Context and Methodology

5 Soldiers was developed by Kay following a period of field research, first as a participant in two weeks of full battle fatigue training with the 4^th Battalion The Rifles and later a secondment at the Defence Medical Rehabilitation Centre Headley Court, Surrey, England. This degree of immersion into soldiers’ training was essential to the development of the work and, as will emerge through this paper, to military spectators’ subsequent experience of the performance. Reflecting on the impact of the field research, Kay writes that the experience:

In describing the processes through which the work was developed and her objectives in wanting to stage the embodied experience of soldiers, Kay writes that “There have been war artists, war photographers, war poets, but the medium of soldier's profession is their body—perhaps a war choreographer could get under the skin of a soldier and portray how it actually feels to be a soldier” (Kay and Reynolds Reference Kay, Reynolds, Morris and Giersdorf2016, 246). Prior to the research presented in this paper, Kay had collaborated with dance researcher Dee Reynolds in exploring audience experiences to the first tour of 5 Soldiers, particularly in terms of the effectiveness and impact of this attempt to represent the embodied experience of soldiers. The results are presented in a chapter titled “The Body Is the Frontline,” which explores how aspects of the performance, including movement and the use of sound, encouraged spectators to evoke “lived, felt, in-the-body experiences that can open up memories of war and [a] complex sense of identity” (Kay and Reynolds Reference Kay, Reynolds, Morris and Giersdorf2016, 265). In their chapter, Kay and Reynolds only briefly touch upon questions of authenticity (while never actually using the word) when they describe how “because of its detailed re-enactment of specific military details, 5 Soldiers is deceptively realistic to a military audience” (2016, 245). While the impact of these “military details” is also examined in this paper, the use of the phrase “deceptively” does not do justice to what I would describe as the reflective and multilayered manner with which the spectators engaged with questions of authenticity. It is the nuanced analysis of the interplay between the experience of authenticity and theatricality among invested spectators that is the particular contribution of this article.

In exploring this theme, this paper braids qualitative research data with analytical discussion of the key conceptual frameworks that emerged from the empirical material—discourses on authenticity and how these relate to audiences. This methodological section therefore introduces: first, the work itself; second, the qualitative audience research; and third, discourses of authenticity.

5 Soldiers

In any textual exploration of a dance performance the work itself can become a kind of ghostly presence, discovered at a remove through words and memories. For readers of this paper, the principal way in which the performance will become known is through the recollections and responses of the audience research participants. In many ways this is appropriate, as this article focuses on their perspectives. However, it is also useful to give a general sense of the performance, its form and character (Photos 1 and 2).

Photo 1. Rosie Kay Dance Company, 5 Soldiers (2015). Dancers: Duncan Anderson, Sean Marcs, Oliver Russell, Shelley Haden, and Chester Hayes. Photographer: Tim Cross. Photo courtesy of Rosie Kay.

Photo 2. Rosie Kay Dance Company, 5 Soldiers (2015). Dancers: Sean Marcs, Duncan Anderson, Oliver Russell, Shelley Haden, and Chester Hayes. Photographer: Tim Cross. Photo courtesy of Rosie Kay.

5 Soldiers is performed by one female and four male dancers, all young, fit, and dressed in military fatigues. The work is performed in a confined “waiting space,” the dancers starting already on stage with the audience on three sides. The back wall is used for projections, which consist of a digital double clock, military admin coding (see photo 2), abstracted land contouring, and documentary Afghanistan landscape footage. The work consists of four parts. The opening section, introducing the audience to the world the work inhabits, consists of reenacted moments of military training, the dancers as soldiers performing complex drill maneuvers and quick double-time marching. The beginnings of roughly sketched characters begin to emerge, such as a relationship between a noncommissioned officer and the ranks.

The second section depicts some of the waiting that soldiers endure, the boredom between periods of action and evokes the military experience as simultaneously one of action and of endless waiting. This includes elements of camaraderie, the humor that underpins friendship, the fighting that is produced by enforced proximity and building tensions, and a scene where the male soldiers prey with increasing sexual violence on the single female soldier (see photo 3). The third section is the only one that presents actual conflict: worth noting in itself as conflict is only one element of the broader military experience. Here the soldiers are parachuted by helicopter (represented by the stage being entirely filled by Afghan Chinook footage) into a war zone and a patrol scene. This patrol builds up to the inevitable IED attack or explosion, in which the youngest soldier is injured.

