ABSTRACT
In preparing recently for a lecture in a course I am teaching in documentary storytelling at American University, I read about how artists and survivors of political torture in Chile came together in New York to explore dramatic ways to use testimony. Inspired by the use of testimony in Latin America called Theatre of Witness, the group Theatre Arts Against Political Violence captured the stories:
[O]ral histories were conducted [emphasis added] with torture survivors as a way for others to enter into the experience of remembered torture, but in a broader landscape than one-on-one therapy (or oral history) could provide. The actors modeled the experience of torture through their bodies, symbolically transferring the words into a lived experience that would be witnessed by the public to break down the conspiracy of silence that often confines the survivor in a world of isolation. … The goal of the production was to give torture survivors the ability to stand outside their experience and witness the transformation of their suffering, on stage in the company of friends and fellow survivors. The survivors became the critics and ultimately the authors, of the transformation. (Clark, 2002, p. 102)
