About the Book
In Performing Remains (2011), Rebecca Schneider proposes that the (re)performance of history creates a kind of rupture: in both contemporary evaluations of the past and conceptions of the future. That such an idea is significant to us here is because the renderings of loss and commemoration explored in this book are precisely those ruptures to which Schneider refers. They exist in a territory occupied by (re)stagings, (re)doings, remembrances and (re)enactments, and pose a challenge to âour long-standing thrall to the notion that live performance disappears by insisting that, to the contrary, that the live is a vehicle for recurrenceâ (Schneider 2011, p. 23). To commemorate, and to stage loss in this way is to trouble history, to trouble notions of linear-time. It is to both recall the past and remake it, in full view of the present. Indeed, we attempt to ask, through the chapters here, not just how performance commemorates but how commemoration performs.
Across 13 chapters, our contributors consider the (re)performance of history; the intersections between theatre, performance and the commemorative; commemoration as a form of, or performance of, ritual; performance as memorial; performance as eulogy; eulogy as performance; performance as marking (-meaning, -history, -event); performance as call to memory, and performance and the history/histories (material, cultural and fantastical) of place, site and space. It asks where the personal act of remembrance merges with the public or political act of remembrance; where the boundary between the commemorative and the performative might lie, and how it might be blurred, broken or questioned. It questions how the process of remembering loss becomes a performative act.
The book is divided into four parts that, through their thematic and methodological groupings, seek to locate and critically theorise an emerging field of twenty-first-century theatre practice concerned with commemoration and the commemorative. They are disparate points on a tentative map that spans continents and cultures. Some of these practices belong to established, internationally recognised artists, playwrights and theatre companies: Andrew Bovell, Third Angel, The Wooster Group, while others are concerned with practices that exist in the public/traditional or intensely private sphere: Lisa Gaughan on the maritime âcrossing the lineâ ceremony, Karen Savage and Justin Smith on the ârejournâ, Louie Jenkins on âmourning shameâ, and Clare Parry-Jones on the almost inarticulable torment of the loss of a child. Nevertheless, the range of practices here are not exhaustive or closed to slippage. So woven together are commemoration and loss with ritual and memorial practice, that public âstagingsâ or âperformancesâ of loss, be they personal or national, which mark or articulate either a moment of history or particular cultural reference point, proliferate across cultural, national, political and ideological boundaries.
By Way of Example
In 2011, in the Siberian city of Tomsk, Igor Dmitriyev and Sergei Lapenkov conceived of a parade, to take place on Victory Day,1 in which participants would carry homemade placards, portraits and photographs bearing the images of their fathers, grandfathers, great-grandfathers, uncles and great uncles who had lost their lives in war between 1941 and 1945. In 2012, 6000 people from the local area arrived to the Victory Day celebration to march in response to Dmitriyev and Lapenkovâs call. From 2012 onwards, their idea, of a grassroots commemoration/parade/performance, took a firm grip of the national imagination, with identically composed parades appearing across Russia, all inspired by Dmitriyev and Lapenkovâs original model. The parade would become known as The March of the Immortal Regiment.2
ââIt wasnât about the history, in the direct sense, of the army and the navy,â Lapenkov says âFor us it was a generational history, the history of all the people who went through the 1940s. It was about human memoryââ (Prokopyeva 2017). Film and photographic documentation of the marches is breath-taking. Thousands upon thousands of placards and images, from the composed to the crude, are raised aloftâinterspersed with the occasional Russian or Soviet flagâas tightly packed crowds walk their designated routes at a mournful crawl. That it is performance, there is no doubt: the procession is a sea of masks, a black-and-white parade of the lost or forgotten, marching together, again, forever. Those holding the placards and portraits, their living descendants, (dis)appear as if they were puppeteers, willingly (and purposely) invisible to the mise en scène composed above their heads.
That the march was quickly co-opted by the state (as soon as 2015) says something important about commemoration, performance, and pertinently, performance-as-commemoration. It was of crucial importance, Lapenkov argued, that the Immortal Regiment remained ânoncommercial, apolitical, and nongovernmentalâ (ibid.). The problem it faced, however, was that it struck a much more meaningful, and ultimately, historically literate chord with its participants than the official, state sanctioned, Victory Day remembrances. That it struck such a chord was because what was stagedâcommemoratedâwas not victory, but loss. It spoke, collectively, to the individual experiences of loss and war, of absence and remembrance. An army of ghosts, each with their own small, personal, human storyâdivorced from the grand narratives of victory. If this regiment saw victory, their victory was in death.
âThe Immortal Regiment was doomed from the moment of its birthâ, prominent blogger and former Duma Deputy Igor Yakovenko wrote on May 10. âThe likelihood that the authorities would tolerate an independent grassroots movement that was becoming national and even international was precisely zero. The transformation of a grassroots initiative into a state ritual and part of the quasi-religious cult of âvictoryâ began already in 2014âŚ. That was the end of the human story of the Immortal Regiment and the beginning of the story of a state ritualistic cultâ. (Prokopyeva 2017)
Such was the groundswell of local, and then national levels of community-led support for the marches that Russian authorities had no choice, politically speaking, but to incorporate them into the official narrative of Victory Day. In doing so, the marches demonstrate the problematic tension (an idea articulated further by Westerside in Chapter 2) at the heart of âofficialâ commemoration: that they attempt, at the same time, to testify to narratives that are often pulling away from one anotherâthe personal and the national.