Photo 3. Rosie Kay Dance Company, 5 Soldiers (2016). Dancers: Reece Causton, Duncan Anderson, Oliver Russell, Luke Bradshaw, and Shelley Haden. Photographer: Maria Falconer. Photo courtesy of Rosie Kay.

The final, and shortest, section of the work is a portrayal starting in a rehabilitation center and focusing on the injured male in a solo, his legs strapped calves-to-thighs behind him so that he appears to be a double amputee (see photo 4). The other soldiers return to waiting on the sides as he struggles to find ways to move with his new body; the work ends as he attempts to march on his stumps toward the audience.

Photo 4. Rosie Kay Dance Company, 5 Soldiers (2016). Dancers: Shelley Haden, Chester Hayes, Oliver Russell, and Sean Marcs. Photographer: Maria Falconer. Photo courtesy of Rosie Kay.

Qualitative Audience Research

The audience research sought to gather army and ex-army response to 5 Soldiers following its performance in York in 2015 as part of a wider tour of England and Wales. The research was qualitative in nature, following the objective of engaging participants in wide-ranging, reflective conversation about their experience of the performance (see, for example, Barker Reference Barker1998).

The research described here consisted of two main elements. First, six telephone interviews were conducted with serving or retired military personnel, consisting of commissioned officers, commanding officers, and a commander-in-chief, all of whom had seen 5 Soldiers and taken part in post-show discussions about the performance. Each interview lasted for between 30 to 60 minutes and followed a semistructured format with particular emphasis on personal expectations and experiences of the performance, the issues and topics raised by the production, its relationship to wider representation of the military, and its potential impact on both civilian and military audiences. The objective of these “expert interviews”Footnote ⁴ was to explore how the interviewees’ professional experience and knowledge informed and shaped their perception and response to the production. These participants will be identified anonymously as CO1 to CO6.

Secondly, a 90-minute postperformance focus group was held with three military veterans, recruited through a local veterans’ community support group.Footnote ⁵ The same structure of questions was followed as with the telephone interviews. The veterans’ military service ranged between six and twenty-four years, including operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Balkans, Germany, Rwanda, and Northern Ireland. None were commissioned officers. All the veterans described themselves as having physical and/or mental health difficulties resulting from their military service. All were men. One of the veterans described himself as an occasional theater/dance spectator; one of the participants had never seen a live dance or theater performance before. These participants will be identified anonymously as: Veteran A, Veteran B, and Veteran C.

Both interviews and focus group were recorded, with the material subsequently transcribed verbatim.Footnote ⁶ The semistructured question format then enabled a grouping of responses by theme and for different or unexpected themes to emerge. In the initial analysis of the material themes described included: expectations, authenticity, the portrayal of the female soldier, the representation of camaraderie, the representation of injury and soldiers as victims, and the relationship with the audience (both military and nonmilitary). Among these, authenticity was prominent both as something discussed in its own right and as a prism through which other themes were discussed or evaluated, and for this reason it is the focus of this paper. The next section will therefore briefly examine authenticity as a prominent and problematic discourse within the arts. The specific focus here is on authenticity as it has been framed in relation to spectatorship in order to provide a conceptual framework through which to consider how the military spectators used the term within their responses.

Discourses of Authenticity

There are few critical concepts as fraught as the notion of authenticity. As theater researcher Helen Freshwater writes in her exploration of “the complex relationship between performance and authenticity,” “The term authenticity is supremely slippery, as well as being over-stretched. Its association with genuineness, honesty, integrity, and uniqueness meant that it was widely adopted as a term of approbation at both ends of the cultural spectrum during the twentieth century” (Reference Freshwater2012, 155). Most famously, Theodor Adorno declares that judgments of authenticity are largely without content: “Whoever is versed in the jargon [of authenticity] does not have to say what he thinks, does not even have to think properly. The jargon takes over this task and devaluates thought” ([1964] Reference Adorno1986, 9). According to Adorno, the thoughtlessness of assertions of authenticity is perhaps most visible in the manner in which “authentic” and “inauthentic” can become reducible, fundamentally, to judgments of quality in a manner that can be applied across almost any domain of art and culture: from personal identity to news media to food and drink.

