Synopses & Reviews
History, Memory, Performance is an interdisciplinary collection of essays exploring performances of the past in a wide range of trans-national and historical contexts ranging from seventeenth century New France and nineteenth-century Russia to modern Australia, Brazil, Britain, Canada, Lebanon, Russia, and the United States. Contributions from theatre scholars and public historians address issues of shared interest to the disciplines of theatre studies and theatre history, performance studies, history, and public history, coalescing around the concept of memory, both collective and individual. Wide-ranging and theoretically engaged, History, Memory, Performance is especially timely given the historical turn in theatre studies and the performative turn in historical studies.
Synopsis
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.
About the Author
David Dean is Professor of History and co-director of the Centre for Public History, Carleton University, Canada. David is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and from 2006-2012 was Company Historian to Canada's National Art Centre's English Theatre Company. He is currently editing A Companion to Public History for Wiley-Blackwell.
Yana Meerzon is an Associate Professor in the Department of Theatre, University of Ottawa, Canada. Her research interests are in theory of drama and performance; cultural and interdisciplinary studies; and theatre of exile and immigration. Her book Performing Exile - Performing Self: Drama, Theatre, Film was published by Palgrave in 2012.
Kathryn Prince is an Associate Professor in the Department of Theatre at the University of Ottawa, Canada, where her research focuses on early modern theatre history. Her recent publications include Performing Early Modern Drama Today, Shakespeare in the Victorian Periodicals, and chapters in major projects including Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century and Shakespeare in the Nineteenth Century.
Table of Contents
Introduction: History, Memory, Performance; David Dean, Yana Meerzon, Kathryn Prince
1.Discursive Practices and Narrative Models: History, Poetry, Philosophy; Freddie Rokem
2.Performing Pasts for Present Purposes: Reenactment as Embodied, Performative History; Katherine Johnson
3.Minding the Gap: The Choreographer as Hyper-historian in Oral History-based Performance; Jeff Friedman
4.Un/becoming Nomad: Marc Lescarbot, Movement, and Metamorphosis in Les Muses de la Nouvelle France; VK Preston
5.Group Biography, Montage, and Modern Women in Hooligans and Building Jerusalem; Nancy Copeland
6.Alexander Pushkin's Boris Godunov as Epic Theatre; J. Douglas Clayton
7.Shakespeare Inside out: Hamlet as Intertext in the USSR 1934-1943; Irena R. Makaryk
8.Raoul Wallenberg on Stage - or at Stake? Guilt and Shame as Obstacles in the Commemoration of a Holocaust Hero; Tanja Schult
9.Staging Auschwitz, Making Witnesses: Performances between History, Memory, and Myth; Rachel E. Bennett
10.Real Archive, Contested Memory, Fake History: Transnational Representations of Trauma by Lebanese War Generation Artists; Johnny Alam
11.Performing Collective Trauma: 9/11 and the Reconstruction of American Identity; Josy Miller
12.Brazilian Contemporary Theatre: Memories of Violence on the Post-Dictatorship Stage; Claudia Tatinge Nascimento
13.Bent and the Staging of the Queer Holocaust Experience; Samantha Mitschke
14.Partners in Conversation: Ethics and the Emergent Practice of Oral History Performance; Edward Little and Steven High
Bibliography
Index