| Popis: |
This paper discusses the aesthetic and social implications of enacted eyewitness accounts. For Brecht, the principles of eyewitness performance served as a “basic model” for contemporary epic theater as a performed critique of social life, with the “Street Scene” (1940) and a camp scene (1939/40) as the paradigmatic sites of eyewitness acts. With Brecht and Smith, who superimposes these sites in her multi-media work on the Brooklyn Crown Heights Race Riots in 1991 (1992-94), the theatricality of eyewitness accounts, their “uneasy” aesthetics and acting technique, becomes crucial to understanding the present moment in culture. Concomitantly, enacted eyewitness accounts politicize and de-psychologize our understanding of their scenes. They are not about identity – what we are – but about personhood, about how we are as social creatures, in legal, aesthetic, and material terms. |