Writing in the specific context of dance and spectatorship, Clare Dyson (Reference Dyson2009) similarly exposes the problematic nature of the term. Drawing on discourses from dance improvisation and the “authentic movement” tradition, Dyson describes how the “authentic dancer” is constructed as a performer who is “in-the-moment” and “being themselves.” The difficulty here, as Dyson discusses, is that “however real or authentic a performer is at any given moment on stage, she is still on stage and within a constructed environment” (2009). For Dyson, there is a tension between discourses of the authentic dancer and the requirements of the form in which the dancer has trained her body as an instrument.Footnote ⁷ For Dyson authenticity in dance is “most often discussed in terms of interpretation: ‘She dances that role so well, she is so believable’” (2009).Footnote ⁸

Such sometimes problematic utilizations of ideas of authenticity can also be seen in terms of the representation of the military and, specifically, the lived experience of contemporary soldiers. Parry and Thumim, for example, examine how high-profile representations of the Afghanistan conflict have sought to utilize soldiers’ self-representations specifically because of their ability to claim to be representing soldiers’ authentic self:

To illustrate this, Parry and Thumim (Reference Parry and Thumim2016) draw upon the Imperial War Museum's Reference Museum2011 exhibition “War Story: Serving in Afghanistan,” which tells the experience of the conflict from the perspective of service personnel and their families and asserts the stories came “direct from the men and women who have been serving in Afghanistan, and is often described in their own words and voices” (100). Parry and Thumin's critique of this evocation of authenticity is its ability to mask the inevitable curatorial framing of such exhibitions through the claim to “direct” personal experience.

In a very different context, it is possible to see how representations of war as diverse as computer games (Call of Duty 2 is promoted as “The Most Intense and Realistic Combat EVER”) to feature films (the film Lone Survivor, set in Afghanistan , for example, was praised in Empire (2014) as “the most authentic gunfight you'll see and most affecting view of combat since Black Hawk Down”) utilize concepts of authenticity as a primary marketing strategy. That these representations typically measure their degree of authenticity against other representations —as in the Empire review above, Lone Survivor is praised as the most authentic “since Black Hawk Down”—is just one of the critiques of this trope of authenticity as it slips into manifesting Jean Baudrillard's (Reference Baudrillard, Foss, Patton and Beitchman1983) procession of simulacra by which representations can be seen as copies for which there is no original. In relation to war, which for many people is known only through representations, each representation is a copy that references back to other representation in an endless sequence of deferral. An observation that might encourage us to adopt the skepticism of Guy Debord, who in The Society of the Spectacle declares that “all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation” ([1967] Reference Debord1997, section 9). The vibrant tension of this observation—that we measure both reality and representations by the extent to which they imitate prior representations—is starkly disrupted in the context of presenting a representation of the military to the military: that is, to spectators who have direct lived experienced but simultaneously exist in a society where there is a tendency for such experience to be subsumed by the representational.

For Rosie Kay, a desire for authenticity was not her starting point in making 5 Soldiers; rather, she was interested in her relationship to the subject as an outsider and whether she could “even begin to understand, to interpret and to perhaps translate onto the stage” the subject matter (Kay Reference Kay2015). However, while she felt no compulsion or motivation to document details simply in order to reproduce them, the experience of being an outsider while training with The Rifles forced her to pay attention to details as a kind of survival mechanism:

Through this process, the details were not just observed, but learned, with Kay describing herself as a “participant-observer” who went “native.”Footnote ⁹ In choreographing 5 Soldiers Kay was very conscious of the importance of communicating to the particular and encoded world of the army and of the challenge of constructing a representation that could successfully play back to army audiences:

While not the starting point, therefore, Kay had a clear sense of the importance authenticity to her potential military audiences. The impact of this upon spectators will be explored next, with expectations being considered first and then experiences of the performance.

