer Kondrup’s chamber opera Den Rejsende (Copenhagen 2018) to examine the challenges and opportunities provoked by the operatic form when attempting to create socially responsible theatre. Focusing on how opera reflects and contributes to contemporary discourse on migration, it examines how opera’s unusual performance and reception demands differentiate it from, for example, spoken verbatim theatre. The article first considers the most common way opera companies today engage with migration – through productions of existing operas – in which socially responsible decisions are primarily in the hands of directors and designers and relate mostly to interpretation, and it explores some of the risks and opportunities of engaging with migration in recent revivals of repertoire works. It then analyses how questions of social responsibility in new operas extend to structural issues that are the field of the composer and librettist. The article examines Kondrup’s decisions as librettist-composer of Den Rejsende, demonstrating the potential for opera to use non-realist operatic techniques to engage with some of the issues with which spoken verbatim theatre has wrestled, including questions of authority, authenticity and authorship, and of empathy, engagement, and identification. The production, performed by two Swedish singers from non-refugee backgrounds in multiple roles, favoured distanciation techniques over “authenticity effects” and avoided tensions between giving voice to and speaking for contemporary refugees that can arise in spoken verbatim theatre. While the libretto contained found text, this was from historical refugee situations, and from the words of Inger Støjberg in her role as Danish Minister for Immigration, Integration and Housing. By throwing a spotlight on the words of an elected representative, Den Rejsende indicated an area in which audience members of what is often thought of as an affective theatrical form might have some influence in effecting practical change.

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Are you for real: writing verbatim performance with ethnographer’s tools

Rinne

2022

Scriptum : Creative Writing Research Journal

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Verbatim technique connects concepts such as ‘actual’, ‘real’, ‘original’ and ‘authentic’ to theatre, performance art and creativity. In this article, I consider the roles of creativity, art, veracity and reality when composing a performance text that is based on the ‘actual words’ of ‘real people’. What is the truth claim in verbatim performance, and how does it operate together with artistic creativity? My approach is that of an artistic researcher conducting research with children. When I collect materials for my verbatim performances, I use many of the same techniques and methods that childhood studies ethnographers use in their fieldwork. The performative turn in social sciences, with post qualitative inquiries and non-representational methodologies, and the educational turn in art, bring these fields even closer together. Both fields face the questions of veracity and creativity without any simple oppositional structure. I claim that, instead of concentrating on the friction between creativity and truth, it is important to acknowledge that creativity can be needed in order to lie less. I argue that ethnographic objects can lie if they are presented to us dead. Although performance art, or live art, claims to be the epitome of liveness and immediacy, it actually expresses the impossibility of guaranteed unmediated presence. The creative skills of an artist and ethnographer are needed, to keep the transcript and presented materials alive and communicating, to ensure that research remains reciprocal.

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Speaking about Reality: Verbatim techniques in contemporary Finnish documentary theatre

Cited by 3 publications

References 0 publications

Jauría: Documentary fiction and the transformative potential of sexual violence testimony

Jauría: Documentary fiction and the transformative potential of sexual violence testimony

Migration and Opera Old and New

Are you for real: writing verbatim performance with ethnographer’s tools

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