Staging Loss

This book locates and critically theorises an emerging field of twenty-first century theatre practice concerned, either thematically, methodologically, or formally, with acts of commemoration and the commemorative. With notions of memorial, celebration, temporality and remembrance at its heart, and as a timely topic for debate, this book asks how theatre and performance intersects with commemorative acts or rituals in contemporary theatre and performance practice. It considers the (re)performance of history, commemoration as a form of, or performance of, ritual, performance as memorial, performance as eulogy and eulogy as performance. It asks where personal acts of remembrance merge with public or political acts of remembrance, where the boundary between the commemorative and the performative might lie, and how it might be blurred, broken or questioned. It explores how we might remake the past in the present, to consider not just how performance commemorates but how commemoration performs.

Provides a new and original theorisation of an emerging field
Examines the relationships between performance and commemorative ritual
Places professional, public-facing, contemporary practice at its heart

Auteur
Michael Pinchbeck is MA Theatre Programme leader and Principal Lecturer (Professional Practice) in Drama at the University of Lincoln, UK. He completed a PhD at Loughborough University exploring the role of the dramaturg in contemporary performance. As a writer and theatre-maker, he was commissioned by Nottingham Playhouse to write The White Album (2006), The Ashes (2011) and Bolero (2014), which toured Bosnia & Herzegovina and Kosovo supported by the British Council.
Andrew Westerside is Senior Lecturer in Drama & Theatre at the University of Lincoln's School of Fine and Performing Arts, UK, and Co-Artistic Director of Proto-type Theater. Andrew is a performer, writer, director and academic. He has performed and toured nationally and internationally and directed work including: The Good, the God and the Guillotine (2013), A Machine they're Secretly Building (2016), Fallen (2016) and The Audit (2018).

Contenu

1. Staging loss: an introduction.- 2. There is some corner of a Lincolnshire field: locating commemoration in the performance of Leaving Home ; Andrew Westerside.- 3. Watching with mother: 'rejourning' the wartime memories of a Wren, 1946/2016; Karen Savage and Justin Smith.- 4. Commemoration: sacred differentiation of time and space in three WWI projects; Helen Newall.- 5. Making Bolero : dramaturgies of remembrance; Michael Pinchbeck.- 6. Andrew Bovell in the History Wars: Australia's continuing cultural crisis of remembering and forgetting; Donald Pulford.- 7. After them, the flood: remembering, performance and the writing of history; Dan Ellin and Conan Lawrence.- 8. Cheers, Grandad! Third Angel's Cape Wrath and The Lad Lit Project as acts of remembrance; Alexander Kelly.- 9. On Leaving the House: the loss of self and the search for the freedom of being in The Wooster Group's Vieux Carré ; Andrew Quick.- 10. The God, the owner & the master: staging rites of passage in the maritime crossing the line ceremony; Lisa Gaughan.- 11. Staging absence and the (un)making of memory in A Duet Without You ; Chloé Déchery.- 12. Trace: shame and the art of mourning; Louie Jenkins.- 13. The performative ritual of loss: marking the intangible; Clare Parry-Jones.- 14. Searching shadows, lighting bones: commemorative performance as a radical, open-ended and ethical action; Emily Orley.- 15. Conclusion: Some words speak of events. Other words, events make us speak.