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PROOF Staging Loss REVISED Michael Pinchbeck · Andrew Westerside Editors Staging Loss Performance as Commemoration PROOF REVISED Editors Michael Pinchbeck Andrew Westerside University of Lincoln University of Lincoln Lincoln, UK Lincoln, UK PROOF ISBN 978-3-319-97969-4 ISBN 978-3-319-97970-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97970-0 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018951053 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2018 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifcally the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microflms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specifc statement, that such names are exempt from REVISEDthe relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affliations. Cover illustration: Johncairns/Getty Images Cover design by Fatima Jamadar This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun,PROOF and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves. Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (1929) REVISED PREFACE Why remember? Why here? Why us? Why now? We write this preface in Lincoln in April 2018. When I arrived in Lincoln this morning, I came off the train carriage and crossed the PROOFfootbridge at the train sta- tion. Behind me on the hill is the spire of the memorial to Bomber Command and the men who lost their lives in the air during World War Two. As I crossed the high street, I caught a glimpse of the cathedral on the hill and the castle beside it currently housing the Magna Carta, which recently commemorated its 800th anniversary. The cathedral was a beacon for those WWII airmen based here lucky enough to return home. From time to time, we see vintage planes fy over the campus of the University of Lincoln where we work and the city to pay respect to its history. Also, on display recently at the castle were the ceramic poppies that marked the centenary of World War One at the Tower of London. The decision to host Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red (2014) marks LincolnREVISED as a city of remembrance which has a topography of commemoration at which cathedral and castle stand literally at the epicentre. Where we are sitting now looks out onto a roundabout with a recent sculpture to commemorate Lincoln’s history as the birthplace of the tank. It was conceived in a hotel lobby at the top of Steep Hill but forged at Tritton Works just down the road and test driven at the com- mon that you pass when you drive into Lincoln on the Carholme Road. It was a training ground for both the army and the air force. In the Grandstand, a relic of Lincoln’s racing heyday long since gone, there is a vii viii PREFACE fading mosaic left behind by the Royal Flying Corps stationed there 100 years ago. We are writing a book about staging loss, the performance of commemoration, in a city steeped in it, politically, artistically, militaristi- cally and historically. In doing so, we want to place Lincoln at the centre of a critical discourse around how we remember through performance today and this publication starts this discourse. As artists, we have been working on a number of projects that enact and enable narratives of remembrance and commemoration, notions of memory and loss. Andrew Westerside worked with Conan Lawrence on a project in 2014, called Leaving Home, that told the story of a local woman who lost fve sons in World War One. It was both a large-scale site-specifc performance and a radio play and featured on the national BBC news. In fact, it is Conan who is responsible for our subtitle ‘performance as commemoration’, which we have used as an umbrella term for the ongoing body of work that this book attempts to critically locate. Michael Pinchbeck’s last devised performance, Bolero, commemorated the First World War, the 1984 WinterPROOF Olympics in Sarajevo, and the Bosnian War, using Maurice Ravel’s music as a bridge between these different narratives and 100 years of history. Both Leaving Home and Bolero were performed on the exact centenary of the events that inspired them. The former being performed on 4 August 2014, 100 years to the day after the formal declaration of the First World War in a village in Lincolnshire. The latter being performed on 28 June 2014, 100 years to the day of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. Both projects were anniversarial and commemorative in nature and fea- ture in chapters here. As a result of these events chiming with history as well as the themes of loss, both of us sought to refect on a wider context of performance made in this way exploring this theme. This publicationREVISED seeks to be a bridge, to bridge practices, themes, method- ologies, research and discourse around notions of commemoration. We are excited to share chapters by scholars and theatre-makers working in this nascent feld as part of an ongoing cartography of commemoration, a tentative map for the genre. We would like to thank the University of Lincoln for supporting the research that led to this publication and for their support of our individ- ual artistic practices. In particular, we would like to express our gratitude to our Director of Research, Professor Dominic Symonds, for supporting (and making the opening remarks for) the original symposium, Staging Loss: Performance as Commemoration (16 June 2016) and Dr. Karen Preface ix Savage, Head of the School of Fine and Performing Arts, for her ongoing support of our work, and of this project. We would like to thank our colleagues in the Lincoln School of Fine and Performing Arts and other institutions who have been endless foun- tains of critical support and encouragement including: Rachel Baynton, Dr. Jacqueline Bolton (especially the advice on being ‘tough’!), Rosalyn Casbard, Dr. James Hudson, Dr. Rhiannon Jones, Conan Lawrence, Dr. Siobhán O’Gorman, Professor Mark O’Thomas, Dr. Anna Scheer, Kim Sly and Rebecca Tompkins. We would also like to extend our thanks to Tomas René at Palgrave Macmillan for his enthusiasm and guidance throughout the project, and Vicky Bates for her continued advice in spite of our naïve questions. We would like to thank Professor Mick Mangan for his generous endorse- ment and support. Your words and refections mean a lot to us. Our penultimate thanks go to the academics and artists who spoke at, and attended, the original forum, many of whom have contributed to this publication as a result. Without their research,PROOF or their willingness to contribute their research to this wider project, the book would not exist. Finally, we would like to thank you, the reader, for engaging with this book. We hope that it stimulates debate and contributes to an ongoing discussion of a nascent feld of study colliding the performative with the commemorative. Lincoln, UK Michael Pinchbeck May 2018 Andrew Westerside REVISED CONTENTS 1 Staging Loss: An Introduction 1 Michael Pinchbeck and Andrew WestersidePROOF Part I This is not Re-enactment: Staging the Voices of the Dead 2 There is Some Corner of a Lincolnshire Field…: Locating Commemoration in the Performance of Leaving Home 19 Andrew Westerside 3 Deference, Deferred: Rejourn as Practice in Familial War Commemoration 37 KarenREVISED Savage and Justin Smith 4 Commemoration: Sacred Differentiation of Time and Space in Three World War I Projects 59 Helen Newall xi xii CONTENTS Part II Staging History: Dramaturgy, Remembering, Forgetting 5 Making Bolero: Dramaturgies of Remembrance 79 Michael Pinchbeck 6 Andrew Bovell in the History Wars: Australia’s Continuing Cultural Crisis of Remembering and Forgetting 95 Donald Pulford 7 After Them, The Flood: Remembering, Performance and the Writing of History 109 Conan Lawrence and Dan Ellin Part III Commemoration and Place: Architecture,PROOF Landscape and the Ocean 8 CHEERS GRANDAD! Third Angel’s Cape Wrath and The Lad Lit Project as Acts

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