Acts of Defiance

Actor Holly Strickland tells The Forum about what it was like to be involved with Combatant Status Review Tribunals pp.002954-003064: A Public Reading, recently held at Tate Modern:

"To coincide with the opening of 9 Scripts from a Nation at War, a collaborative work by Andrea Geyer, Sharon Hayes, Ashley Hunt, Katya Sander and David Thorne currently showing in the Level 2 Gallery, the artists, with the assistance of Tate curators Amy Dickson and Rachel Taylor, staged a public reading of transcripts from the Combatant Status Review Tribunals held at the US military prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, between July 2004 and March 2005. I’m proud to have been one of the eleven readers at the event.

In response to complaints regarding freedom of information, the US Department of Defense made transcripts from all 558 tribunals available to the general public via the Internet. The artists contend, however, that the sheer volume of material generated by the tribunals (over 10,000 pages) has effectively obscured them from public view. Using the transcripts in their work is a gesture towards making them accessible to a wider audience. Certainly, I had no idea of the existence of these documents prior to the reading – you would only come across them if you were looking for them. They are well hidden, frequently moved around on the Department of Defense’s website and in PDF format so impossible to find through a text search.



My background is in acting, so this was how I initially approached the documents. I found it incredible that the 18 tribunals had not been specially selected by the artists for their dramatic qualities. The section was chosen randomly so that it might provide a representative part of the whole, with the material itself remaining as unburdened as possible by artistic or political bias. As an actor I have often heard directors talk about not getting in the way of the text, and this is similar to what the artists seemed to have in mind for the reading. It was impressed on us that we should not be aiming to recreate or act out the tribunals; our prime concern should be for the words to be heard.

We were a deliberately diverse group of people, from various professions, and those of us who were actors were given special instruction to approach the texts differently than we would a normal script. The artists were not interested in characterisation in a conventional sense. The roles we were playing, such as Tribunal President, Detainee and Personal Representative, were common to all the tribunals, and with each tribunal we changed role. We were not to impose any characterisation to differentiate our various roles, but remain in the role of reader throughout. This idea of playing a role was a key concern in the reading, as it is in ‘9 Scripts’, where each video installation corresponds to a different role in society - ‘Citizen’, ‘Student’ or ‘Soldier’.

The installation for the role of Detainee comprises three video screens showing recordings of the Combat Status Review Tribunal reading that took place in New York last year. The governing principle of the CSRTs was to define the specific role of ‘Enemy Combatant’ as identified by the United States in the ‘War on Terror’; the ostensible purpose of the tribunals bring to determine that each ‘detainee’ had been correctly classified as such upon their incarceration. As a response to decisions made by the Supreme Court that detainees had certain minimal human rights, including the right to contest their classification and therefore their detention, the tribunals gave them their first opportunity to speak on their own behalf. However, what became clear as we read was that these hearings were for the most part played out as a formality, and that no matter how the detainees’ scripts varied from tribunal to tribunal - wry or raging, obliging or uncooperative - the officials’ behaviour remained largely consistent in fulfilling their roles, arriving at an unchanging, uncertain conclusion.

Looking at the documents objectively, they are textually fascinating. Considering that they are concerned with defining an individual’s status, the definition of such individuals within the transcripts was often decidedly blurred. The point of view of the Detainee was refracted through many other roles within the tribunal, such as Translator or Personal Representative, and this was reflected in the at times confusing interchange of third and first person narratives. For example, reading the part of Personal Representative sometimes involved reading a Detainee’s statement, in which case the Personal Representative would use the first person, not speaking on behalf of the Detainee, but speaking as them. The transcriber of one tribunal put the words of the Detainee entirely in the third person, a characteristic of the text which, preserved in the reading, created an odd sensation of the Detainee being dislocated from the proceedings.

The effect these shifting subject positions had on us as readers was intensified by the rotation of roles. The stage was set up so that each seat corresponded to a different role and at the end of each tribunal we moved one place along. This gave us the opportunity to experience the tribunal process from many different angles, a prospect described as ‘delicious’ by Jon Snow, regretting that he had to leave after the fourth tribunal to go and read the news! The rapid changes of perspective this afforded was intellectually enlightening but, to an extent, emotionally restricting; another instruction during rehearsal directed specifically towards the actors amongst us was that we were not to try to ‘live the part’, to borrow a Stanislavskian phrase, or attempt to become someone other than ourselves, which is what I usually aspire towards in my work. I suggested that our approach was closer to the Brechtian idea of ‘showing’ rather than ‘becoming’ a role. This seemed entirely appropriate considering the political nature of much of Brecht’s theatre, and his technique of encouraging his actors to see either side of conflicts by swapping roles around during rehearsals.

