Arts & International Affairs: Volume 2, Number 2 | Page 82

of their own experience—what has actually happened to them and what they
have witnessed. This is not to say that the performance was not virtuosic. In
fact, one might argue that the exceptionally painful and visceral nature of
the testimonials in Nirbhaya demanded a degree of artistic and expressive
sensitivity, made manifest in this case through potent atmospherics and
powerfully staged communal ritual, that allowed the experience to be not
only bearable, but generative and restorative.
The shift from spectating to witnessing that Gardner invokes in her response
to Nirbhaya seems to me a profound distinction that cuts right to the core of
the question of what we mean by, and what we want from, socially engaged
performance. Often, the spectator who merely watches voyeuristically from
the dark is liberated from accountability for what they are seeing. In a sense,
they are analogous to the person who passes the suffering beggar on the
street. They might feel something, but the action they are performing is one
of moving past or through the experience and on to something else. It is
a form of escapism—perhaps a necessary one, a method of survival, quite
normal, habitual, and not shameful, but still in its essence characterized by
a kind of absence, or at least by an incomplete presence.
By contrast, most effective socially engaged performances foreground the
audience’s conscious act of witnessing, a transference of accountability to
acknowledge that something substantive has occurred in which all those
present are now implicated, and that can never be unseen. This notion of
witnessing runs directly counter to the idea of the artistic event as merely a
form of escapism—implying that as witnesses the performance has exposed
us to something that shifts us in some way and that will make us continue
to engage and grapple with its contents, perhaps both privately and in our
dialogues and interactions with others.
The act of witnessing is inextricably tied to what performance is, how artists
make it, how audiences experience it, and how it develops meanings in the
social world. When we conceive and create toward a public performance,
the leap of faith we take is that there will be witnesses who give meaning
and substance to that effort. But the forms and modes of witnessing that
are essential to performance are hugely variable, and often layered and
co-dependent. When we conceive of the act of witnessing our primary
relationship is typically ocular—it involves seeing. Etymologically, we know
that the word “theater” comes from the Greek, meaning literally “the seeing
place.” Colloquially, when we speak of having witnessed something, we
generally mean to say that we have seen it.
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