Applied Theatre Encounters at Canada's National Holocaust Monument

The stark, slanting, raw concrete walls of Landscape of Loss, Memory and Survival, reveal the essential performativity of Canada's new National Holocaust Monument (NHM). Designed by architect Daniel Libeskind and opened in Ottawa in September 2017, the unexpected angles of the monument's towering walls form six triangular "volumes" that constitute a deconstructed and elongated Star of David. Belarie Zatzman frames the NHM's architecture, itself, as the foundation for conceptualizing an applied theatre project as she speculates about what it might mean to respond to the Holocaust from the present, in a specifically Canadian context. She draws on Rothberg's concept of multidirectional memory as an approach for gathering participants' multiple narratives as well as multiple communities' responses to the Shoah. For Zatzman, the promise and challenge of applied theatre lies in the possibility of interacting with history, beyond passively consuming historiographic narratives. Thus, the article asks, how might applied theatre processes help shape our encounter with history and memory at the NHM as a performative, participatory, and pedagogical practice?