Performing trauma safely

CW: mental health, trauma, sexual assault, violence

A friend on Facebook recently shared this fabulous and timely, for me, essay by Sarah Mantell: Touch the Wound, But Don’t Live There. In the essay, Mantell explores their own mental/physical health journey in relationship to their creative process. They also discuss how Somatic Experiencing and resilience services for artists has begun to change the field’s relationship to trauma, with a goal expressed in the title of the essay.

I have been interested in exploring trauma and Somatic Experiencing in the context of performance since working as stage manager for a production of Buried Child a couple years ago. Buried Child is a story of intergenerational trauma and the damage done to everyone in the sphere of these hurt and hurting people. There are difficult scenes in this play. Scenes that brought up powerful reactions in the actors. These needed to be addressed with care and consent. Even with the care and the centeredness of each member of the cast, there were moments where physical bodies went strongly into trauma responses.

• “Holding both your own trauma and that of the person you are embodying is a feat with no parallels outside the field of acting. Holding the trauma of many characters at once long enough to write them into being is work that writers learn to do without support for the size of that lift. But there is science and methodology and practice that can make our work deeper and stronger.”—Sarah Mantell, Touch the Wound, But Don’t Live There.

Actors take on difficult, challenging, gritty roles and make them tangible through their presence. The actors in films where emotional, physical, psychological violence are portrayed are faced with the real-life impacts of these processes on their own body-minds. In the film, Boys Don’t Cry, actors reacted strongly to the intense experience of making this movie:

• “The intensity of the shoot got to the actors. Goranson had an emotional breakdown in the scene in which Candace sees Brandon stripped. Sarsgaard threw up while shooting the rape scene. ‘I was run ragged,’ he says. ‘It had been going on so long and shooting nights. Everything started to seem really kind of…not like the movie was real, but the making of the movie was so real.'”—Hilary Swank Reflects on Boys Don’t Cry

When Boys Don’t Cry was made there was not much structural support for body/mind health. That is changing, as Mantell writes. 

I am grateful that this work is making its way into the performance field and creating positive change. It really is a wonderful article offering hope for healthier performers. They don’t have to suffer for their art.

If you are a performer working with challenging roles or finding yourself stuck in ways that are hard to overcome, please consider scheduling a session with me. Together we can find the pathways to your own resilience in the context of your performance.