Staging Loss: Performance as Commemoration

271 Pages·2018·4.168 MB·English

by  Michael Pinchbeck, Andrew Westerside

Staging Loss
Michael Pinchbeck · Andrew Westerside
Editors
Staging Loss
Performance as Commemoration
Editors
Michael Pinchbeck Andrew Westerside
University of Lincoln University of Lincoln
Lincoln, UK Lincoln, UK
ISBN 978-3-319-97969-4 ISBN 978-3-319-97970-0 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97970-0
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018951053
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In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across
the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were
pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and
swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down
the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks
of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the
troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the
breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and
white except for the leaves.
Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (1929)
P
reface
Why remember? Why here? Why us? Why now? We write this preface
in Lincoln in April 2018. When I arrived in Lincoln this morning, I
came off the train carriage and crossed the footbridge at the train sta-
tion. Behind me on the hill is the spire of the memorial to Bomber
Command and the men who lost their lives in the air during World War
Two. As I crossed the high street, I caught a glimpse of the cathedral
on the hill and the castle beside it currently housing the Magna Carta,
which recently commemorated its 800th anniversary. The cathedral was
a beacon for those WWII airmen based here lucky enough to return
home. From time to time, we see vintage planes fly over the campus
of the University of Lincoln where we work and the city to pay respect
to its history. Also, on display recently at the castle were the ceramic
poppies that marked the centenary of World War One at the Tower of
London. The decision to host Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red (2014)
marks Lincoln as a city of remembrance which has a topography of com-
memoration at which cathedral and castle stand literally at the epicentre.
Where we are sitting now looks out onto a roundabout with a recent
sculpture to commemorate Lincoln’s history as the birthplace of the
tank. It was conceived in a hotel lobby at the top of Steep Hill but
forged at Tritton Works just down the road and test driven at the com-
mon that you pass when you drive into Lincoln on the Carholme Road.
It was a training ground for both the army and the air force. In the
Grandstand, a relic of Lincoln’s racing heyday long since gone, there is a
vii
viii PREFACE
fading mosaic left behind by the Royal Flying Corps stationed there 100
years ago. We are writing a book about staging loss, the performance of
commemoration, in a city steeped in it, politically, artistically, militaristi-
cally and historically. In doing so, we want to place Lincoln at the centre
of a critical discourse around how we remember through performance
today and this publication starts this discourse.
As artists, we have been working on a number of projects that enact
and enable narratives of remembrance and commemoration, notions of
memory and loss. Andrew Westerside worked with Conan Lawrence on
a project in 2014, called Leaving Home, that told the story of a local
woman who lost five sons in World War One. It was both a large-scale
site-specific performance and a radio play and featured on the national
BBC news. In fact, it is Conan who is responsible for our subtitle ‘per-
formance as commemoration’, which we have used as an umbrella term
for the ongoing body of work that this book attempts to critically locate.
Michael Pinchbeck’s last devised performance, Bolero, commemo-
rated the First World War, the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo, and
the Bosnian War, using Maurice Ravel’s music as a bridge between these
different narratives and 100 years of history. Both Leaving Home and
Bolero were performed on the exact centenary of the events that inspired
them. The former being performed on 4 August 2014, 100 years to the
day after the formal declaration of the First World War in a village in
Lincolnshire. The latter being performed on 28 June 2014, 100 years
to the day of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo.
Both projects were anniversarial and commemorative in nature and fea-
ture in chapters here. As a result of these events chiming with history
as well as the themes of loss, both of us sought to reflect on a wider
context of performance made in this way exploring this theme. This
publication seeks to be a bridge, to bridge practices, themes, method-
ologies, research and discourse around notions of commemoration. We
are excited to share chapters by scholars and theatre-makers working in
this nascent field as part of an ongoing cartography of commemoration,
a tentative map for the genre.
We would like to thank the University of Lincoln for supporting the
research that led to this publication and for their support of our individ-
ual artistic practices. In particular, we would like to express our gratitude
to our Director of Research, Professor Dominic Symonds, for supporting
(and making the opening remarks for) the original symposium, Staging
Loss: Performance as Commemoration (16 June 2016) and Dr. Karen
PREFACE ix
Savage, Head of the School of Fine and Performing Arts, for her ongo-
ing support of our work, and of this project.
We would like to thank our colleagues in the Lincoln School of Fine
and Performing Arts and other institutions who have been endless foun-
tains of critical support and encouragement including: Rachel Baynton,
Dr. Jacqueline Bolton (especially the advice on being ‘tough’!), Rosalyn
Casbard, Dr. James Hudson, Dr. Rhiannon Jones, Conan Lawrence,
Dr. Siobhán O’Gorman, Professor Mark O’Thomas, Dr. Anna Scheer,
Kim Sly and Rebecca Tompkins.
We would also like to extend our thanks to Tomas René at Palgrave
Macmillan for his enthusiasm and guidance throughout the project, and
Vicky Bates for her continued advice in spite of our naïve questions. We
would like to thank Professor Mick Mangan for his generous endorse-
ment and support. Your words and reflections mean a lot to us.
Our penultimate thanks go to the academics and artists who spoke at,
and attended, the original forum, many of whom have contributed to
this publication as a result. Without their research, or their willingness to
contribute their research to this wider project, the book would not exist.
Finally, we would like to thank you, the reader, for engaging with this
book. We hope that it stimulates debate and contributes to an ongoing
discussion of a nascent field of study colliding the performative with the
commemorative.
Lincoln, UK Michael Pinchbeck
May 2018 Andrew Westerside
c
ontents
1 Staging Loss: An Introduction 1
Michael Pinchbeck and Andrew Westerside
Part I This is not Re-enactment: Staging the Voices
of the Dead
2 There is Some Corner of a Lincolnshire Field…:
Locating Commemoration in the Performance of
Leaving Home 19
Andrew Westerside
3 Deference, Deferred: Rejourn as Practice in Familial
War Commemoration 37
Karen Savage and Justin Smith
4 Commemoration: Sacred Differentiation of Time
and Space in Three World War I Projects 59
Helen Newall
xi
xii CONTENTS
Part II Staging History: Dramaturgy, Remembering,
Forgetting
5 Making Bolero: Dramaturgies of Remembrance 79
Michael Pinchbeck
6 Andrew Bovell in the History Wars: Australia’s
Continuing Cultural Crisis of Remembering and
Forgetting 95
Donald Pulford
7 After Them, The Flood: Remembering, Performance
and the Writing of History 109
Conan Lawrence and Dan Ellin
Part III Commemoration and Place: Architecture,
Landscape and the Ocean
8 CHEERS GRANDAD! Third Angel’s Cape Wrath
and The Lad Lit Project as Acts of Remembrance 129
Alexander Kelly
9 On Leaving the House: The Loss of Self and the
Search for “The Freedom of Being” in The Wooster
Group’s Vieux Carré 145
Andrew Quick
10 ‘The God, the Owner & the Master’ (Barthes, 1979):
Staging Rites of Passage in the Maritime Crossing the
Line Ceremony 159
Lisa Gaughan