“What if performance challenges strict divisions about where the art ends and the rest of the world begins?” (15)

I always feel like something of a heel using a quote from so early in the book, but I felt like this idea merited some discussion.  According to the manifesto I’m writing for Blair’s class, art is inherently liminal, in that it is always negotiating that space between real and representational.  And, on the scale of liminality, theatre is the one that spends the most space in this in-between.  And, in the terms of this book, when theatre begins to interact not only with a real audience, but with the really real social world outside the theatre doors, this line becomes ever more delicate, ever more blurry.  Brecht wanted his theatre to remain distinctly unreal so that it could inspire real action in its audience.  Augusto Boal took his theatre to society, rather than expecting society to come to his theatre.  The Tectonic Theatre Project’s use of documentary techniques in building their theatre has real people’s words coming out of the mouths of actors, hoping to challenge the audience’s perceptions of real events and issues.  Paul Chan felt the pull of New Orleans from the comfort of his New York apartment and felt that the only way he could answer that pull was to put a 60-year-old piece of European art into direct conversation with the all too real landscape of devastation in the ninth ward.  What is the responsibility art takes on when it edges its way closer and closer to reality?  And not just any reality, but the sensitive realities that surround social issues.  Art can never be really real, or it simply becomes life instead of art, so where does this kind of “experimental” theatre practice fall on the continuum?  Certainly, as Jackson points out, this is a delicate distinction as well: “Experimental art performances use visual, embodied, collective, durational, and spatial systems, but a critical sense of their innovation will differ depending upon what medium they understand themselves to be disrupting, i.e. which medium is on the other end of whose ‘post.’” (2)  So while navigating theatre that participates in social discourse, we have to take not of its interaction with reality, its interaction with issues, and its interaction with the history of the art form itself in order to be aware of all the levels of codes present in any given performance.  And all of that may well prove to be the easy part.

“all bodily practice is, like language itself, always already composed in repetition and repetition is, paradoxically, both the vehicle for sameness and the vehicle for difference or change.”[1]

“Of course, when playing in the crossfire of time letting anachronism do its creative work, things can feel a little uncanny, or dislocated, or unsettling, or queer.  They can also feel like downright bad art…The first time was true.  The second time is false, etiolated, hollow, or infelicitous.  The second time, the third time, the nth times are not actual.  Thus: the second time is lesser.  But…the minor, forgotten, overlooked, disavowed, unsung second, double, and ‘lesser’ gain a kind of agency in the re-do.”[2]

A couple of years ago, I interviewed a Civil War reenactor for a documentary theatre piece I was working on for a class.  I was talking to her about being a Southern woman, but we couldn’t help, of course, discussing her passion for reenacting.  As the descendant of a confederate soldier, she took the whole thing very seriously.  She led me to the air conditioned shed out back where she built and stored all of her costumes – at least two racks worth.  She spoke with pride about the authenticity of the garments, the way a dress petticoat would become an everyday petticoat once it had been worn too many times.  When I performed as her in our documentary performance, the knowledge that I was performing a performer kept tickling the back of my mind. 

Judith Butler’s discussion of identity as “a stylized repetition of acts”[3] seems to be in conversation with a lot of what I observed in my own little anecdote, and what Schneider is talking about in navigating the murky waters of reenactment.  There is something dismissive about the way most of us would talk about the second time around.  It’s an interesting contradiction of our postmodern sensibilities, in that we are so comfortable with simulacrum in our daily, mass-produced life, but there seem to be places where we draw the line and say at those things that aren’t really real, that aren’t authentic or original.  But in Butler’s sense, nothing we ever do is truly original – our very identities are a sedimentation of simulacra built up through decades and centuries of repetition.  And then, when we in the theatre rehearse and rehearse and rehearse, all in an attempt to produce the illusion of the first time, we add a layer of sediment to our behavior.  Think about revivals.  Think about tours.  Think about cast members being replaced midway through a run.  Iterations of the “original” are almost infinite in a theatrical sense.  And then, these reenactors, have their own layers to add – whether they acknowledge their touristy allure, or dedicate themselves to serious authenticity.  Historical events happen for the first and only time, but then, as the truism goes, we are doomed to repeat them – either on a historical scale or in unending recounting and reenacting.  And even historical events make reference to past events, past speeches, past people.  One would be hard pressed to point to any event that could truly stand on its own. 

