Enacting History

Introduction

introduction Scott Magelssen Enacting History is a collection of new essays by scholars in theater and performance studies tracing the ways recent performance practices have been used to select , devise, and perform narratives of the past to their participants and audiences. Such practices include living history museums, battle reenactments, pageantry, rendezvous, Renaissance festivals, and adventure-tourism destinations. The essays that comprise this collection by no means constitute a complete survey of performative representations of the past. Rather, we sought out a relatively short list of scholars, and in some cases practitioners, who are currently conducting crucial work in this area through their focus on specific case studies and methodologies and whose observations and arguments contribute to the larger questions of an ongoing discussion. for example, each of these popular forms, depending on its context and purpose , claims a greater or lesser degree of historical “accuracy” or “authenticity” to its participants and spectators, and the authors in this volume tease out the representational and historiographic issues related to such claims. but, moreover, they carefully consider other emerging dilemmas concerning spectatorship, politics , and the construction of communal identity. How, for instance, are issues of race, ethnicity, and gender dealt with at museums and events that purport to be accurate windows into the past? How are political and labor issues handled in local- or state-funded institutions that rely heavily on volunteer performers, and how do these issues shade or compromise the performances? How do tourists’ expectations shape the choices made by would-be purveyors of the past? Where do matters of taste or censorship enter in when reconciling archival evidence with a family-friendly mission? How is meaning conveyed by these enactments, and how is it received—or produced—by their spectators? on what criteria does “authenticity ” hinge, and who, ultimately, is to judge whether a particular spectator’s experience of the past is “authentic”? 2 / Scott Magelssen The past has been a subject of theater and performance since the beginning. on the face of it, a glance at the “canon” of Western non-comedic drama, for instance, suggests that if one were to catalog the material written for the stage into that which fabulates incidents in the present and near future and that which portrays events that have already happened (or ought to have happened, per the dicta of Aristotle and later the neoclassicists), the bulk of the plays would fall into the latter variety. (let us not forget, either, that any playwright’s depiction of her or his contemporary milieu, with few exceptions, defaults into a “historical drama” upon subsequent revival.) And when we expand the umbrella to cover the realm of historical performance that takes place, for the most part, outside traditional theater venues, it becomes even clearer that spectators and participants have found the past to be a seemingly inexhaustible repository of material for public consideration and reworking. it is this larger umbrella with which the authors of this collection are concerned . Whether closely following a script, improvised around a loose scenario, or based completely on free-play, performative representations have shaped audiences ’ understanding of the past for centuries. These performances have been manifested in civic spaces, as was the case with medieval mystery pageants in England and on the Continent, and spaces with decidedly more limited access: Le Ballet de la Nuit at the louvre’s Salle du Petit-bourbon or The Birth of a Nation in the White House’s family theater. They have been witnessed by hundreds of thousands, like the commemorative spectacle The Storming of the Winter Palace in revolutionary Russia, and by very intimate audiences, as in Eastern European living rooms when martial law or censorship prohibited artists like vaclav Havel from telling any story outside the officially sanctioned “past.” in a similar manner , performances have restaged famous battles with casts of thousands in the stadiums of antiquity, and they have been performed by a sole troubadour, the custodian of his people’s exploits and victories. And practitioners’ intentions have been as deeply religious as the ritual commemorations performed by a Catholic priest during Mass and a Muslim pilgrim on the hajj or as secular as an antique tractor pull. it would seem, then, that the public’s fascination with enacting and watching history has been a perennial and vital theme in much of our society. Since the late nineteenth century, though, there have been numerous shifts and thresholds that have pushed representations of past events into new territory, and it is possible...