Theatre, Performance and Commemoration

How does the act of performance speak to the concept of commemoration? How and why does commemorative theatre operate as a conceptual, historical and political site from which to interrogate ideas of nationalism and nationhood? This volume explores how theatre and performance create a stage for acts of commemoration, considering crises of hate, nationalism and migration, as well as political, racial and religious bigotry. It features case studies drawn from across Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Africa and Latin America. The book''s four parts each explore commemoration through a different theoretical lens and present a new set of dramaturgies for research and study. While Section 1 offers a critical survey of 20th- and 21st-century discourses, Section 2 uncovers the commemorative practices underpinning contemporary dramaturgy and applies these practices to plays and performance pieces. These include works by Martin Lynch, Frank McGuinness, Sanja Mitrovic, Theater RAST, Les SlovaKs Dance Collective, Estela Golovchenko, Wajdi Mouawad, Aine Stapleton, CoisCeim, ANU Productions, Aubrey Sekhabi, and Indian and African dance practices. The final sections investigate how individual and collective memory and performances of commemoration can become tools for propaganda and political agendas.>

Préface
This book interrogates how theatre and performance practices have commemorated the dysfunctionality and utopia of nationhood throughout the 20th and 21st centuries in Europe, Africa, Asia and Latin America.

Auteur

Miriam Haughton is Director of Postgraduate Programmes in Drama and Theatre Studies at University of Galway, Ireland, Vice-President of the Irish Society for Theatre Research, author of Staging Trauma (2018) and co-editor of Legacies of the Magdalen Laundries (2021) and Radical Contemporary Theatre Practices by Women in Ireland (2015).

Alinne Balduino P. Fernandes is Associate Professor in English and Director of the Irish Studies research cluster at Federal University of Santa Catarina, Brazil.

Pieter Verstraete is Assistant Professor at University of Groningen, the Netherlands, Marie Sklodowska-Curie fellow at Free University Berlin, Germany, and co-editor of Inside Knowledge: (Un)doing Ways of Knowing in the Humanities (2009) and Cathy Berberian: Pioneer of Contemporary Vocality (2014).

Contenu

Acknowledgements
Foreword

Introduction

1. Theatre, Performance and Commemoration
   Alinne Fernandes (Federal University of Santa Catarina, Brazil), Miriam Haughton (NUI Galway, Ireland), Pieter Verstraete (University of Groningen, the Netherlands)

Section 1 - Commemorative Practices: Performing the Contradictions of our Present

2. Unruly Remembering: Great War Anti-heroes and National Narratives in Northern Ireland
   Tom Maguire (Ulster University, UK)
3. My Revolution is Better than Yours: Remembrance, Commemoration and Counter-memory of May 68
   Karel Vanhaesebrouck (Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium) and Jorges Palinhos (Playwright, Dramaturg and Researcher, Portugal)
4. Dancing the Emigratory Experience: Challenging the Boundaries of (Imagined) Communities and (Invented) Traditions
   Christel Stalpaert (Ghent University, Belgium)
5. Representations of Transition, Memory and Crisis on Stage in Punto y Coma (Ready or Not) by Uruguayan Dramatist Estela Golovchenko
   Sophie Stevens (University of East Anglia, UK)

Section 2 - Disruptive Lessons: Thinking Through the Affects of Memory

6. Know Thy Enemy: Wajdi Mouawad on History, Memory and Reconciliation at La Colline
   Yana Meerzon (University of Ottowa, Canada)
7. From Difficult Pasts to Present Resonance: Performances of Memory and Commemorative Gestures in Contemporary Vienna
   Vicky Angelaki (Mid Sweden University, Sweden)
8. Dancing Impossible Histories: Commemoration, Memory and Trauma in Screendance
   Aoife McGrath (Queen's University Belfast, UK)

Section 3: Challenging the Nation/the State: Performing Affective Critiques

9. Performing/Mourning Marikana as Affective Critique of a Nation in Crisis
   Miki Flockemann (University of the Western Cape, South Africa)
10. Resonances of Mnemonic Community: Turkey's Kurdish Question in European Opera
    Pieter Verstraete (University of Groningen, the Netherlands)
11. Post-colonial Imaginations: Afro-Asian Dialogues in the Past and the Present
    Bishnupriya Dutt (Jawaharlal Nehru University, India)

Index