But does this constant referentiality devalue the reenactment?  Is it merely a precondition of existing in a world built out of performances?  Is there ever really an original?  How far back must historiography reach to find the roots of any given historical or theatrical impulse?  Is consciousness of our relationship to the “original” necessary to give the reenactment validity?  I found myself particularly interested in the protests Schneider discusses in her Afterword for this very reason.  The acknowledgement of their deliberate anachronism is a powerful tool in demonstrating the way in which we as a people have been reenacting our own flawed history, since the same fights from the past have so much to say to contemporary issues, so by foregrounding the out-of-time-ness of the argument, we can draw attention to the repetition that believes itself to be originality. "The ‘performance’ of history can create a rupture in the safe contemporary evaluations of the past and conceptions of the future"[4]  There is something important in the conscious reenacting impulse that forces the now into a dialogue with the what was and the could be.  So perhaps it is the level of consciousness on the part of both performer and observer, rather than the reenactment itself that becomes the most compelling and useful element in terms of the effect of reenactment on history itself.  This extends queering of identity into queering of place in history and place in time, which allows us to look at ourselves in non-linear terms, feeding on anachronism as a tool for understanding rather than as a mistake or an affront against the rigid forward motion of time.

This post is going to be a little unusual for me, because I think I’m going to argue with Young a bit more than I tend to…then I’m going to jump around a bit.  I do enjoy a lot of this book, don’t get me wrong.  And I think his exploration of the active nature of stillness is compelling (Muhammed Ali’s refusal to take a step at the induction, for example, was a really powerful example of the extreme activeness of stillness), but there were a couple of moments that have really gotten stuck in my craw, and I have to get them out.

When he talks about the daguerreotypes in the second chapter, he mentions “the allure of the off-frame space in photography” (48) as he imagines what the studio might have been like for the subjects of these images.  How many people were there?  Were the subjects watching each other?  Where had they placed their clothes?  All of these are fascinating questions, and it’s true that we can’t help but want to fill in the world outside the frame of the photo, but he seems to forget this piece of the experience when he’s discussing the “Love it or Leave it” photo, wherein he points out the crowd of black folks in the background all looking away from the main car as some sort of act of rebellion against the message of white superiority implied by the car.  But, if we take a moment to think about what logically might be off-frame in a picture of a parade… wouldn’t it be logical that there is something following after this car?  If not, this is the worst parade ever.  Can we really put so much historical and emotional weight on a group of people who are probably just looking at what’s coming next?  Young seems to be stretching a little too far on this one, leaving behind his own earlier ideas in favor of locating what he hoped he would.

My second issue with him came in his discussion of Yellowman.  As he introduces the piece he tells us: “Dael Orlandersmith, despite viewing her play as nonhistorical and not autobiographical, tells a story that reflects the treatment of her own body.” (121)  It is certainly his prerogative to see what he sees in this piece of theatre, but it seems a little odd coming from a man who has spent 120 pages explaining how meaning has been placed on the black body against its will and how people have worked hard to reclaim the right to define their own bodies.  So doesn’t it seem a little presumptuous of him to say, “She might say it’s not about her body, but she’s wrong – I say it is.”  The way he is discussing his observations is not merely an attempt to communicate what he sees, but a deliberate contradiction of what she has proclaimed about herself.  There is something snide in his tone when he says, “It is difficult to imagine Orlandersmith not identifying with her own protagonist’s racial anxieties.” (155)  And she may or may not, but, based on his arguments throughout the book, it is not his place to decide whether or not she does.  He’s inscribing his own desired meaning onto her body in performance and that really rubs me the wrong way.

