Extreme violence on stage (original) (raw)
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Special Issue Introduction "Performative Holocaust commemoration in the 21st century"
Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History , 2019
Performative practices aim to transform individuals from passive spectators into socially and morally responsible agents. Although performative practices figure prominently in Holocaust memorialization of the past two decades, they remain significantly under-researched. This article provides a critical introduction to this Special Issue’s contributions which explore performative practices in contemporary artistic, educational, and in memorial projects. The article situates performative practice in relation to the pledges ‘never forget’ and ‘never again’ proclaimed by survivors and endorsed by newer generations of memory agents. Empirical research is deemed crucial to reach a better understanding of how such practices impact on contemporary audiences.
Repertoires of Remembrance: Violence, Commemoration, and the Performing Arts
Journal of the British Academy, 2020
This essay argues for a reconsideration of performative and embodied memory in illuminating how the performing arts—and music in particular—offer a unique means of embodying knowledge and of performing memories of violence. Incorporating insights from these fields provides an alternative approach to the questions of who, what, and for how long we should remember. After establishing a conceptual framework for the mobilisation of rituals of artistic practice and cultural memory, this article discusses examples from a range of cultures and performance practices to explore aesthetic and ethical characteristics of performative memorials. It concludes that performance’s self-consciously ephemeral, temporal, and iterative character means performative memorials can refocus the commemorative impulse away from the past by shifting our collective attention from the question of what should we remember to the question of what should we remember for?
Performing Atrocity: Staging Experiences of Violence and Conflict
Representing the Experience of War and Atrocity: Interdisciplinary Explorations in Visual Criminology, 2019
In this chapter, I focus on the phenomenon of staged performance as a medium through which experiences of atrocity and violence are being increasingly articulated by those who experienced them directly. Drawing chiefly on the rationales underpinning Teya Sepinuck’s Theatre of Witness and the collaborative work of Bravo 22 Company and The Drive Project, the chapter interrogates two broad questions emanating from projects of this nature. Firstly, for scholars exploring relationships between bodies, violence, injury, memory, memorialisation, and reconciliation, what exactly is it about these performances that should constitute ‘the empirical’? Exploring a form of expression more apt, it may be claimed, at capturing the visual and the visceral, as well as the unspoken and the unspeakable, I argue that any analytical attempts to harness the power of staged performance must resist the temptation to reify its meaning. Rather than trying to decipher ‘the real meaning’ of a play, for example, I argue that only approaches which pay close attention to the practices of production and consumption associated with the performance are able to faithfully comment upon its all-important context. Secondly, I consider the potential ethical contradictions of documentary theatre as an artistic site of investigation for the social sciences which have frequently exemplified an overly individualistic and risk-averse logic characteristic of Western epistemology and pedagogy.
How to represent the Holocaust, a historical experience that largely exceeds our imagination, on stage? In its seminal performance Kamp, the Dutch theatre company Hotel Modern addresses this question by literally restaging the experience of Auschwitz on a miniature scale. Kamp is not just a simple attempt to commemorate a particularly painful episode in our recent Western history, the performance makes the spectator think about what we experience as ‘real’ in this recollection and, at the same time, how this memory is determined by various cultural conventions. This self-reflexive perspective, I will argue, is a truly baroque strategy. In this article I will therefore return to the religious wars at the end of the 16th and the beginning of the 17th century. There, too, concrete violent historical circumstances led to a fundamentally violent theatrical imagination, to a spectacular ‘theatre of the real’. At the same time, this theatre simultaneously put itself, or rather the idea of theatrical representation itself, at stake. It is this meta-perspective that makes it possible not only to show the unbearable, but also to understand the constructed nature of historical memory.
