Staging History: Aesthetics and the Performance of Memory
by Belarie Zatzman
I want to talk about a certain time not measured in months and years.
For so long I have wanted to talk about this time, and not in the way
I will talk about it now, not just about this one scrap of time. I wanted
to, but I couldn't. I didn't know how. I was afraid, too, that this second
time, which is measured in months and years, had buried the other time
under a layer of years, that this second time had crushed the first and
destroyed it within me. But no, today, digging around in the ruins of
memory, I found it fresh and untouched by forgetfulness. This time was
measured not in months but in a word - we no longer said "in the beautiful
month of May," but "after the first 'action' or the second or right before
the third. We had different measures of time, we different ones, always
different, always with that mark of difference. . . .
- Ida Fink, A Scrap of Time and Other Stories
What are the boundaries of remembering? How do we make manifest the ruins
of memory? How do we enter that time not measured in months and years? How
do those not directly affected by the Holocaust encounter its meaning? How
do we move toward the performance of memory with youth as co-creators, when
we must be awake to the act of staging histories "both remembered and not
remembered, transmitted and not transmitted"? In designing aesthetic practices
of remembrance in the present, we face both the specificity of time and
the collapse of time as a way of knowing. This paper articulates the design
of a project, titled "Wrapped in Grief," in constituting personal and public
memory in the aesthetic space made available by arts education. How can
our drama work "capture the aesthetic of memory, its instability and its
contingency"?"Wrapped in Grief" responds to these questions about
the performance of memory by articulating a process for constructing and
rehearsing our own identities among the narratives of others, present and
past. Contemporary research examining memory and memorial underscores the
fact that in provoking history as an act of remembrance for a new generation,
we are narrating a sense of self. The paradox of re-telling these personal
and public histories is that we are playing out that which cannot be represented.
In this sense, drama education offers an aesthetic frame that allows us
the possibility "to be the story and to repeat its unrepeatability."
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