So now that I’ve gotten those two little complaints off my chest…

I think he does a nice job of discussing the physicality of Suzan-Lori Parks’s language: “The focus here rests not on the utterance itself but the process by which that utterance manifests itself, the position of the body at the moment of enunciation, and the reverberations of the sound having been spoken.” (130)

This makes me think back to one of the old truisms I learned in working on Shakespeare – that everything comes from the head, the gut or the groin.  Language is not something that belongs to the head alone – it comes from humans and is deeply connected to what the body needs.  Language has a taste and a tactile quality that is too often overlooked, but in people like Shakespeare or Parks, whose understanding of language is so fully embodied, ignoring what language, sounds and words can do for and to the body just sort of ends up missing the point.  I love reading Parks – she has the ability to shake me out of my heady, intellectual, “I’m reading something and thinking deep thoughts” space with her playful use of spelling and rhythm.  She demands that I let go of “the way it’s supposed to be” and go with the flow of something else that generally ends up leading me to someplace way deeper than just sitting and thinking could.  In the ever-present mind/body binary, Parks and her characters refuse to choose sides, and her plays are the better for it.  The “spells” she casts are those sweet spots where the mind and the body are so intertwined that language isn’t possible or isn’t necessary.

“She acts like a scientist, putting a part under a microscope for examination and experimentation.  She unpacks the history of coding and the connections between the body part and the process of identification, subjection, and objectification… Ultimately, Urban Bush Women moves toward putting the black female body back together, healing the old wounds and creating more complete positive images of black women.” (37-38)

·         Laura Mulvey talks about how the male gaze breaks down the female form into its desirable parts, taking a fully formed individual and turning her into a collection of eroticized body parts based on the sexual desires of the male audience.  So I found it interesting how George-Graves turned this vivisection on its ear, using fixation on individual body parts as a process of empowerment, rather than objectification.  It occurred to me that dance is a logical art form in which to counter the male gaze, as it is the art form most essentially intertwined with the body.  The dances described put the spotlight on the processes of objectification, and hopefully begin a dialogue among the dancers and the audience about the effects thereof, but they don’t always present a neat and tidy solution.  I loved the discussion of high heeled shoes and lipstick – how they were used as illustrations of the shaping and marking of the female body – in particular the black female body: “The markers of femininity are commodities, according to this piece, to be bought and sold.  These girls buy and wear desire.  Soon, however, reality confronts fantasy, and the women are left with a confused sense of themselves.  Violence has been done.” (116)  In her essay “Selling Hot Pussy,’ bell hooks points out the eroticization and animalization of the black female body by the white male hegemony, noting how completely the black woman is othered, but also how she is expected to find ways to conform with ideals of white beauty in order to keep her animal sexuality from running wild.  But she also notes how someone like Tina Turner was able to find power in this sexuality.  I thought about bell hooks’s work a lot as I was reading about the Urban Bush Women.  Their celebration of the black female body feels like a reclamation and a declaration – confronting the forces that would rob them of their individuality and identity.  Since the black female body has been so intensely written upon by history, the dance theatre of the Urban Bush Women seems a logical place for wrighting (to use Rossini’s term) their place in the world.  In particular, I was moved by the discussion of hands – how the terminology of hands was so much a part of the language of slavery, and how those same hands have the power to take back history and tell a different story.  “I argue that by creating characters who exist in alternate realities and characters who represent entire populations, the company is attempting to rewrite master narratives.  The characters push against the gaps of history and narrative and challenge us to move beyond stereotypical and limiting images of black women.  These dances are exercises of agency over the stories of black women and the languages with which they are communicated.” (72)  So piece by piece, limb by limb, body by body, the Urban Bush Women come together to tell stories in a way that makes their dance something more than dance.  The incorporation of language and song; personal expression and technique; memory and history all come together in something less literary than theatre and more narrative than dance.