Performative Commemoration of Painful Pasts
Artists, museum curators and educators are increasingly interested in devising more effective strategies of remembering painful pasts. To this end, many recent projects commemorating genocides, civil wars, dictatorships and terrorist attacks, invite audiences to actively engage in remembering and reflecting critically upon these historical events, and what they mean to contemporary societies. The term 'performative' best explains the active engagement that these projects demand from audiences. This term is used to describe artistic and educational projects which promote a high degree of participation, through hands-on activities and other audience engagement strategies. Furthermore, it can also denote the possible effects which these projects may have upon audiences, namely to encourage them to become agents of commemoration, to transform their relationship with the past, and to reach a position of moral and civic responsibility. This conference, and its subsequent publication, invites academics, artists, and museum practitioners to explore the usefulness of performative strategies of engagement with painful pasts, and the impact these strategies have upon the public. We ask whether and how performative practices enable later born generations to deal with the legacies of trauma, to initiate reconciliation and to attempt forgiveness. Do performative projects motivate individuals from persecuted groups to ask for justice? Do they sharpen public awareness of democratic values, and make contemporary audiences more sensitive to discrimination and intolerance? Coming from the field of Holocaust Studies, and having noted that performative practices are employed frequently in its commemoration, our goal is to widen our understanding of why and how 'performativity' appears in the memorialization of other dreadful historical events. Therefore, we are interested in projects commemorating genocides such as those in Cambodia, Rwanda, and Darfur, civil wars in South America, ethnic cleansings in former Yugoslavia, the Apartheid system in South Africa, the Soviet gulag system, the suppression under communist regimes and dictatorships, forced migration, as well as other major traumatic events in recent history. The variety of case studies from different backgrounds will help us to understand whether these methods are effective. In their papers the participants explore artistic and educational projects that challenge the audience to contribute to social, political and civic activism and to strengthen democratic values within their societies. Examples of such projects include spontaneous memorial acts, audience
The Holocaust is present: reenacting the Holocaust, then and now
Holocaust Studies: a Journal of Culture and History, 2019
Reenactment has played a vital, albeit unacknowledged, role in what has been remembered of the Holocaust. From the moment the camps were liberated, performative and participatory practices were seized upon for both documentation and commemoration. From Auschwitz to Dachau to the Eastern Front, survivors were asked, and volunteered, to reenact their experiences in the camps. They had themselves photographed in their camp uniforms and paraded in them during memorial pageants and services, and they reenacted the past in theatrical performances on stage. Although many assume reenactment is a contemporary phenomenon, it existed from the very first days after liberation, offering survivors and their audiences a way to script and embody their own history for a wider audience. The varied ways survivors used this performative practice suggests that Holocaust reenactment needs to be re-examined for its documentary, affective, commemorative and emancipatory potential. This article delineates a typology of the various forms of reenactment used in the immediate postwar period, comparing these with contemporary artistic reenactment projects (by Alan Schechner, Zbignew Libera, Artur Żmijewski, Sanja Iveković, Santiago Sierra and Rafał Betlejewski) that reflect critically on reenactment as a practice that promises, but not always delivers, to bring us closer to the past.
Christopher Marlowe's The Massacre at Paris, a play which probably dates from 1592 but has reached posterity in a mangled form, enacts the incorporation of religious and state politics in the theatre. Through a sequence of short scenes characterized by senseless brutality and black humor, Marlowe revisits one of the darkest episodes of French history, the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre, which took place on the 24 th and 25 th August 1572. Dramatizing the slaughter of thousands of Protestants by Catholics, the play not only reflects on the significance of massacre as a political term for an increasingly absolutist Renaissance Europe but also translates the violence of massacre into aesthetic form. Itself alien within the body of Marlowe's dramatic works, The Massacre at to recent wars and atrocities and rejoice in the irony of the play. This paper seeks to investigate the play's ability to convey political thought and provoke contemporary audiences by reading it together with Delaveau and Mitterer's adaptations. The challenge of reworking the Massacre for our age involves the question of the theatre's potential to expose the audience to the horror of history.
Performative Materials and Activist Commemoration.
Public Art Journal CAP Cadernos de Arte Pública, 2020
Talk given at Fragmentos, Bogotá, September 2020. Monument debates in the second decade of the twenty-first century, turning almost entirely on questions of who is represented and by whom, might benefit from considering questions of how and with what material resources first raised in the context of post-WWII commemoration of the Holocaust and other traumatic events. The involvement of audiences in the memorial’s physical substance, entering its spaces and otherwise performing acts of commemoration rather than just looking upon public art meant to broadcast an ideal official history, has been central to the most durable memorials of the last half century, and is given a particularly radical turn by artist interested in justice and restitution. In Colombia, Doris Salcedo has taken the very fabrication of a memorial space—made from surrendered FARC firearms by women who had suffered in the war in cathartic acts of hammering sheet metal—as a performative process making commemoration physical. The same phenomena can be observed spontaneously in acts of public imagination directed at more conventional memorial objects, such as the Korean Statue for Peace, whose bronze girl commemorates the victims of sexual exploitation during WWII is clothed by anonymous contemporary Koreans. The task for theorists of monumentality today, as much as for monument-makers, is to understand how an ethics of care can meet and interact forcefully with a politics of taking responsibility.