1 ‘Shoah’ is the Hebrew term for what is commonly called the ‘Holocaust’.

2 See especially Baum, Rob, ‘Forgetting Women: The Half Li(f)e of Fascist Memory’, Utah Foreign Language Review, 10, 1 (March 2000), pp. 27–43Google Scholar; and idem, ‘“And Thou Shalt Bind Them as a Sign upon Thy Hand”: Eve's Tattoo and the Holocaust Consumer’, Shofar (forthcoming, 2010).

3 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge, 1962)Google Scholar.

4 This body is more akin to (but not synonymous with) Stanton Garner's notion of the ‘dys-appearance’ in the theatre. See Garner, Stanton, Bodied Spaces: Phenomenology and Performance in Contemporary Drama (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994)Google Scholar.

5 Derrida, Jacques, Schibboleth: pour Paul Celan (Paris: Galilée, 1986)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Prager, Emily, Eve's Tattoo (New York: Vintage Books, 1991)Google Scholar.

7 Turner, Victor, Forest of Symbols (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970), p. 48Google Scholar.

8 Not coincidentally, in my work as a movement practitioner and dance therapist, body–mind is inseparable, and not the philosophical and political duality proposed by most body discourse.

9 Schama, Simon, Landscape and Memory (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), p. 26Google Scholar.

10 The student's name has been changed and performance details omitted to protect the privacy of the survivor.

11 States, Bert O., The Pleasure of the Play (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), p. 145Google Scholar.

12 See Agamben, Giorgio, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Heller-Roazen, Daniel (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998)Google Scholar.

13 Compare Kotre's, John N. journey through memory and its operating symbols in White Gloves: How We Create Ourselves through Memory (New York: Free Press, 1995)Google Scholar.

14 Tompkins, Jane, ‘At the Buffalo Bill Museum – June 1988’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 89, 3 (1992), pp. 525–45Google Scholar.

15 Girard, René, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Gregory, Patrick (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977)Google Scholar.

16 I say she incorporated a fourth wall because even though she used direct address, she did not really want the audience to respond verbally or physically to the performance; that is, to interrupt her in her performance or to share the space of the performing survivor.

17 Dürrenmatt, Friedrich, Writings on Theatre and Drama, trans. Waidson, H. M. (London: Johnathan Cape, 1976), p. 69Google Scholar.

18 Ibid.

19 Compare Anne Ubersfeld's discussion of the spectator's role in ‘The Pleasure of the Spectator’, L’ École du spectateur, trans. Pierre Bouillaguert and Charles Jose (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1981).

20 Eugene Ionesco, ‘Théâtre et anti-théâtre’, Cahiers des saisons, 2 (October 1955), pp. 149–51.

21 This entire discussion of Tali's play and its transformations of genre and reception assumes that the context of the university, with its presumed educational biases, is considered a part of the genre.

22 Scarry, Elaine, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985)Google Scholar. See also Grand, Sue, ‘Unsexed and Ungendered Bodies: The Violated Self’, Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 4, 4 (2003), pp. 313–41Google Scholar.

23 Dürrenmatt, Writings on Theatre and Drama, p. 69.

24 Although it may be what we now expect of performance art. But in the latter case it also generally, or often, begins as performance art, so that we are not watching theatre, which becomes performance art; within its choices or limitations the genre is (generally speaking) consistent.

25 See also Rob Baum, ‘Deconstruction of Jewish Identity in the Third Reich: Nazisprache und Geopolitik’, National Identities, 2 (June 2006), pp. 95–112.

26 Compare the filmic roles of John Davidson in The Performer, or Hugo Weaving in Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.

27 It may also be a marker for a perverse kind of luck – its current bearer survived, after all. Compare Rokem's discussion of the Nazi uniform as an ‘unperformable’ or impermissible stage symbol in Yehoshua Sobol's original version (1984) of Ghetto; see Rokem, Freddie, Performing History: Theatrical Representations of the Past in Contemporary Theatre (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2000), pp. 38–56Google Scholar.

28 Clastres, Pierre, La Societé contre l'état, recherches d'anthropologie politique (Paris: Minuit, 1974)Google Scholar.

29 Rokem, Performing History, also argues that Israeli performances about the Shoah invariably situate local, current politics alongside memories of the Shoah, and therefore confront the history of Jewish persecution alongside the currency of Palestinian discrimination; the Israeli is forced to witness as victim and (potentially) oppressor; see pp. 56–76.

30 Rokem, Performing History, p. 69.

31 For a richer illustration see my article ‘“And thou shalt bind them for a sign upon thy hand”’.

32 Langer notes that an imitation is ‘never a copy in the ordinary sense [but] an unbiased rendering . . . the “simplified or even projected version”. . .; the imitation of objects with a difference is what we call a treatment . . .‘. Langer, Suzanne K., Problems of Art (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1957), pp. 95–7Google Scholar.

33 Rokem, Performing History, p. 69.

34 Adler, Janet, ‘Who Is the Witness?’, Contact Quarterly, 12, 1 (Winter 1987), pp. 20–9Google Scholar.

35 Alternatively, we could consider such an unmaking as ‘performance’, a genre inside and outside of theatre; see, for instance, Kaye, Nick, Postmodernism and Performance (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994)Google Scholar; or Ambercrombie, Nicholas, Audiences: A Social Theory of Performance and Imagination (London: Sage, 1998)Google Scholar. But for discussion of Tali's work, which was intended as a piece of theatre, I prefer to remain within the bounds of dramatic theory.

36 Gestus seems to be used in a visual sense; I propose that gestus is also auditory. Many death camp survivors cannot to this day tolerate the music of Richard Wagner, or even Richard Strauss, because of their memories of being made to march to it, or of being beaten to it. The gestus is an encapsulating event that in turn produces an audience effect. The horn blasts of the Valkyries, by signifying Wagner's opus (let alone his politics), may plunge the hearer helplessly into the wartime past. A replaying of the music that did not consciously include an opportunity to address the negative feelings that arise from hearing the music could reinforce the original effect.

37 Barthes, Roland, The Pleasure of the Text (New York: Hill & Wang, 1973)Google Scholar.

38 Blanchot, Maurice, The Unavowable Community, trans. Joris, Pierre (New York: Station Hill Press, 1988), pp. 19–20Google Scholar, my emphasis.

39 No witness is desired, presumably because of the onboard video camcorder, which stands in for the one who receives.