Arts & International Affairs: Volume 2, Number 2 | Page 79

From Spectating to
Witnessing: Performance in
the Here and Now
Derek Goldman
Derek Goldman is Professor of Theater and Performance Studies at Georgetown University and
co-Founding Director of the Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics, which he co-founded
with Ambassador Cynthia Schneider in 2012 with a mission “to harness the power of performance
to humanize global politics” (www.globallab.georgetown.edu). He is an award-winning stage
director, playwright, adapter, producer, developer of new work, teacher, and published scholar,
whose artistic work has been seen around the country, Off-Broadway and at numerous major
regional theaters, as well as internationally. In 2016 he was honored to receive the prestigious
President’s Award for Distinguished Scholar-Teachers. He is a Founding Director of UNESCO/
ITI’s Global Network of Higher Education in the Performing Arts, member of the Board of Theatre
Communications Group, with whom he is a co-creator of the Global Theatre Initiative, promoting
cross-cultural collaboration and cultivating strategies to maximize the global theatre field. He holds
a Ph. D. in Performance Studies from Northwestern University.
We are all witnesses to the times that we are living through and to countless
performative manifestations of these times on a daily basis. But our role as
witnesses is inevitably bound up with so many of the other roles that we try
to hold in balance, and is compromised by what we inevitably fail to see, to
notice, and to absorb of what is transpiring around us, and from all that we,
being human, fail to process and to transform. The daily performance of our
lives consists of habitually bearing witness to a great deal that, if we allow it
to, might profoundly stir and trouble us. But we witness every day so much
that we feel powerless to act on, and that we feel we lack the capacity to
do anything about. The desperation and suffering of another human being
we pass on the street is a living image of our habitual daily performance of
simultaneously bearing witness, and of avoiding or forgetting what we see.
Most of us are inundated these days by an onslaught of competing discourses,
images, narrative fragments, and bits of mediated information, and it is not
uncommon to experience laments of sensory overload, numbness, and
despair as conscientious citizens try to balance a sense of being engaged and
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