And yet, through this kind of self-constituted, unofficial performance of loss, the Immortal Regiment in Dmitriyev and Lapenkovâs original incarnation found a way to speak to, about and for the 30 million lives lost on the Eastern Front in ways that the homogenising, historically clumsy nation-building narratives of Russian state-remembrance could not. Performance-as-commemoration, then, perhaps is seen at its clearest when people are placed in contrast to the stories told about them. But the line between the two remains incredibly fine. In the case of the Immortal Regiment, the simplicity and elegance of Dmitriyev and Lapenkovâs commemorative performance, that its scenographies and stage directions could become âfranchisedâ, equally meant that it very easily âbecame a case of the very âmandatory patriotismâ to which [it] was created as an alternativeâ (ibid.).
Commemoration Fatigue
One of the aims of this volume was to address a current trend towards the use of the phrase âcommemoration fatigueâ in recent scholarship and journalism. As we write this, almost half way through 2018, we find ourselves living through the decades and centenaries that mark the significant British losses of previous generations, and importantly, in contexts that are international in their scale. And the question of how to remember, has persisted. As early as June 2013, over twelve months before the centenary anniversary of the outbreak of World War One, Harry Mount in The Times, suggested that âthe danger is, though, that while remembering the facts of the First World War, we forget what it was really like â and that, by overdoing the commemorations, war fatigue will set inâ (Mount 2013). Mountâs concerns seem prescient, and a number of other cultural commentators have asked the same question to problematise their nationâs ways of remembering. In The Guardian, only a month later, Matthias Strohn suggested, hopefully, that âby limiting the number of high-profile events, the UK will prevent a âcommemoration fatigueâ setting in among the population.â As we reach the end point of that particular (WWI) cycle of commemoration, it remains unclear whether or not this was true. It may well be the case that this four-year cycle of remembrance was somewhat obscured or refracted in the public consciousness as a result of the United Kingdomâs contemporary relationship with Europe, as played out through its proposed withdrawal from the European Union. How that will be âcommemoratedâ and remembered, only the coming months and years can tell, but it calls to mind (in 2018), Action Heroâs ongoing Oh Europa (2018) project. They write:
Over 6 months in 2018, Action Hero are travelling over 30,000km across Europe in a motorhome, recording songs of love, hope, heartbreak, loss and desire, sung by the people we meet. This ever-evolving archive will be broadcasting 24/7 from beacons placed, by us, at literal edges of the continent, but also the invisible boundaries, margins, cultural junctures and geological edgelands of Europe. (Action Hero 2018)
While concerned with Europe as such, the piece cannot help but feel inspired by the fractures and fissures running through contemporary European (and global) politics. Indeed, they write that the piece âseeks to imagine other forms of mapping, one that represents the relationships between people and space rather than one that is about territoryâ (ibid.). Like the Immortal Regiment, Oh Europa produces a legacy of people and places and stories and lives that become emblematic of (that commemorates) loss or absence; resisting and running counter to state-level, nation-level narratives, such that we might âre-imagine our relationships to each other outside of the dominant discourseâ (ibid.).
What can be said of commemoration, with some degree of certainty, and pace Mount, is that each generation views the events of memorial, centenary, and anniversary, through its own cultural, political and technological lenses.
Later in 2013, to describe the volume of documentaries and news footage online commemorating the 50th anniversary of the assassination of US President John F. Kennedy, journalist Alexandra Petri used the term âCommemoration Fatigueâ in an article for the Washington Post (Petri 2013). She describes the near 24-hour footage of the event as an âorgy of commemorationâ and, with a tongue-in-cheek brand of reductio ad absurdum, suggests that âin the future there will be no news. In the future all news will be Retrospectives and Commemorations of the Days when there was newsâ (Petri 2013). Speaking to this theme from first-hand experience, I (Michael) remember flying from San Francisco to London on 11 September 2015 and watching real-time footage of the events of 14 years ago play out on national news channels, a re-staging in a media age; a mediated and mediatised battle re-enactmentâindeed, Baudrillard writ large. Here, as we looked at events unfold on screen just as we did in 2001, the moment is lived again; the past, in its collision with the present, saw us commemorating not only the seismic shock of 9/11, but also the news coverage of what took placeâthe commemoration of an archive.
The idea of âcommemoration fatigueâ was also introduced in the Australian Journal of Political Science by Joan Beaumont in 2015 to describe Australiaâs commemoration of World War One. She claimed that, âthe commemorations in 2014â15 triggered some debate about the commodification of the memory of war and the possibility of commemoration fatigueâ (Beaumont 2015). Nevertheless, small- and large-scale commemorations of events and battles throughout the First World War (Passchendaele, the Somme and Gallipoli as the most obvious examples) continue as we approach the anniversary of the Armistice itself, and each appears wracked with concern about how best to reflect upon the significant losses on both sides.
In November 2017, in a provocatively titled piece in The Guardian, âNo more remembrance days â letâs consign the 20th century to historyâ, Simon Jenkins writes that by marking significant dates in the past, we simply perpetua...