Rossini says that Moraga was “searching for her own people, for a group that shares both her political beliefs and cultural position, crucially recognizing that her people need a space in which to manifest themselves.” (177)  Isn’t this sort of true of most artists?  I guess this takes us back to community – that every artistic endeavor is looking for some way to communicate with like-minded people, or to convert non-like-minded people into like-minded people.  We want to work with people who understand us and we want to perform for people who can hear what we have to say.  I’ve spent the last eight years working with a company in South Carolina with similar passions and goals and politics and aesthetics, and it’s an extremely rewarding experience to have a community of artists who speak the same language.  Of course, this idea becomes more literal when we’re talking about Latina American theatre, where the intersection of language is so much a part of the aesthetic.  The ways in which Spanish and English intertwine throughout the book create a whole new language that communicates with different audiences in different ways.  I have to admit – the tangent I think I’m about to take is a little off the beaten track, but it’s sort of where I’m living right now, so I guess I’ll just have to deal with that.  On the language front – I spent the weekend in Brampton, ON – a suburb of Toronto.  I was visiting my grandparents in the hospital.  They’re both in there for different reasons, but they’ve managed to be put in the same room.  So they’re there in their hospital beds facing each other – and neither one is wearing his or her hearing aid.  So my aunt and I spent the weekend repeating ourselves loudly and slowly, watching them interpret us and each other, seeing the hilarious and frustrating and adorable patterns that are still so present after 64 years of marriage.  It struck me – the common history and vocabulary and knowledge that was shared by the people in that room.  My grandparents are from tiny towns on the east coast of Canada, my aunt in Canadian-American, my cousin is Lebanese-Canadian, her husband is Chinese-Canadian, I’m on my way to American-Canadian status… we live all over the world, but this common communal thread of family gave us the ability to understand each other and share the experience in a way that would have been so different with an outsider in the room.  The nurses commented on the dynamic – it’s a tangible thing to be among a group of people who understand each other in such a fundamental way – even when we’re not as able to communicate.  I sat in the surprisingly comfortable visitor’s chair reading Rossini’s book and thinking about the ways in which people perform with and for their respective communities.  We assume or are assigned roles that will hopefully serve the entire community in some meaningful way.  And we do what we have to to be understood.  And we accept that sometimes we won’t be understood or we won’t understand, but lack of understanding doesn’t preclude participation – especially in the theatre we read about this week.  Sometimes the source of confusion becomes a source of inquiry: an invitation to take a different point of view or to ask new questions or to phrase things differently.  Certainly the implications of Moraga’s theatre – and the work of all the artists mentioned in the book – are far greater than the implications of my grandfather yelling into the phone to his deaf sister in Halifax or my grandmother believing my cousin’s husband had called her “Phoenician” instead of “a comedian,” but at the heart of all of this is a common experience fueling a common language and a common sensibility with some hope of connecting with our little concentric circles of community.

[Jessica Hagedorn] “wanted to explore what humor was and how it related to racism.  For Hagedorn, ‘humor has to be tied with truth’: ‘[Truth] is what makes you laugh because it hurts…Humor is about telling the truth.’” (121)

“Hwang knew how to let mainstream audiences laugh at Asian American topics: ‘One of the things I found very early on at the [Public Theater] was that with predominantly non-Asian audience, you had to give them the permission to laugh because they weren’t sure whether or not they were being offensive by laughing, and so after The New York Times came out and said that it was funny, then everyone thought it was OK to laugh.’” (134)

There were a few things I found particularly interesting in reading this book.  First was the preponderance of women who were at the forefront of the Asian-American theatre movement.  Jessica Hagedorn, Joanna Wan-Ying Chan, Roberta Uno, Nobuko Mitamato and many others were among the most exciting, active and incendiary people in the history of this group about which we generally know so little.  If we tend to be ignorant of Asian American theatre in general, then we are certainly ignorant of the specific role women have played within it. 