With the rotation of roles and some speeches becoming detached from the speaker through use of the third person, the roles did not in fact lend themselves to close identification. However, the artists did not want us to read at a remove, but to allow the texts to affect us and, if possible, to let that animate our reading. Indeed, some of the statements and exchanges were so moving, it was impossible not to become swept up in and carried along by the emotion of the situation.

All this came to inform my reading as ‘Narrator’ in one tribunal. This role was created by the artists to encompass the sections of text in the transcripts that were not assigned to specific speakers. Suddenly, during a long speech, I was taking on many roles at once and the conflicts described were played out by a single voice. This contrasted sharply for me with the tribunal where I played the Detainee, but at which the Detainee had not been present. I attempted to communicate this non-participation in the process by fixing my gaze outwards, and not following the script. Another role created by the artists for the reading was that of ‘Witness’, but it was never embodied and was merely represented by an empty chair. The reason for this was that although detainees had the opportunity to call witnesses to speak on their behalf, in the tribunals we read potential witnesses were mentioned, but were never present. The idea that someone who was being held indefinitely, without sentence because without trial, would nominate, for example, a family member to be hauled out to Cuba for questioning by US military was striking in its ridiculousness.

The systematic flaws in the tribunal process frequently exposed themselves or were brought to attention by the detainee. It is a situation that exists in British law, but most detainees were flummoxed by the catch 22 of wanting to address the evidence responsible for their detention but being unable to do so because such evidence remained classified. In reading the part of Detainee, you could not but become affected by this exasperation. The transcripts were also revealing of how even the officials were not privileged with certain information. At one point, reading Tribunal President, I had to admit to ignorance to an important statistic, and Juliet Stevenson’s Detainee induced in me acute embarrassment during our exchange. However, although this was what I was made to feel, I was able to resort to a role that assumed authority over whatever challenged it, and paper over the upset. It was an electrifying moment for me as a performer, although I wondered whether the actual Tribunal President would have been as sensitive to the impassioned arguments of the Detainee.

Nonetheless, I wanted to be careful that the highly emotive quality of the tribunals, along with the vogue for antipathy towards the United States’ government, did not leave me with an unbalanced view of the story the transcripts told. It occurred to me that by aligning sympathies with the underdog and anti the establishment, I had myself opted out of interrogating the veracity of some of the detainees’ statements. But as Sam Roddick pointed out to me, with the passionate conviction of someone who has devoted their life to campaigning for human rights, guilt or innocence doesn’t come into it, it’s about just process.

This word ‘detainee’ now chills me. So seemingly benign, what it has come to signify to me is indefinite imprisonment without recourse to an impartial judicial system. When, in one of the breaks during the reading, news of reached us of an announcement that Guantánamo detainees had at last been granted a hearing in the US civil courts, it sent a collective shiver down our spines. I’m not suggesting, of course, that we felt we had in any way effected this decision, but this extraordinary coincidence certainly reinforced my sense that we had been engaging with art that was of immediate and urgent relevance to life outside of the gallery. Just a day earlier our government had secured parliamentary support for 42 days’ detention without charge for terror suspects, and my resulting uneasiness was heightened by my encounter with the CSRT transcripts.

Yet, and I’m sure that this is not only my performer’s vanity prickling, I didn’t feel we had the audience I was a) expecting and b) thought the work deserved, in spite of the reading lasting several hours and visitors able to drop in and out at will. Holding this one-off event on a weekday afternoon immediately excluded a large amount of people; the standard response from most of my acquaintances was ‘Oh, it sounds really interesting, but I’m at work’. There were posters inside the Tate Modern and a listing in the guide, but the publicity for the reading did not seem to stretch beyond the institution itself. I wondered whether the Tate might have been reluctant to give its unmitigated support to a piece so politically polarising, or if there were other reasons for what I consider to have been vital work going largely unnoticed."

- Holly Strickland