History, Memory, Performance

D. Dean, Y. Meerzon, K. Prince, D. Dean, Y. Meerzon, K. Prince

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137393890
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

History, Memory, Performance is an interdisciplinary collection of essays exploring performances of the past in a wide range of trans-national and historical contexts. At its core are contributions from theatre scholars and public historians discussing how historical meaning is shaped through performance.

1

Discursive Practices and Narrative Models: History, Poetry, Philosophy

Freddie Rokem

I will begin with an example of ‘micro-history,’ the term used to designate a supposedly minor event that we usually pay attention to, not for its direct, rather insignificant consequences but rather for its more general, more profound significance and what it enables us to understand.¹ There are many representations of such moments in the work of Bertolt Brecht – small traces that are usually erased when they occur as historical events – but as readers and spectators we immediately sense that they are huge and that there is something we need to pay attention to that is not obvious for the characters themselves. They are hiding something crucial from themselves, or from the other characters. One such moment in Brecht’s Mother Courage and her Children (which takes place during the Thirty Years’ War) is when the main character, Courage, herself, begins to apprehend subliminally that her actions and reactions – or rather the fact that she does not act – acquire a moral, more general significance. But she lacks the language to talk about it and remains silent and supressed. For the spectators, what passes by almost unnoticed in the situation of the war itself is a moment of major crisis in the play.

One of her sons, Swiss-Cheese (Schweizerkas) has been accused of stealing the cash box of the Finnish Regiment and has been sentenced to death. However, he can still be saved by a substantial sum of money and Courage is negotiating how much money is needed to set him free, as well as how much she can get by selling her wagon and the goods she trades for her livelihood. She is incapable of making the two ends of this economical equation meet – because if she sells the wagon she will lose her source of income – and when the drums of the Finnish regiment can be heard in a distance, she begins to understand, saying quietly, as if to herself: ‘Maybe I bargained too long’ (Brecht, 1972, p. 169). Her inaction has become an almost ‘invisible’ action which gradually becomes incorporated within the larger context of the Thirty Years’ War. But it is not going to change the war itself; hardly even her understanding of it.

A moment later, the fatal shot is heard from a distance, and Helene Weigel, who played the role of Mother Courage in the performance in Berlin in 1949, which Brecht himself directed, opens her mouth in the famous silent scream of despair which made the spectators who saw this production shudder from identification with the supposedly helpless mother. Afterwards, as George Steiner (1996, pp. 353–4) so poignantly described the following scene in the final section of his own seminal book, The Death of Tragedy:

There comes a moment in Mutter Courage when the soldiers carry in the dead body of Schweizerkas. They suspect that he is the son of Courage but are not quite certain. She must be forced to identify him. I saw Helene Weigel act the scene with the East Berlin ensemble, though acting is a paltry word for the marvel of her incarnation. As the body of her son was laid before her, she merely shook her head in mute denial. The soldiers compelled her to look again. Again she gave no sign of recognition, only a dead stare. As the body was carried off, Weigel looked the other way and tore her mouth open. The shape of the gesture was that of the screaming horse in Picasso’s Guernica. The sound was raw and terrible beyond any description I could give of it. But, in fact, there was no sound. Nothing. The sound was total silence. It was silence which screamed and screamed through the whole theatre so that the audience lowered its head as before a gust of wind.²

This short sequence in the performance first exposes the failure of Mother Courage to save her son, and then to acknowledge him. He has become transformed into a commodity in the war-economy, from which she herself obviously also earns her living. A little later, when the soldiers carry him onto the stage on a stretcher to be identified, in order to save her own life, Mother Courage fails him again and does not admit that this was her own son. When he is dead he has no value. For a short moment, even if she finally fails her son twice, she is almost aware of the larger destructive patterns of the war and her own moral responsibilities within that context. Even the doubt we may have about her level of awareness is a significant aspect of this short sequence, after which she reverts to her previous behaviour of acceptance. Her unawareness and her lack of words to talk about the experience of the war are the micro-events of this performance. Her silence even broadens the gap between her seeming lack of awareness and our sense of pain.

Unless the spectators who saw this performance in Berlin four years after the end of the Second World War lived in total denial, they must have been aware of the profound failure of basic human values, which had hopefully come to a close. Many of them had no doubt participated actively and even initiated many of the atrocities of the Second World War while others had been its victims; some more, others less, just barely surviving. The perpetrators frequently claimed retrospectively that they were unaware of the full consequences of their actions or that they were just taking orders, while the victims have often described their own experience during this time as a form of total isolation or seclusion, entirely deprived of a more synoptic understanding of what they were actually a part of. Maybe also for them there was a sense of failure – because of their limited understanding of what had taken place – for not having reacted appropriately, and in time. This deprivation, together with the meticulously planned ‘lack’ of logic on behalf of the perpetrators, in particular regarding the extermination of the Jews during the Second World War, was an integral aspect of the persecution itself, making it impossible even for the intelligence services of the allies to create a coherent picture of what was actually happening. They obviously also failed. This lack of perspective, the failure to understand, and the inability to grasp the whole situation are an integral aspect of what it means to live ‘history.’ What then are the possibilities of the arts and of the theatre in particular to reach a level of understanding and insight that are meaningful and to perform or represent history by aesthetic means?

