Belarie Zatzman

Bounded by the Past:  Curating Memory and Representation in Response to Theatre for Young Audiences

Did you know that Canada is “the only allied nation without a Holocaust monument in its capital” (Canadian Government Foreign Affairs)?  However, a National Holocaust Monument Act was passed and an international competition to design the Canadian Holocaust monument has been launched.  The winner from amongst six short-listed designs will soon be announced, with construction scheduled to begin in Ottawa in 2014.  Our National Holocaust Monument is mandated to “ensure that the Holocaust has a permanent place in our nation’s consciousness and memory” (www.international.gc.ca/monument/index.aspx?lang=eng) and “to educate visitors of all faiths and traditions about the causes and risks of hate.” (http://holocaustmonument.ca).  To what extent will our new Canadian Holocaust memorial refuse to “accept graciously the burden of memory but to throw it back at [the viewer’s] feet” (Young, 1993:30)?  Contemporary memorials are often designed “not to console but to provoke; not to remain fixed but to change; not to be everlasting but to disappear; not to be ignored by passersby but to demand interaction” (30). It is against this backdrop that I situate Theatre for Young Audience’s role in provoking memorial. I wonder how we will support young audiences—and their teachers and families—in remembering and witnessing, almost 70 years after the Shoah.  Indeed, the next generation of Theatre for Young Audiences [TYA] may be the first to have no direct contact with survivors of the Holocaust. That Canadians remain “separated from those unspeakable events by an ocean and, nearly, a lifetime” (Bozikovic), complicates the challenge to TYA in confronting genocide’s difficult history.  Marianne Hirsch has addressed this lacuna by conceptualizing the notion of postmemory.  She distinguishes “postmemory from memory by generational distance and from history by deep personal connection” (1993: 22).  Characteristically, postmemory represents the experiences of those “dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are displaced by the powerful stories of the previous generation, shaped by monumental traumatic events that resist understanding and integration” (Hirsch, 2001: 12). While firmly rooted in the experience of the Holocaust, postmemory has also come to describe the difficult legacy of other cultural or collective traumas; accordingly, postmemory now signals a space of remembrance, broadly wrought, in which empathy and imagining can actively carry us toward remembering and inscribing the suffering of others, as an ethical turn.  How then can we help foster the postmemory relationships young people establish with the historical past?

 

“Why people attend theatre about historical atrocity and what they do after the performance, are what matters” proposes Adrienne Kertzer (2003: vii). Hers is a provocation that underscores the significance of attending to the aesthetic and pedagogical project of memory. If performance can indeed be understood as the beginning of a longer experience (Barba 1990); and if what matters is what we do after the performance, how might we create embodied, pedagogical encounters to help us navigate the “burden of memory” in the lives of young people?  Inevitably, I am directed to the extended spaces of performance, where the afterlife of Theatre for Young Audiences can be negotiated and nurtured (Reason, 2010).  Within pre and post show spaces—in talkbacks and workshops and study guides—teachers and artists can address the rupture that is the Shoah across audiences, generations, and contexts. That this postmemory interaction is critical is evidenced by the work of renowned Holocaust scholar Lawrence Langer, who counsels us to generate a framework for responding to, rather than attempting to wrest meaning from, the Shoah (1995).

 

I am committed to structuring the relational as fundamental to the staging of stories across the fluid generational and temporal boundaries of postmemory with youth—as an audience in their own right—as well as with the artists and teachers with whom the students will work. Attending to the complex intersections between the historical, the aesthetic, and the personal in remembering and representing the Holocaust can serve as an invitation to witness difficult narratives in relation to our own lives and to inscribe our questions via challenging, imaginative, intellectual, and artistic drama education practices.  However, the paradox of engaging in the extended spaces of performance is three-fold:  first, we are asked to imagine that which we can never know; to recognize that the retrieval of narratives of loss or survival can only ever be partial; and we are bounded both by documentation and the (im)possibility of knowing (Horowitz 1997; Ellsworth 2005).  Further, one is reminded that “young people are often building experience rather than drawing from memory. Imagined experience becomes experience; while it is not real, it feels real”, explains Allen MacInnis, Artistic Director of Toronto’s Young People’s Theatre (Interview).  MacInnis recommends that “when we present traumatic issues in history, our obligation is to be prepared for whatever questions kids want to ask.  We negotiate a sense of agreement, explaining that we are going to examine some demanding material but that we must be respectful and brave and take care of and protect each other. If you look at the background information at the beginning of a study guide for historical plays (for example the history of slavery or the Holocaust), we explain that we’re going to talk about the brutality and horrors in a way that doesn’t terrify them –especially important if there is not much of a distinction between past, present and future for kids— because the theatre is a safe space in which to talk about difficult things” (Interview).