Expectations and Experiences

The analysis of responses to 5 Soldiers begins with consideration of spectators’ expectations to reflect how our engagement with dance “begins” prior to the event itself. As Martin Barker notes, being an audience “is a process that begins in advance of the actual encounter” with spectators bringing their prior encounters as well as social and personal histories with them (Reference Barker2006, 124). In this context, the relevant personal histories included the respondents’ army backgrounds and crucially also their prior encounters with external representation of that background. In this setting, “intrigued” was one of the more neutral responses received when serving army officers and veterans were asked about their expectations before seeing 5 Soldiers.

In framing their research into soldiers, identities and representation at the Military Research Group at Newcastle University, Neil Jenkings, Rachel Woodward, and Trish Winter note that “In our conversations with serving and former soldiers, talking about news coverage of military operations and personnel, we'd often been told that ‘the Army isn't really like that’” (2016). Their findings also suggest the existence of a “disjuncture” between public representations of the military and soldiers’ own self-representation and “of a lived experience that is, variously, mundane and frightening, stressful and injurious” (Jenkings, Winter, and Woodward Reference Jenkings, Winter, Woodward and Boll2008, 105).Footnote ¹⁰

Echoing such perceptions of a representational disjuncture, the military and exmilitary spectators to 5 Soldiers frequently asserted a sense of trepidation when asked about their expectations of the performance. Their responses ranged from the curious (“I wasn't sure what I was expecting,” CO3 2015) to the skeptical, wondering how a dance performance could possibly represent the military experience (“I was hoping it wasn't all fluffy and silly,” Veteran A 2015). CO2 asserted this bluntly “Probably I expected I wouldn't see anything authentic, really, because, you know, it's a dance performance, how is it possibly going to capture what regimental life is like” (2015). For CO4 this skepticism was the result of the sense of identity produced from being within a community and “how can somebody, how can dancers, represent this highly professional, regulated family of people? Anybody from outside who tried to represent you is automatically suspicious” (CO4 2015).

This trepidation was also caused by the sense, described by Jenkings, Woodward, and Winter (Reference Jenkings, Woodward and Winter2016) above, that the military often feels ill-served by media representations, which depict narrow, inaccurate, or biased representations. CO2 commented that his concern was that portrayals of soldiers tend to “focus on a human story and don't situate the story within the context of military life and what military life is actually like” (2015). While for Veteran A “my perceptions of shows like that and my experiences in the past have… It never really lives up to what they're trying to do” (2015). One fear for several interviewees was that the production would depict soldiers as victims in one way or another. One clear sense was that there is a fundamental difficulty in representing the military in a manner that isn't a “sort of pastiche and it's not very accurate and it's a little bit of mockery and caricature, because that's how you sell stories” (CO2 2015). For the veterans, there was concern that it would be “taking the piss out of us” (Veteran A 2015) or be what they described as “a piss-taking show” (Veteran B 2015).

As demonstrated here, these cautious or outright skeptical expectations were sensitized by prior encounters with other representations of the military and awareness of how easy it is to slip into parody, pastiche, caricature, or piss taking and present something that is narrow, inaccurate, or communicates particular perspectives. All these concerns circulate around questions of representation and, particularly, ideas of authenticity. The extent to which these expectations were allayed, realized, or transformed by the production were largely the result of the extent to which 5 Soldiers satisfied a sense of authenticity for these invested spectators. Indeed, it is telling that the “scholarly circumspection” that Freshwater describes as inflecting discussions of authenticity has had “no discernible impact upon its popular use” (2012, 156). In their analysis of the factors audiences utilize to assess the quality in the performing arts, audience researchers Susan Radbourne, Katya Johanson, and Hilary Glow list “authenticity” (which they define as “a form of truth within the performing arts event”) as one of the four key indicators of the audience experience: “The greater the authenticity of a performance perceived by audience members,” they write, “the greater their enjoyment of the experience” (2010, 362). As Anna Wilson observes, the result is that authenticity is “employed as a marker of judgments by audiences who often use the term as a synonym for ‘good work’” (2015, 341).

Certainly, among the army and ex-army spectators to 5 Soldiers there was a direct correlation between perceptions of authenticity and judgments of quality: those who responded positively to the performance identified 5 Soldiers as powerfully authentic to their own experience of the military; those perceiving it more ambivalently did less so and those seeing it negatively not at all. However, this masks the complexity of the perceptions, which are worth exploring in detail.

