Performing Trauma: Race Riots and Beyond in the Work of Anna Deavere Smith

Abstract

Isn’t it somewhat of a paradox that Anna Deavere Smith’s vigorous invocation to those working in the documentary mode to ‘get real’ postdates her own best known works in the genre by over 15 years? Not necessarily. Although Smith’s Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn and Other Identities (1992, first directed by Emily Mann) and Twilight: Los Angeles 1992 (1993, first directed by Christopher Ashley) are early examples of theatrically documenting the ‘real’ behind two quite distinct examples of urban trauma, events have unfortunately conspired to make the traumatic an inescapable condition for all of us living in the twentyfirst century. Following the catastrophe of 9/11, documentary theatre makers have been challenged as never before to convey ‘the real’ to an audience that continues to be bombarded on a daily basis, with startling immediacy, by a form of mediatised shorthand for the traumatic — moving, static and repeated graphic images of war, death and mayhem. This seemingly increasing surfeit of horror, readily accessible through a range of media, presents the risk of emotionally anaesthetising the very people that documentary theatre attempts to communicate with and inspire. Indeed, in an eerie inversion that recalls and compounds Smith’s own words in the opening quotation of this chapter, Susan Sontag observes that the vocabulary used to describe the catastrophe of 9/11 is often the language of the representational rather than the real:

The attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, was described as ‘unreal’, ‘surreal’, ‘like a movie’, in many of the first accounts of those who escaped from the towers or watched from nearby. After four decades of big-budget Hollywood disaster films, ’It felt like a movie’ seems to have displaced the way survivors of a catastrophe used to express the short term un-assimilability of what they had gone through: ‘It felt like a dream’. (2003, p. 19)

Here follows a provocation for documentarians, those who cultivate the soil of reality; about making art out of the real, looking to the real to find a new aesthetics, meanings, feelings that actors have been faking. It’s only natural that we would look to the real to find… fiction. And what do we do now that we find out how easy it is to fake, even, say, a memoir (Million Little Pieces)? I say we get real — er… But my question: Does the academy help? Us, get real? Perhaps if it’s real we want, we should recall the fight about theory (real?) vs. practise (real?). What’s realer? Let’s get real.

(2006, p. 192)