Psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut once described empathy as vicarious introspection. That is, attending to ourselves as we listen to or imagine other people is the closest we can get to knowing someone else's inner life. My thoughts kept returning to Kohut's understanding of empathy as I read Scott Magelssen's rich, rewarding study of how performance can transform personal experience into a window on the lives of others.
Magelssen defines simming as the use of “theater and performance practices to stage environments in which participants play[ ] out a scripted or improvised narrative in order to gain or produce understandings of a situation and its context” (3). Varieties of simming range from live, first-person immersions in scripted situations to virtual or informal interactions with a proffered scenario. Magelssen argues that simming provides a way to gain a fuller sense of the past, to share something of others' experiences in the present, and to taste and test out possible futures. Magelssen joins a robust conversation about performing past, present, and future, drawing primarily on Rebecca Schneider (reenactments), Susan Leigh Foster (kinesthetic empathy), and Tracy C. Davis (nuclear war rehearsals). Magelssen's study both combines and extends these important conversations.
Following an introduction establishing a taxonomy of simmings, Magelssen divides the book into three parts. In the first, on simming the past, his sites include a recreation of fugitive slaves escaping to the North, a live-chat virtual conversation with museum staff, and a demonstration of nineteenth-century autopsy techniques. Magelssen turns to simming the present in the second section, relating museums' recent efforts to devise interactive programs and then recounting a thrilling U.S.–Mexican border-crossing simulation (the Caminata Nocturna). The final section focuses on what Magelssen christens “preenactments”: drills to prepare emergency responders for crisis situations, programs to educate people in working with senior adults, and elaborate scenarios staged in a mock Middle Eastern town designed to train soldiers about life in rural Iraq.
Magelssen restricts his scope to events he himself experienced. His auto-ethnographic approach generates an attenuated sim-effect of its own. I have neither been nor pretended to be a corpse on a Civil War mortician's table. Magelssen's first-person account of simming a dead body for an educational recreation of historical autopsy procedures provides as deep a sense of corpsing as I am likely to know. He writes vividly about struggling to lie still, to breathe shallowly, and to repress reflex movements even as he takes in the surgeon's explanations. Feeling my own muscles cramp sympathetically as I read, I could not help but think that I was simming his experience of simming.
Magelssen leavens such absorbing recollections with rigorous contextualization and theoretical reflection. He is especially deft at interrogating points where his own body (white, male, U.S. citizen) disrupts the approximation of experience for which simmings strive. Particularly in the slavery-escape and sneaking-over-the-border productions, Magelssen notes how a dissonance of ethnicity, nationality, and privilege complicates not only his own participation, but simming generally. For Magelssen, such dissonance can at least potentially function as a feature rather than a bug of simming's meaning-making pedagogy. That simmings stop short of escapist immersion, he suggests, means that they can provoke a more critical reflection of one's own social positions.
Of course, not every simming about which Magelssen writes realizes such opportunities, nor is every participant as apt as Magelssen is to think critically about institutional privilege. I found Magelssen's chapter on simming age striking in this regard. There he focuses on programs that simulate the experience of living in a senior citizen's body. Simmers don specially designed outfits that impede everyday movements like walking or grasping while dulling senses of sight and sound with clouded goggles and ear muffs. As always, Magelssen's account of his own time in the suit makes for thought-provoking reading, and Magelssen emerged with a sharpened sense of the difficulties many seniors face. But, to the disappointment of the simulation's producers, other simmers absorbed a different message: getting old is awful, so I'd better take care of myself. Magelssen's warnings about the possibility of empathic backfire point to an important and often overlooked element in studies of empathy in performance: the all-too-common assumption that empathy necessarily leads to ethical behavior. Vicarious introspection can just as easily foster voyeuristic tourism or rigid solipsism as it can lasting openness to difference.
Nevertheless, Magelssen discovers success in unexpected places. I was most surprised by his fascinating chapter about “the Sandbox,” the military's faux-Iraqi training town populated with Iraqi-American actors. Featuring a degree of planning, assessment, and constant revision unthinkable by most theatre companies, the Sandbox functions as a massive laboratory in teaching empathy through simmed performance. With enviable critical generosity, Magelssen balances acknowledgment of the war's dubious-to-mendacious pretexts with attention to the sincere commitment of all involved to make the simming translate into better outcomes for Iraqis. Critical without being closed, Magelssen underlines the need for more scholars and practitioners of social change performance to attend to such military–industrial productions.
Magelssen makes a strong case for adding simming to our critical toolboxes. I strive to emphasize to my students how performance can be a mode of knowing rather than just entertainment. Magelssen demonstrates that a wide range of producers have already absorbed this lesson, and he provides an excellent model for how artists, teachers, and critics can make the most of their embodied pedagogy.
