Performing Ethos: International Journal of Ethics in Theatre & Performance - Volume 2, Issue 1, 2011

The Tectonic Theater Project (TTP) under the leadership of Moisés Kaufman began their ethnographic research in Laramie, Wyoming in November 1998, four weeks after the murder of Matthew Shepard. The impact of The Laramie Project is significant as an example of theatre for social change; however the methods used by the TTP to gather and disseminate their research material for this project are often overlooked. Furthermore a full-length epilogue, published ten years after the original performance, reassesses the research and results, developing a complicated field of ethical dilemmas in representation. This article maps the ways in which The Laramie Project is connected to and also how it significantly departs from the codes of ethics outlined by three leading anthropological organizations and considers the challenges inherent in performance as representation. Documentary drama, like The Laramie Project, becomes a rich and useful space for rehearsing the ways in which ethics guide fieldwork in anthropology and performance, and how these disciplines might learn from and employ particular strategies inherent to each discipline.

In 2008 Aliza Shvarts, a senior at Yale University, proposed and executed a thesis project for her undergraduate art major. She artificially inseminated herself repeatedly over the course of nine months, then self-induced a miscarriage on the 28th day of her cycle using herbal abortifacients. She planned to project video of her miscarriages (filmed alone in a bathtub) onto the sides of a large cube, with blood from the miscarriages suspended under its surface. When word spread on the nature of her project, Shvarts was faced with a powerful furore from Yale, the media and the national public. 'Untitled [Senior Thesis], 2008' was never shown in public. This article considers how realness and visibility can define a performance ethics of the abortive body. Performing an abortion narrative within the confines of traditional performance does not necessarily provoke any discussion of ethical performance. However, by bringing in her own body and the question of 'realness', Shvarts's piece entered that realm. She disrupted perceptions of ethics in performance by enacting a bodily speech that took for its language a process normatively defined within a cultural code of moral permissibility.

Part of an ongoing exploration of the ethics of representation and spectatorship in theatre addressing global issues, this article examines how theatre depicting 'strangers' may activate our empathy. Rooting the discussion in Jovanni Sy's 2010 site-specific play A Taste of Empire in Toronto, the author draws on new research in the field of social neuroscience to explore how theatre is attempting to bridge what J. D. Trout calls 'the empathy gap': the gap between empathetic relationships in small, community groups and empathetic relationships between strangers at a global scale. While the discovery of the 'mirror neuron' system might make a case for the human capacity for empathy at larger scales, other research suggests a range of factors mitigate empathy, at least providing cause for scepticism.

COMMUNITY POLITICS AND THE PEACE PROCESS IN CONTEMPORARY NORTHERN IRISH DRAMA, EVA URBAN, (2010) Oxford, Frankfurt am Main, Bern and New York: Peter Lang International Academic Publishers, 303 pp., ISBN: 978-3-0343-0143-5, pbk, £38.00

GET REAL: DOCUMENTARY THEATRE PAST AND PRESENT, ALISON FORSYTH AND CHRIS MEGSON (EDS), ([2009] 2011) Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 264 pp., ISBN: 0-230-22115-7, hbk, £52.00; ISBN: 0-230-33689-2, pbk, £17.99

THEATRE: THE REDISCOVERY OF STYLE, MICHEL SAINT-DENIS, (2009) Jane Baldwin (ed.), London and New York: Routledge Theatre Classics, 202 pp., ISBN: 978-0-415-45048-5, pbk, £17.99

DISASTER CAPITALISM; OR MONEY CAN'T BUY YOU LOVE, RICK MITCHELL, (2011) Bristol: Intellect, 299 pp., ISBN 978-1-84150-430-8, pbk, £14.95

THEATRE AND ETHICS, NICHOLAS RIDOUT, (2009) London: Palgrave, 78 pp., ISBN 978-0-230-23027-1, pbk, £4.99

DAS DRAMA DES PREKÄREN: ÜBER DIE WIEDERKEHR DER ETHIK IN THEATER UND PERFORMANCE, KATHARINA PEWNY, (2011) Bielefeld: transcript, 336 pp., ISBN 978-3-8376-1651-4, pbk, €32.80

THE TRANSFORMATIVE POWER OF PERFORMANCE (TRANS. SASKYA IRIS JAIN), ERIKA FISCHER-LICHTE, (2008) Abingdon: Routledge, 232 pp., ISBN: 978-0-415-45856-6, pbk, £22.99