ABSTRACT
Departing from an apparent point of saturation with verbatim theatre diagnosed in 2018 by theatre critic Matt Trueman, from which he notably exempts the work of American verbatim theatre pioneer Anna Deavere Smith, the chapter proceeds to identify the defining features of Smith's particular approach. In this process, the chapter references Norman Denzin's paradigm of postmodern performative ethnography, focusing specifically on the work's ability to compositely engage diverse audience perspectives, which are understood according to Dorinne Kondo as necessarily ‘incomensurable’. Bella Merlin's idea of ‘counterpoint’ between verbatim text and its performance, drawn from her practice, is isolated as significant. Mikhail Bakhtin's theoretically more prominent notion of heteroglossia is re-substituted by the musicological notion of polyphony found at its core. Polyphony and its constitutive element counterpoint are deployed as an explanatory mechanism for the trend introduced here as ‘post-verbatim’ theatre: documentary theatre that represents the original subject of its research not by means of loyal transmission, but by engaging the audience in a critical process through the contrapuntal juxtaposition of the documentary material with the means of its theatricalisation. A key example analysed here is Nic Green's Cock and Bull (2015) specifically for its engendering of an act of collective, embodied, affective critique. In addition, the chapter examines testimonies from the artists interviewed as part of the A/OD project under the remit of issue #2 Post-Verbatim of Lend Me Your Ears (LMYE) on www.auralia.space, such as Gracefool Collective, Valentijn Dhaenens, Dead Centre, Lola Arias, The Fall Collective, and others. Notions of montage, convergence of perspectives, theatricalisation, metaphor, technicity of theatre in representing the real, unrepresentability, and holding on to contradictions are identified as key themes that run across the sample. Finally, three themes are distilled as more generally definitive of the dramaturgies of speech and sound: politicity of form, instrumentalisation of technology, and trans-cultural contingency of the work.
