Arts & International Affairs: Volume 2, Number 2 | Page 83

More recently, productive critical interventions have discussed other mediated
forms of witnessing such as photographs, diaries, and recordings. The work
of Israel’s remarkable Nalaga’at Theater, with its mission to integrate “deafblind
people into society,” reminds us that experiencing performative copresence
may not be confined to the acts of seeing and hearing. Still, what
we normally mean by performance is fundamentally characterized by its
liveness and the physical co-presence of living human beings in a shared
space.
The relationship of performance to witnessing is not only a dynamic in the
performer–audience relationship. A wide variety of structures and forms
of bearing witness have for thousands of years been woven into the fabric
of performances themselves. The form and function of the Greek Chorus
as an extension of the community that would comment on and reflect the
events of the play is a classic example of how the act of witnessing has been
staged, and that continues to be used in many variations in contemporary
plays. This form of performance, in which, for example, a chorus uses direct
address to implicitly or explicitly acknowledge the presence of the audience
and to comment on the action, creates a dialectic within the performed
event between the events being witnessed and those doing the witnessing.
The Chorus is thus conceived as an extension of the audience, a way for the
community to look at itself.
In addition, variations on the “courtroom drama” have been pervasive
across many eras, cultures, and theatrical forms ranging from the Greeks
to Shakespeare to innumerable classic plays in the American and British
naturalistic traditions. Much of the enduring power of this form is in how
it positions and involves the audience as a kind of proxy jury, capable of
witnessing events and of weighing arguments that are often presented
directly to them.
There are other theatrical forms and theoretical movements that have gained
currency such as the epic theater, a term first coined by Erwin Piscator
(����), and made most famous by Bertolt Brecht. Epic theater serves as a vast
umbrella for an array of theatre practices rooted in audience interaction,
documentary techniques, and tactics meant to cultivate an audience response
in the here and now. Epic theater forms are arguably as familiar now in many
of their conventions as realism. At its root, this theatrical approach highlights
the audience capacity to participate in, challenge, interrupt, or even contest
the performance. Influential Brazilian theatre practitioner and politician
Augusto Boal, who founded the form known as Theatre of the Oppressed,
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