The poet Paul Celan (1983, p. 72), who survived the war in Europe, wrote that ‘nobody can bear witness for the witnesses’ (Niemand zeugt für den Zeugen), meaning that the experience itself cannot be passed over to anyone else and it cannot be appropriated for any other event, no matter how threatening or complex. Each historical event is unique. It is a particular occurrence or chain of actions and reactions. The arts have, however, already transgressed Celan’s imperative and will continue to bear witness even after there are no more direct witnesses at all, extending the chain of witnessing, bridging the inevitable gaps between the generations. Therefore, regardless of our ideological convictions or political opinions, we have to be very cautious when discussing and evaluating the ways in which works of art incorporate historical events, hopefully enabling us to gain a more profound understanding of these events at any given moment in the constantly evolving present.

We are frequently exposed to situations where, in particular, politicians handle these issues somewhat recklessly, lacking the kind of responsibility that is necessary to break Celan’s imperative. The arts also raise the issue of what the historical past means for us today, like Brecht does when he decides that Mother Courage and her Children, (which takes place during the Thirty-Year-War, in the first half of the seventeenth century), is going to be the first production he will direct in Berlin after 16 years of exile – more than 300 years after the war he portrays on the stage.

My basic claim is that the endeavour to ‘perform history’ within aesthetic contexts (as opposed to the polemical/political ones, as well as different forms of re-enactments of historical events) is constituted by a complex double perspective. On the one hand, such aesthetic representations present a lived immediacy of the historical event, an immersion into that historical reality, including the limited understanding (or denial) of what is happening as the events unfold according to their sometimes perverse logic; while at the same time, these aesthetic representations also include some form of more general retrospective understanding of their consequences for us in the present, in particular regarding the ethical (though not moralistic) dimensions of these events. Aesthetic representations of the past are constituted by carefully balancing the limited or limiting understanding a person living at a specific moment has, incapable of grasping the whole event of which he or she is a part, with some form of retrospective understanding that these historical events may have for us at any given point in time. The moment the bullets kill Swiss-Cheese very poignantly draws attention to this complex balance.

A work of art ‘performing history’ demonstrates how to construct and retain the balance between the lived moment and the retrospective understanding. Political polemics often lack an understanding of the complexities for those who lived in a certain moment to grasp larger and more comprehensive patterns. What I term the political, polemical version – ‘teaching’ lessons from history, rather than trying to understand them – is based on the assumptions that those who lived at the time these events took place should have known better. Historical ‘re-enactments,’ on the other hand are, as a rule, based on the fantasy of a total immersion in the past, where there is no room whatsoever for retrospection within the ‘event’ itself, as a rule passing on this responsibility to the spectators. Re-enactments of artistic events in the past, like the Globe Theatre in London, or of performance art, like Marina Abramović’s New York exhibitions at the Guggenheim (Seven Easy Pieces, 2004) and at the MoMa (The Artist is Present, 2010), need to be discussed more in depth than I can do here. The fact that they re-enact works of art or aesthetic contexts in different ways creates complex modes of reflexivity that must also be taken into consideration. There are many (more traditional) dramas where history is performed which contain plays-within-the-play, giving rise to a similar self-reflexive dimension.

The dialectics between the partial understanding of the events as they unfold and a more synoptic retrospective understanding is a crucial component of how art ‘performs’ history. One of the main reasons why this dialectic is both complex and challenging is that there is, of course, no guarantee that our retrospective perspective really provides a full understanding of the past because one of the things we have learned about such retrospective understandings is that they also change through time. One of the functions of artistic representations of the past is indeed to constantly question the validity of such retrospective understandings, because the past also ‘changes’ by being reconsidered.

In order to ‘perform history’ – and I am primarily interested in how this can be done on a theatrical stage – it is necessary to confront the paradoxical tensions of the immediacy of the events themselves (as Mother Courage hears the drums and the shot killing her son), which the dramatist/director has to organize according to some narrative principle, while at the same time presenting a more general understanding of why such a particular moment is worthy of our attention; why we somehow always wait too long to take action.

What can we gain by engaging in a certain moment from the historical past? Do we really believe such moments can ‘teach’ us anything crucial about human nature or human fate? These are not easy questions to answer, because at the same time as an answer confronts complex ideological and moral issues, there is always a margin of uncertainty as to whether we have really understood the full consequences of a certain event in the historical past. Finally, the only thing we can learn from history is probably that it is impossible to learn from history. And in spite of this we will most likely go on insisting.

