This book locates and critically theorises an emerging field of twenty-first century theatre practice concerned, either thematically, methodologically, or formally, with acts of commemoration and the commemorative. With notions of memorial, celebration, temporality and remembrance at its heart, and as a timely topic for debate, this book asks how theatre and performance intersects with commemorative acts or rituals in contemporary theatre and performance practice. It considersthe (re)performance of history, commemoration as a form of, or performance of, ritual, performance as memorial, performance as eulogy and eulogy as performance. It asks where personal acts of remembrance merge with public or political acts of remembrance, where the boundary between the commemorative and the performative might lie, and how it might be blurred, broken or questioned. It explores how we might remake the past in the present, to consider not just how performance commemorates but how commemoration performs.
1. Staging loss: an introduction.- 2. There is some corner of a Lincolnshire field...: locating commemoration in the performance of Leaving Home; Andrew Westerside.- 3. Watching with mother: 'rejourning' the wartime memories of a Wren, 1946/2016; Karen Savage and Justin Smith.- 4. Commemoration: sacred differentiation of time and space in three WWI projects; Helen Newall.- 5. Making Bolero: dramaturgies of remembrance; Michael Pinchbeck.- 6. Andrew Bovell in the History Wars: Australia's continuing cultural crisis of remembering and forgetting; Donald Pulford.- 7. After them, the flood: remembering, performance and the writing of history; Dan Ellin and Conan Lawrence.- 8. Cheers, Grandad! Third Angel's Cape Wrath and The Lad Lit Project as acts of remembrance; 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 Carre; Andrew Quick.- 10. The God, the owner & the master: staging rites of passage in the maritime crossing the line ceremony; Lisa Gaughan.- 11. Staging absence and the (un)making of memory in A Duet Without You; Chloe Dechery.- 12. Trace: shame and the art of mourning; Louie Jenkins.- 13. The performative ritual of loss: marking the intangible; Clare Parry-Jones.- 14. Searching shadows, lighting bones: commemorative performance as a radical, open-ended and ethical action; Emily Orley.- 15. Conclusion: Some words speak of events. Other words, events make us speak.
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