Abstract
This research project employs a hybrid creative-critical inquiry to examine whether magic(al) realism can stage trauma’s difficult-to-represent subjective experience. Because many theorists consider trauma to be unrepresentable, theatre-makers often stage its preceding event instead (Fitzpatrick 59). However, scholars warn against conflating the event and experience, especially because many traumas arise from systemic conditions (Craps 4; Reisner "Private Trauma/Public Drama"; Visser "Decolonizing Trauma Theory" 8-9). While literature and film scholars argue that magic(al) realism can embody trauma’s felt experience (Arva "The Analogical Legacy of Ground Zero" 237; Langdon 14), its potential in theatre remains comparatively underexamined beyond dramatic literature. To address this gap, this project adapts magic(al) realism to theatre performance, developing dramaturgical, scenographic, and embodied strategies. It argues that magic(al) realist theatrical strategies externalize trauma’s internal processes and sensations, bringing them outward and expanding what can be literally or visually staged.
To develop these strategies, this project employs a Practice Research methodology, drawing on Robin Nelson’s framework and Hazel Smith and Roger Dean’s iterative cyclic web model. The project comprises two major research cycles: the first included two workshops, which explored magic(al) realism as a theatrical language to evoke broad qualities of trauma; the second, which included a third workshop and the final performance experiment, Vœrtices, refined this inquiry by applying the most promising magic(al) realist techniques from previous workshops to represent trauma’s intrusive, dissociative, and temporal symptoms. This research contributes to trauma studies by providing specific strategies that address key artistic and ethical challenges regarding trauma’s purported unrepresentability. It advances scholarship on magic(al) realism in theatre by synthesizing four approaches to staging the mode, recuperating it as a critical category and developing a new, hybrid approach to magic(al) realism specific to theatre as a medium. Through these contributions, the project encourages theatre-makers to engage with representational practices that can embody experiences which, like trauma, exceed normative reality.