These spectators’ relationship to the performance was continually assessed against a standard of authenticity originating from within their own military experience. This is present when one the veterans said the performance felt “real to life” (Veteran C 2015) or when another commented that “it did show you what it's like when you go out on patrol” (Veteran B 2015). For CO2 the show presented “what soldiers go through and really what they're like” (2015). Here, the strength of the production was its authenticity, and the authenticity of the performance was its strength.

This authenticity was achieved in part through what CO5 called observation of details and CO1 described as “recognizable hooks,” that is, moments of behavior or action that “anybody who has gone through would see or recognize” (2015). The spectators described this in terms of “tradecraft,” giving examples such as the use of hand signals in the patrolling scenes and the probing of the ground for landmines. These details were important because they evidenced research, investment in the process, and respect for the subject matter.

One particularly striking example of how details underpinned a sense of authenticity came up in the veterans’ focus group when participants discussed the drill scene. This they first noticed in terms of its precision: “And the marching, they were in perfect step; the quick march, everyone was in perfect step, which must have taken some training you know. We couldn't do that when we were young” (Veteran C 2015). Then another veteran commented “there was only one teddy bear in the whole act wasn't there? One teddy bear in the whole drill” (Veteran B 2015) followed by a discussion whether this “teddy bear”—British army slang for a moment when your arms and legs do not swing in a coordinated way—had been inserted deliberately:

This awareness of how authenticity is constructed, even down to the deliberate planning of mistakes, indicates that this was not a naïve or single-faceted sense of the authentic. Rather, a complex interplay existed between the representation, a sense of military identity, and experience. That it felt like a genuine and committed portrayal was vital to these spectators’ willingness and ability to engage with the production:

Here, with these detailed and invested perceptions of the importance and impact of authenticity, it is valuable to return to theoretical discourses and seek to go beyond simple judgments of quality and formulate a more nuanced understanding of the concept in the light of audience experiences.

Two Authenticities

It is therefore worth pausing here to consider exactly what is going on in these expressions of authenticity. First, it seems clear that while a perception of authenticity was a prerequisite to a positive engagement with the performance, the responses go beyond a simple equation of authenticity with quality as described by Wilson, Radbourne and colleagues, and others. Equally, it would also be difficult to agree with Adorno and accuse these spectators of employing ideas of authenticity unthinkingly as a substitute for critical engagement. Rather, what is revealed is a complex and subtle personal and intersubjective relating of lived experience to the dance representation, one in which the spectators frequently travelled through doubt to acceptance, to full empathetic investment in which they placed themselves—imaginatively, kinesthetically, emotionally—within the body of the performers on stage. Some of the articulations of this were strikingly absolute. CO1, for example, described the performance as a “little bit like doing six months in one hour” (2015). The concept and claim of authenticity, therefore, needs to be more subtly understood than simply an assertion that the performance looked the part or was a realistic portrayal.

A useful starting point is Rudolf Arnheim's description of two authenticities; like Sontag's discussion in Regarding the Pain of Others (Reference Sontag2003), it was proposed in relation to photographic media but can be applied to representations more broadly. Arnheim's first authenticity is the extent to which a depiction “does justice to the facts of reality” (Reference Arnheim1997, 53). For the army and ex-army spectators of 5 Soldiers this was an essential assessment: did the performance have a factual accuracy, did it look right, did it have the details right, did it satisfy a sense of institutional norms and expectations?

As has been seen, meeting this threshold of authenticity enabled these spectators to watch and relate to the performance. However, it in itself does not explain the level of investment that followed. Here we turn to Arnheim's second authenticity, which he describes in terms of a depiction “expressing the qualities of human experience by any means suitable to that purpose” (53). This second authenticity, for Arnheim, is greatly helped by the first, and it is possible to see this with 5 Soldiers. Authenticity to the “facts of reality” enables—or perhaps in this instance was the prerequisite to—investment of authenticity of “qualities of the human experience.”