All of us have no doubt confronted these issues in one way or another, and we have no doubt also asked ourselves why it is so important to create such aesthetic representations. Is it not enough to write history books and to produce documentary films to tell about the past? Why do we need to complicate matters by making art about historical events? We obviously engage in this practice not only for therapeutical reasons.

I hope that my introductory remarks have already provided some possible directions as to where the answers to these questions can be found. Furthermore, I think we have reached a point in time where our knowledge and understanding of the historical past has already, to a large extent, been created through exposures to aesthetic representations of history; much more I would claim than by reading traditional history-books and historiographical research, where the ‘facts’ are supposedly presented objectively. And as teachers, students and researchers of theatre we are all much more dependent than we have ever been on a broad range of aesthetic representations for our understanding the past. This certainly calls for a deepened understanding of how such representations are constituted.

Before exploring an additional concrete example, I want to discuss the dialectic interaction between the specificity of the past and the retrospective, more universal understanding that a work of art performing history can give us. In his Poetics Aristotle presented a basic model of the relations between three discursive practices – philosophy, poetry, and history – which I believe is extremely relevant in this context. Even if there is only one surviving Greek classical play – The Persians by Aeschylus – that deals with historical events in the way we understand history today, considering history as events that have actually occurred and that do not only relate to a mythical past, Aristotle presents a basic model where history holds a prominent position.

In chapter nine of the Poetics Aristotle provides a point of departure for an analysis of the relations between the discursive practices of poetry, history, and philosophy, which are still the three main areas of study and research in most of our university faculties of the humanities and the arts. Aristotle claimed that,

/t/he distinction between historian and poet /[. . .]/ consists really in this, that the one describes the thing that has been, and the other a kind of thing that might be. Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import (spoudaioteron) than history, since its statements are of the nature rather of universals, whereas those of history are singulars. (Trans. Bywater, 1920, n.p.)

According to this scheme, poetry, including theatre and performance, is situated ‘between’ history and philosophy, and because of their universal nature they are a ‘better thing’ or ‘something to be taken more seriously’ than history.

One of Aristotle’s crucial points is that each of these three individual discursive practices – philosophy, poetry, and history – is based on a specific mode of representation (basically included in the notion of mimesis or imitation/representation). While Plato had established a vertical ontological model, with the work of art situated on the lowest possible step on the ladder of ‘being’ – considered to be a copy of a copy, even more distant from the pure, metaphysical forms than the individual objects – Aristotle claimed that poetry occupies an intermediary position, strategically and horizontally situated between two other distinct discursive, representational practices (history and philosophy), and because of its more universal character, poetry is closer to philosophy than to history. Aristotle’s basic model depicting the relations between the three representational practices can be examined from several perspectives.

The ontological perspective

Aristotle’s typology implies that poetry and the other arts are simultaneously both singular/particular and universal. This simultaneous mixture of the particular and the universal is related to the dialectics between the direct experience and the retrospective understanding mentioned before (though Aristotle does not discuss them in these terms), and the model suggests that the aesthetic object is constituted through an ontological instability, being both particular and universal at the same time. This ontological instability would obviously have been unacceptable within Plato’s metaphysical framework, where, since the aesthetic object is a copy of a copy, it has been assigned the most ontologically-inferior position possible and can therefore not be universal. The combination of the proximity of poetry to philosophy and the ensuing ontological instability of the work of art, which Aristotle’s model...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  Discursive Practices and Narrative Models: History, Poetry, Philosophy
• 2  Performing Pasts for Present Purposes: Reenactment as Embodied, Performative History
• 3  Minding the Gap: The Choreographer as Hyper-Historian in Oral History-Based Performance
• 4  Un/becoming Nomad: Marc Lescarbot, Movement, and Metamorphosis in Les Muses de la Nouvelle France
• 5  Group Biography, Montage, and Modern Women in Hooligans and Building Jerusalem
• 6  Alexander Pushkin’s Boris Godunov as Epic Theatre
• 7  Shakespeare Inside Out: Hamlet as Intertext in the USSR 1934–43
• 8  Raoul Wallenberg on Stage – or at Stake? Guilt and Shame as Obstacles in the Swedish Commemoration of their Holocaust Hero
• 9  Staging Auschwitz, Making Witnesses: Performances between History, Memory, and Myth
• 10  Real Archive, Contested Memory, Fake History: Transnational Representations of Trauma by Lebanese War Generation Artists
• 11  Performing Collective Trauma: 9/11 and the Reconstruction of American Identity
• 12  Contemporary Brazilian Theatre: Memories of Violence on the Post-Dictatorship Stage
• 13  Bent and the Staging of the Queer Holocaust Experience
• 14  Partners in Conversation: Ethics and the Emergent Practice of Oral History Performance
• Bibliography
• Index