I also took note of the many mentions of humor within this book.  The quotes cited above make note of the ways Asian-American artists were able to use humor to test and even blast beyond boundaries, inviting or dragging people into their world.  This appropriation of humor is important for these artists, since the roots of Asian and Asian-American characters in American theatre were also often comical, but in those days they were the butt of the joke.  They were the geishas, the drunks, the fools, the criminals, and they were to be feared, laughed at, or both.  So it’s interesting to see the ways in which they changed the discourse, took control of the laughter, and made it into something that could propel them into the mainstream.  Hwang’s understanding of the intricacies of letting the audience in on the joke is the very reason he became the pioneer he did.  He worked within the rules of the mainstream to open doors into the world of the Asian-American experience, humanizing it and allowing audiences of all stripes to find the kind of connections and parallels with their own lives that are the bedrock of so much comedy.  He was, in a sense, “using the master’s tools” to dig out a place for the Asian-American voice in the American theatre context.

And while Hwang was digging with fairly delicate tools, it sounds like Hagerdon may have been working with dynamite.  I have to admit, I love that Hagedorn was so known for her particularly in-your-face brand of humor.  Seeing a woman challenge society in such a straightforward, unabashed way is often (not to be trite) empowering to me.  She reached out across racial and societal barriers to point out the injustice and absurdity of stereotypes and judgments, and she did it in a way that refused to go unnoticed.  I’m not a proponent of shock for the sake of shock, or coarseness for the sake of coarseness, but when humor and extremity are applied in a carefully thought out, intelligently crafted, intentional manner with a social purpose, I can really dig it!  And the fact that she was playing with Samuel L. Jackson… well… that’s just bonus cool points, let’s be honest.

As she discusses Ralli’s performance of Antígona, Taylor points out how Ralli was able to use embodied symbols to connect lived  memory to the dramatic memory of the story of Antigone: “In the performance, she included the gestures she associated with the women as a way of signaling the continuity of cultural gestures and behaviors.” (207-208)  This immediately brought to mind an amazing project called Dark Elegy (http://www.darkelegy103.com/).  Dark Elegy is a sculpture garden by a woman named Suse Lowenstein that commemorates the attack on Pan Am 103 on Dec. 21, 1988.  The plane was coming from Heathrow bound for JFK, and was destroyed by a bomb over the town of Lockerbie, Scotland.  Until September 11, 2001, this was the largest foreign attack on American civilians.  Lowenstein’s 21-year-old son was one of the victims.  In order to cope with her grief, she sculpted herself at the moment when she received the news, and then began sculpting other women connected to other passengers.  Each sculpture is a frozen gesture, an encapsulation of the trauma of the moment captured in stone.  This sculpture project later inspired playwright Deborah Brevoort to write the play The Women of Lockerbie, based on the event.  I found a strong connection in this play both to the gestural nature of embodied memory in Taylor’s repertoire, but also in her discussion of her experience of September 11.  The layers of performance involved in capturing that trauma – from memory, to sculpture to play – marry the repertoire and the archive in an interesting way.  There is a moment in the play when Madeline, the grieving mother of a 21-year-old son lost in the attack, recounts the moment when she heard about the explosion:

                I was in the kitchen.

                I was baking a pie for Adam.

                A pumpkin pie, to welcome him home.

                The TV was on.

                I listen to it when I’m cooking…

                I sprinkle flour on the counter

                and roll out the pie dough.

                I roll it once in each direction.

                Like this…

                (She rolls)

                The way my mother taught me.

                And then

                Ted Koppel comes on the air.

                I know immediately that something is wrong.

                You only hear Ted Koppel’s voice at night

                never in the day.

                He said:

                “We interrupt this program…

                Pan Am 103 was last seen in a fireball over Scotland.”

                I double over.

                I sink onto the kitchen counter.

                My face presses into the pie dough.

                It is cold on my nose and cheek.

                I cannot stand up.

                I grope the counter

                for something to hold on to.

                My arm hits the flour bin.

                It crashes to the floor.

                My feet are covered with flour.

                I reach for the handle

                on the refrigerator.

                I pull myself up.

                And there

                in front of me

                is a note

                held by a magnet

                that says

                “Adam. 7pm. JFK. Pan Am 103.”

                I live in New Jersey!

                I have two cars in the driveway!

                This was not supposed to happen to me!

