تئاتر پسافاجعه و بازنمایی رنج جمعی: مطالعٔە تطبیقی اندیشه های هاوارد بارکر و یرژی گروتوفسکی در نمایش آکروپولیس

This study investigates the representational strategies of "collective suffering" in post-catastrophe theatre, concentrating on Jerzy Grotowski's Akropolis and interrogating it through the theoretical framework of Howard Barker's "Theatre of Catastrophe." In light of the ineffability and unrepresentability of large-scale historical catastrophes—genocide in particular—conventional realist approaches have been problematized as not merely insufficient but also reductive, distortive, and prone to trivializing the agony of victims. By contrast, post-catastrophe theatre, through the deployment of indirect, non-mimetic strategies, seeks to represent the consequences, voids, and residual traumas that persist in the aftermath of catastrophe.

The central argument of this paper posits that Grotowski's Akropolis, through its radical reduction of dramaturgical elements and its transformation of the performer's body into a "living archive" of traumatic memory, constitutes a paradigmatic instance of "representation through negation"—a modality that Barker posits as the sine qua non of the Theatre of Catastrophe. Moreover, the inversion of mythological narratives and the deliberate imposition of spectatorial passivity within the work serve to concretize, respectively, "radical ethical ambiguity" and the "tragedy of impossible mourning"—two pivotal concepts within Barker's aesthetic theory.

In its concluding analysis, this research reveals that the Theatre of Catastrophe, by consciously abstaining from the direct depiction of violence, not only remains rigorously committed to the crisis of representation but also assumes an ethical position that respects the fundamental unrepresentability of trauma, thereby summoning the spectator toward a more authentic and unmediated encounter with collective suffering.