Simming: Participatory Performance and the Making of Meaning

Preface and Acknowledgements

Preface and Acknowledgments R The roots of this project lie in my own lifelong relationship with immersive simulation. Simmings loomed largely in my formative years. My first such experience was when I was an infant, and, while I don’t remember it personally ,the story recounted by my parents made an impression: in the dark of the night preceding one Sunday morning during my first Advent, the ersatz baby Jesus had been stolen from the life-­ sized Nativity scene displayed outside Christus Lutheran Church in Clintonville, Wisconsin, where my father was serving as associate pastor. It so happened that the Sunday school program was going to visit the Nativity scene for an activity that morning. Realizing the centerpiece was missing at the last minute,my mother,in a bit of inspired thinking, placed me in the manger for the bundled-­ up Sunday schoolers, who were delighted at the real baby in the simulation of the stable in Bethlehem . By playing baby Jesus, though with no agency or cognition of my own, my infant body effectively converted a static crèche into a simulation of the first days of the Holy Family—­ a living nativity. I’d go on to reprise the role of Jesus of Nazareth in “Christ Hikes” in college when I worked as a Bible camp counselor for summer jobs in northern Wisconsin and western South Dakota (cast because I was the only theater major on the male staff, but the shoulder-­ length hair probably didn’t hurt). Before the reader jumps to conclusions about any Christ complex here, let me just say that my protagonist was more messy than messianic. Staged on Thursday evenings on the grounds of the camp and the surrounding wilderness of the pine forests or the Black Hills, these passion plays were corny bathrobe and flip-­ flop affairs, culminating in a bathos-­ inflected crucifixion scene on a lakeshore or a scenic butte (the resurrections were staged the following morning before the breakfast bell).Despite the lack of “fidelity”to the real-­ life first-­ century Palestine, the simulated gospel story always managed viii • Preface and Acknowledgments to elicit powerful, teary-­ eyed emotional and maybe even spiritual responses from the middle-­ school confirmation student audiences. In truth, despite its terrible costuming and amateurish virtuosity, Bible camp theater might be counted among the most emotionally engaging of performances, from outdoor teenage passion plays like this to the exquisitely disturbing Romans and Christians simulations, where the campers designated as Roman occupiers hunt down, imprison, and martyr the early-­ Christian campers in a Hunger Games–­ like exercise in performative witnessing.1 The cat-­and-­mouse structure of the latter example, in which participants experience what it’s like to hide and run for one’s life from the heavies policing the hegemonic state, is also cleverly exploited in the “Follow the North Star”Underground Railroad experience I treat in chapter 1, in the Caminata Nocturna illegal migrant program I describe in chapter 5, and even, one may argue, in the identification card program at the United States Holocaust Memoriam Museum I take up in chapter 4. I moved from Clintonville to Hayward, Wisconsin, in first grade. The experiences I had growing up in my new hometown likewise figure prominently in the way my scholarly disposition has taken shape. I would have never guessed when I worked as a suspendered lumberjack waiter at an all-­ you-­ can-­ eat logging-­ camp-­ themed restaurant in high school that I’d someday go back and parse the ways in which the Cook Shanty helped stage the nineteenth-­ century Wisconsin lumber industry for summer tourists for a graduate school seminar term paper, the genesis of my eventual masters and doctoral work,and my first book,which treated living history museums.Similarly , I don’t remember thinking that the rest of the town was different from everyone else’s,even though its fabric wove together giant fiberglass statues of freshwater fish, Dutch windmills, Wild West main streets and rodeos, fudge shops, powwows and Indian gift shops, a wilderness zoo, watersports and lumberjack championships, and a north woods hideout of Al Capone turned tourist resort and museum. Looking back, I can see that Hayward, the tip of the north-­ south Wisconsin tourist corridor that continued down through the Wisconsin Dells to the House on the Rock, was a collection of tourist kitsch but also a powerful example of the way simmings create meaning for millions of vacationers each summer. I treat a particularly trenchant example...