The importance of authenticity for these invested spectators in relation to 5 Soldiers was therefore twofold. First, it satisfied that sense of military identity and allayed fears that what was being presented was a pastiche or caricature. This, fundamentally, enabled these expert spectators to watch, to see the performance rather than see a set of clichés—as Veteran A put it, the sense of authenticity made him able to think “for me it's like right, okay, I get that and I appreciate the fact that you've made it real for me” (2015). Second, once recognized and appreciated, this authenticity enabled these spectators to place themselves within the performance in various, sometimes very intense, ways. For CO4 the authenticity was as much emotional as anything else:

Meanwhile for several other respondents it was another scene—depicting a helicopter transfer into conflict—that particularly invited them to place themselves within the performance. Veteran C, for example, commented “I actually felt like going, okay yes, I wanted to get in time with them, and it made me reflect and made me think back to when I was doing those journeys … I felt sick” (2015). Or Veteran A:

This narrowing of the gap between watching and participating was therefore dependent on the spectators’ internal sense of authenticity being satisfied, but it was not produced by this alone.

From Authenticity to Theatricality

Even considering Arnheim's concept of two authenticities—one about the facts of reality and the second about the human experience—it is interesting that authenticity should be so central to responses to such a stylized and abstracted piece of contemporary dance. In her discussion of authenticity and music theater, Freshwater notes a similar paradox, writing that “performance theory often casts theatricality and authenticity as ‘theoretical antagonists’” (2012, 156) but that assertions and experiences of authenticity are often accompanied by elements of theatricality that appear paradigmatically opposite. In common usage we can easily see how theatricality might be the antithesis of authenticity, and in the specific context of the depiction of war Sontag observes that while war is a canonical subject in art, representations of war are often criticized if they are perceived to aestheticize conflict or make it seem “too much like art” (2003, 68). In this discourse, Sontag continues, the perception is that beauty—and considerations of aesthetics more broadly—turns attention away from the subject and to the medium itself. Rather than considering the experience of pain, the suffering of the subject, we find ourselves appreciating the craft of the artist. Sontag describes this in terms of the perceived “inauthenticity of the beautiful” (69).

Reflecting on the process of creating 5 Soldiers, Kay observes that she was interested in “finding the right tension between the reality (real things that real soldiers do) and the theatricality (will this work on stage? How can I present it? And importantly, how can it be developed into a choreographic mode?)” (Kay Reference Kay2015). Kay was explicitly seeking a choreographic language through which to represent the world of the military experience, and this process of translation was vital. Indeed, the proposal that emerges from the audience responses is that the choreographic form constructs a kind of aesthetic lens that enables a new kind of vision of the authentic—one where the authentic and the theatrical are combined. Interestingly, at the end of Regarding the Pain of Others, the representation of war that Sontag isolates for particular praise as being “exemplary in its thoughtfulness and power” (2003, 111) is an image that is the antithesis of a documentation but has rather been made, posed, and constructed in the studio (the work is Jeff Wall's Dead Troops Talk, 1992). While theatrical in its form, it nonetheless possesses Arnheim's second authenticity of “qualities of the human experience” and in terms of the impact of representations of conflict it is potentially this that is essential. For military audiences of 5 Soldiers recognition of authenticity was in itself important, enabling recognition and investment; yet, such authenticity by itself would not have been enough to provoke affective resonance and impact. Instead, there is a particular power in experiencing a direct, truthful, physical, but also aesthetic and abstracted representation.

For CO3 there was an extent to which the abstraction of dance challenged and undermined the factual reality of the depiction. For her, dance was “less shocking and less immediate” than the depiction of conflict through more naturalistic forms (2015). For illustration, she contrasted it with the film Saving Private Ryan (Spielberg Reference Spielberg1998), commenting that dance could never achieve the emotional impacts of the opening scenes of the film depicting the D-Day landings on the Normandy beaches. This remark, however, was immediately followed by the observation that she felt that the need to invest “your imagination a bit more” in 5 Soldiers meant it “probably goes that little bit deeper because you've had to invest a little bit more thought and imagination into what they're trying to portray” (CO3 2015). There is an interesting tension here that allows us to interrogate further the affective impact of this interplay between authenticity and theatricality.