She relives the private moment of her trauma in a detailed and physical way, making of herself a perpetual statue.  As we put that performance of grief into statue and scripted form, it becomes a part of the archive, but since the memory is inherently housed in gesture, it remains actively in the repertoire as well. 

There is something so inherently visceral about the way we process extreme trauma like Pan Am 103, the Dirty War or September 11 that the archive doesn’t seem quite enough to hold these memories.  In many cases, we the survivors are the only physical remains left to testify to the event.  While Diana’s body was there to be paraded through London, many of the bodies could not be recovered from Pan Am or the World Trade Center, and certainly most of the desaparecidos were never retrieved.  In the absence of that kind of archival finality, we are left to rely on the memory that has taken root in the bones of the witnesses.  And we really are all witnesses.  Whether we were in New York or thousands of miles away, we were all witnesses to the events of September 11.  Even though the women represented in Dark Elegy were not in Scotland watching the plane fall, they are witnesses.  As Taylor points out in chapter 9, there is more to the record than the officially sanctioned photos (archive).  The moment of trauma is burned on the body and the mind and the way in which that trauma is relived and re-felt and retold requires a distinctly performative approach to history and memory.

As of 2008, Suse Lowenstein had sculpted 76 women connected with Pan Am 103.  In each piece, the last thing she adds is a small personal trinket or remembrance that she places just behind the heart – which seems to me a sort of perfect illustration of the marriage of the archive and the repertoire.  There is a personal element to the memory recorded in this sculpted archive that we may never see, but that embodied element is what completes it.

“Across the transnational groupings and reinvented affiliations of such an oceanic inter-cultural but within the stubborn eloquence of the intersecting diasporic memories performed within its distinctive urban vortices, the precise location of the New World is no longer clear.” (286)

Roach’s book examines a history of transformation and travel, of appropriation and reclaiming of identity.  The strong postcolonial streak in his writing examines the way memories are preserved and the narratives that this preservation is in service of.  Songs are heard, uprooted, and planted in a new context that serves the hegemony in some completely different way.  Icons are reassigned and their original meaning all but forgotten.  Even the human body itself is employed in ways that the individual might never have anticipated.  Looking at the pageantry of the Betterton funeral alongside the pageantry of the slave trade, there is a stark contrast in the meaning of the respective human effigies.  Betterton comes to represent a certain level of culture and artistic refinement – reanimating a living effigy out of a dead body and making it into an instrument of expression around which a community could continue to gather.  In life, as an actor, he was already a living symbol.  (The discussion of the life or death struggle between the actor and the audience was particularly amusing.  As we ‘knock ‘em dead’ or ‘die out there’ for all to see, there is an exaggeration to the liminality of the theatre act that brings added life to the risk an actor submits him/herself to with each performance.  Theatre transforms the actor into something more – an inherently semiotic entity that takes on a meaning beyond the individual.  And according to Roach’s observations, the power of that performance can live long after the passing of the physical actor.  Actors are replaced by their own legends.)  While theatre and the funeral of a theatre icon create a sort of hyper humanity, his account of the slave markets illustrates a use of performance to diminish humanity.  Dressing up the “auction items” in attractive clothes (just like Betterton and his fellow actors) only to strip them and humiliate them.  They dance and smile and perform in a way that, to an outside observer, might seem quite similar to the theatre of Betterton and his peers.  But the community that arises out of each is painfully different.  As Roach digs through the myriad performances in this group, over and over again we see images of people and populations whose identities are not their own.  But from the point of the hegemony, it is all too easy to forget that these people and traditions have their own history distinct from the popular narrative.  My grandfather used to sing all sorts of old songs.  Some were harmless old sea chanties, and some were negro spirituals complete with “dems” and other well-known colloquialisms.  My mother was mortified when, at the age of 4 or 5, I related the story of the tar baby to my best friend across the street, who was black.  In some senses there can be an innocence to the lack of recognition of an artifact’s history.  Certainly, I just thought these songs and stories came from my grandfather.  I never gave a thought to any lengthy origin story.  But as ignorance implants these appropriated pieces of identity deeper and deeper into the culture of the colonizer, it becomes harder and harder to locate real roots.  “Great discoveries” built on the backs of conquered and subjugated populations rarely recognize the debt they owe.  But when we attempt to untangle these webs of influence that stretch back and forth across the nation and across the Atlantic (in Roach’s examples), we encounter complex stories of give and take that then demand that we rethink our assignment of “new” and “first” and “primary.”  It becomes a huge, historical game of six degrees of Kevin Bacon 

