Performance in Place of War (review)

The title of this ambitious study contains a calculated ambiguity that provides an important insight into the material studied. On the one hand the book considers examples of theater and performance that take place in the midst of conflict, in the nexus of violence itself. This includes not only theater in actual war zones but in those zones created by war and often continuous with it, in refugee and concentration camps, devastated villages, cities under occupation. The alternative meaning interprets "in place of " not as a literal place, but in the sense of "instead of," and considers theater and performance in its role of postwar healing, seeking justice or reconciliation or prewar prevention, building community, and relieving political and cultural tensions.

Since both war and theater have been with us throughout recorded history, the potential scope of such an investigation is overwhelming, and the authors must necessarily set some restrictions on the material drawn upon for analysis. They restrict themselves to a more recent time period, between 2004 and 2007, the time of a three-and-a-half year Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project based at the University of Manchester called "In Place of War" that gathered scholars and practitioners to exchange information and ideas on this pressing cultural project. The listing of participants that opens the volume provides impressive evidence of the scope of expertise thus assembled and represented. There is also a necessary geographical selection, which I found less successful.

Important as such an investigation is, and surely the topic is one of the most critical and pressing of those open to cultural investigation, such a study faces enormous challenges in methodology, in representation, in power relationships, in cultural assumptions, and of course in the selection of materials. To their credit, the authors are very much aware of such concerns and take care throughout their study to recognize alongside the importance of their work its necessary selectivity and contingency. In each case they attempt insofar as possible to contextualize both the example and the analysis, recognizing that although general conclusions can be drawn, each historical circumstance is in many ways unique and that this singularity must also be respected.

Within its time frame the book attempts to present a wide range of examples of performance practice, often in the words of the practitioners themselves, without becoming simply a collection of significant examples. These are contextualized politically and culturally, as well as theoretically, so that the study as a whole provides a wide-ranging survey of contemporary performance practice as it reflects upon the contemporary dynamics of war while developing a theoretical framework and methodology for the discussion and analysis of such performance. Nothing of this sort has been attempted before, and there is little question that future studies of this subject will utilize this text as the basis for further work.

The first chapter takes the Butterfly Peace Garden in Sri Lanka as its central example and discusses performance made at the time and place of war. Critics such as Carolyn Nordstrom, Elaine Scarry, and Terry Eagleton are evoked in a discussion of attempts to utilize performance in a therapeutic manner, among traumatic conditions, especially those affecting children. The second chapter deals with one of the most troublesome and widespread effects of recent wars, the vast numbers of displaced persons and refugees they have created. The role of theater as a source for the creation of stability and survival among such populations is here the theme. By definition such theater must be liminal and hybrid and so subject to a wide variety of forms and with an equally wide variety of objectives. The authors manage this multiplicity of foci as they do with similar multifaceted phenomena elsewhere in the book, with caution and recognition of their partial perspectives, but still with clear and convincing analyses of individual case studies, here of a variety of exile performances in their home base of Manchester and of the Arab-Jewish theater in Jaffa, Israel. The third chapter...