With 5 Soldiers one of the elements of the dance representation that was commented on frequently was its unfamiliarity and—echoing CO3 above—the requirement this made on the viewer. For CO5 dance felt different from “more normal” (meaning familiar) representations on television or in the media. For him dance communicated in a “very emotional, in some ways frightening, way” (2015). Similarly, for CO4 part of the power of 5 Soldiers was that it felt new, felt like it was working without any conventions that make other representations of war seem familiar and therefore more distanced (2015).Footnote ¹¹ For members of the veterans’ focus group what they termed the more “abstract” form of dance, particularly in comparison to film, meant “you had to think what was going on. You had to think and watch what was going on which made it better I felt” (Veteran B 2015). The benefit of this was that, “I think for me it allowed a lot of interpretation, personal interpretation, and I don't think any other media can do that” (Veteran B 2015). The result was a more open experience, rather than something that felt like it had a particular agenda:

To explore this knotty relationship between authenticity and aesthetic abstraction further, it is worth focusing on a specific moment within 5 Soldiers.

Representing Trauma

One of the climactic moments of 5 Soldiers, discussed by all the respondents, was the depiction of a soldier's injury at the end of the performance. In fact, the aspect most commented on was not the moment of injury itself but the aftermath: with the soldier depicted as an amputee, with only stumps remaining for legs, and beginning the process of rehabilitation and relearning to walk.

For the army spectators, their emotional connection to this moment is exemplified by this comment from Veteran B:

Or Veteran A, who asserted a strong resonance with the image of isolation depicted in this moment, saying, “and what brought it back for me was when the lad was crawling and all his friends were separated and he couldn't get back in touch with them” (2015).

While prompting some discussion about the political implications of this scene—particularly what it might imply about how the military treats injured service personnel and whether the scene's place at the end of the performance could be considered as positioning soldiers as victims—it was largely recognized by the interviewees as powerful and necessary, even as it caused disquiet and discomfort:

In terms of the discussion here, what is crucial about this scene is that it came at the end of the performance when the production had already “earned” the spectators’ acceptance and investment. And it was at this point that the interplay between authenticity and theatricality also became central to the choreography, as Kay sought a way of representing the trauma of injury. Kay recalls how in the rehearsal studio they had been improvising using scarves and rehab elastics to tie the dancers’ limbs up. One dancer tried arms and legs, another tried two arms. Then:

In this extended reflection, the mutuality of authenticity and theatricality comes to the fore. Here it is possible to grasp the particular impact of the relationship that aestheticizes (“it was beautiful”) but by doing so also constructs a new relationship between ourselves and the world we are contemplating. For philosopher Elaine Scarry the contemplation of the beautiful produces a radical decentering of the self that alters our consciousness in relation to ourselves and to others. Such moments of beauty act “like small tears in the surface of the world that pull us through to some vaster space” (Reference Scarry2006, 112). In the context of 5 Soldiers, this moment acted as a tear that enabled us enter into a relationship with the otherwise unknowable trauma of the pain of another.

In her discussion of the theatrical representation of trauma on stage, Anna Harpin examines the function and impact of the aesthetic representation of violence and pain—a form that with its portrayal of conflict and devastating injury, 5 Soldiers certainly falls into. Part of the nature of trauma, for Harpin, is the inability to witness and make sense of it: “the traumatic event inhibits the very possibility of witnessing owing to its inassimilable and sudden psychic violence” (Reference Harpin2011, 105). The unknowableness of trauma produces a tension between “the impossibility of telling” and the “impossible silence” and it is into this space that the aesthetic representation of traumatic experience—which is able to speak without being the thing itself—inserts itself. It is able to do so precisely because as an aesthetic representation it is abstracted, stylized, potentially beautiful, certainly theatrical. It wears, as Harpin puts it, “its unreality on its sleeve” (105). The parallel between this and the staging of and responses to 5 Soldiers feels significant.

One of the impacts of theatricality, therefore, is to make it possible to see by making the artifice of the representation impossible to forget. The result is that the spectators have to take responsibility for their own presence, for their gaze, for their own individual act of looking.

With army and ex-army spectators this relationship was doubled through the prism of their own experiences. The power of the performance was in its ability to represent back to them their experience at a distance. It was authentic, yet removed—abstracted, beautiful, theatrical, and thereby suddenly very articulate.