When I ask myself who I am, I don’t come up first with "scholar."  Long before I get there, I swing by actor, director, cat lover, singer, lapsed dancer (watch out for typos on that one!), recovering Catholic, vegetarian, writer, designer (sound and costume… I don’t claim any expertise over lighting and scenic), stage manager, marketing maven, sister, daughter, aunt, friend… and pretty much all of those are places I would go before I get to scholar.  But here I am, a PhD student, trying to reconcile my artistic and my scholarly self.  The way I like to write and the way the academy demands I write tend to disagree.  So there is great comfort in the questions posed in Theatre Historiography.  “Have we sufficiently expanded our ways of knowing to allow for approaches to historiography that are truly Other?  Far better to ask whether the history of theater practice offers modes of inquiry that can illuminate our historical knowledge.” (Bial 284)  Isn’t it about time that we invite into our discourse voices and sources and experts and ideas that do not fit neatly into the (let’s face it) masculine academic cookie cutters?  Isn’t it about time that we allow, nay, encourage, nay, DEMAND that our scholars crawl out from the library stacks to interact directly with that living breathing thing they’re writing about?  When we look at plays and performances and sigh and say that the critical tools open to those artists are not also open to scholars, how many doors are we closing? Aren’t historiographers theatre artists too?  Or shouldn’t they be?  Can the inroads we use to understand and illuminate a script also guide us to understand and illuminate the very history of our art?  Why have we spent so much time shunning that connection?

Kassy mentioned that she noted how many questions the scholars in this book seem to be asking, and I suppose that led me to follow suit.  I think I find questions comforting.  I appreciate the idea that it is acceptable, even in a formal setting, to acknowledge that there are things we don’t know, may never know.  I tend to find myself a little paralyzed as I begin to write, feeling the need to know all of the answers before I can begin typing.  But as Mary said in a meeting the other day, and as these clearly excellent scholars point out, the answers probably won’t be at your disposal as you begin to write.  In fact, they may never present themselves fully or even partially.  You may read and read and write and write only to discover nothing.  But the void is a gift.  Based on his article, Postlewait agrees: “A gap thus exists between the event and our knowledge of it.” (Postlewait 160)  It’s our job to play in the gaps, to look for the connections, or to acknowledge the emptiness and leave it as a gift for the next person who stumbles by.

Can we perform our theatre histories the way we perform our theatre?  Why not?  Who says?

So if we can, as Bial suggests, allow theatre practice to inform theatre historiography, how do we start?  McConachie’s thoughts on narrative history might lead us in the right direction.  Postlewait’s respect of the researcher’s own experience of the research process lends a degree of performativity that has been lacking.  Heather Nathans (whom I greatly admire) did a lot of this in her essay, relating her own journey and questions throughout the course of the search for her “conspicuous” Jewish performer.  Westlake even incorporated his own thoughts of what he hoped to be true about historiographers before him, projecting another level of character and performance onto the text.  The Magic If would certainly be a useful tool as we explore the hows and whys of the construction of the canon and records.  Young inserts moments of pure conjecture to enhance the narrative of his essay, wondering aloud whether his subject had traveled to the South and how those experiences might have informed his work.  Imagination plays a bigger role in some of the entries we read than one might assume “rigorous” scholarship might allow, but it’s nice to have permission to take that leap.  That is not to say, of course, that these writers are encouraging us to write haphazardly without foundation or proof, but rather to allow for possibilities within the search for history to inform and enliven the retelling of it.