Trauma has been a serious social problem in the contemporary world. Confronting this status, artists and scholars try to articulate trauma in performance. However, the mainstream trauma performance generally leads to re-traumatization. Given the urgency to heal trauma, Niki Tulk introduces a new perspective into trauma theatre in her cutting-edge book Performing the Wound: Practicing a Feminist Theatre of Becoming, offering an alternative theoretical and practical paradigm of feminist trauma performance.

Tulk begins with an introduction, where she explains the conceptual framings fundamental to her subsequent investigation, especially those proposed by Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, Diana Taylor and Jill Bennett. Tulk first explains Ettinger's concept of a ‘matrixial zone’ (p. 4), which refers to a space that functions like a womb where performers and the audience members meet. Here, trauma is encountered by co-carriance, border linking and dual subjectivity. She then interprets Taylor's idea that ‘archive and repertoire’ (p. 10) can work in tandem to carry out embodied performances that acknowledge the liveness of trauma. She also ellucidates Bennett's advocacy of performance's ‘empathic vision’ (p. 13) to approach trauma. Inspired by and based on these conceptual framings, Tulk introduces a ‘matrixial, body-/feminist-centered perspective’ (p. 2) into the analysis of trauma and performance, which aims at healing trauma.

The body of the book is composed of two parts. In the first part, Tulk puts forward a feminist paradigm of trauma performance while reframing performance within trauma studies literature. She points out that most of the previous research puts significance on direct representation of wounds. However, as she maintains, this would cause re-traumatization. Instead, she proposes an alternative feminist paradigm advocating indirect representation, matrixial encounter and corporeal languages.

In the second part, Tulk provides three case studies to exemplify the feasibility of her feminist trauma performance paradigm to narrate, hear and heal trauma. In her discussion of Ann Hamilton's multimedia installation, Tulk concentrates on the key role undertaken by textual materiality in encountering the trauma caused by sexual violence. This encounter is elaborated on in Hamilton's the theater is a blank page (2018), in which Virginia Woolf's novel To the Lighthouse is taken as the textured material for participants to vicariously experience the healing process of child sexual abuse. When analysing Renée Green's work, Tulk explores the ways in which Green's film installations bring measures such as ‘ephemeral performance’ (p. 17) to heal historical trauma. Tulk makes a close study of Climates and Paradoxes and Selected Life Indexes (2005), and Walking in NYL (2016), in which Green investigates how the video filming of walking in urban environments can mediate traumatic historical experiences. In the case study of Cecilia Vicuña's public performances, Tulk illustrates Vicuña's intention to heal the national, female and ecological trauma by weaving together visual, tactile and sonic elements. Tulk argues that Vicuña's works, such as Water Songs (2015) and The Book as Performance (2015), manifest how to witness, hear and cicatrize wounds incurred by colonial, patriarchal and environmental violence.

Tulk concludes by asserting the efficiency and importance of her feminist paradigm in healing trauma. She highlights the qualities of feminist theatre with agency, respect and care, regarding it as a site of becoming where performances are ‘active, dynamic processes’ (p. 71), as well as an ethical space where the Other's trauma echoes and resonates with our own. In this space, we neither objectify each other nor cause re-traumatization; instead, we co-carry, strengthen and heal each other.

Tulk's feminist analysis of trauma and performance provides an efficient way to mend not only the broken spirit of trauma survivors but also wounded societies. It also broadens the definition of theatre, propels the conversation between visual arts and trauma studies, and suggests a new direction in theories and practices of trauma performance. This is undoubtedly an important resource for artists and researchers in theatre and performance, trauma psychologists and philosophers of aesthetics. It is also commendable for theatre-goers in general as the vivid descriptions of the performances should facilitate their appreciation of the healing power of performing/performance arts.