 

Much of my research and practice centres on designing and curating responses to the difficult knowledge of the Holocaust, in an effort to resist historical closure. The forms of “public authorship” my research projects explore “must be able to communicate the meaning and significance of the creative process of dialogue” itself (Vickery, 2003; Reason and Reynolds, 2010) in remembering and responding to the Holocaust (Gerz).  In making manifest that creative process of dialogue in the theatre and in the extended spaces of TYA “we hope, yes, that [kids] will be entertained on some level but our objective isn’t to provide them with a pleasant, fleeting distraction. We want children to be imprinted with an experience that will increase their access to the world and to their own developing identity” (MacInnis). Ultimately, the complexity of responding aesthetically and pedagogically to the Shoah lies in being able to define one’s own postmemory relationship to the Holocaust.  The challenge for youth is to raise questions about their role as the next generation to bear the responsibility for remembrance (Hughes), and to consider how it shapes their lives in the present. Mapping memory through a diversity of–real and imagined—contexts, and across generational and temporal boundaries, is thus made possible through the exploration of multiple artistic forms and strategies.  What follows are a several examples of responding to issues of memory and representation through an aesthetic and public pedagogy.

 

“The Suitcase Project” is a series of memorial projects designed to support Sher’s Hana’s Suitcase (2006), in which each student is matched with the name, poem and/or drawing of a real child who was interned at Terezin and whose brief life is documented in I Never Saw Another Butterfly (Volavkova, 1993). The bibliographic information in Butterfly … provides the participants with the dates of their counterparts’ arrival in Terezin, the length of their stay and finally, the date and their age at the time of their death –like Hana— mostly in Auschwitz.  Hana Brady was one of 15,000 children who were transported to Terezin, of whom only 240 survived (xix).  Subsequent to working with improvisation, tableaux, reader’s theatre, scene study and/or writing to explore the play and the book (2002), young people are asked to submit their own questions and uncertainties in grappling with the Shoah (out-of-role writing). Participants can also record their responses to issues of exclusion or to their everyday experiences of essentializing, or reflect on their relationship to markers of identity in their communities.  Their lists of questions become the (visual) text with which the suitcases are then wrapped.

 

Similarly, a collective memorial project asks a class to research the legal and social practices documented in Hana’s Suitcase—boundaries designed to marginalize and isolate the Jewish population—which slowly culminated in the deportation and murder of thousands of people, including Hana Brady.  The students are asked to develop lists of the strictures, which emerge from their research and their close reading of the script; and to generate improvisational work based on this research.  This time, it is the lists of ordinances that can be used to cover the suitcases, in order to produce another form of public memorial.

 

A third memorial suitcase project asks for letters to or from characters in the play (in-role writing).  The letters can be layered on the outside of a suitcase as well as on the inside.  This memorial may be understood as a three-dimensional, aesthetic translation of role-on-the-wall, as it were—a portrait of the character created from collective responses.  The letters from the character are layered on the outside of the suitcase; the letters to the character on the inside.  Finally, in the extended, interactive spaces of theatre, one recognizes that the collection of luggage produced for each of the suitcase projects is intended to evoke Auschwitz and narratives of annihilation, displacement and dislocation.

I have just begun working on a new public authorship piece: participants will be asked to create Artist Trading Cards [ATC] (www.artist-trading-cards.ch/).  Students can exchange cards within a classroom, across (multiple) classrooms, schools, communities, cities, etc.  Constructed as another form of aesthetic response to TYA performances about the Holocaust, this memorial is intended to throw the burden of remembering back to the audience insofar as it encourages public interaction. I have asked that these ATCs include a line of dialogue from a TYA script; and a phrase, or an image from any additional Holocaust or genocide source material they research.  Students will also be asked to include their most compelling question(s) and/or a question(s) they would like the recipient to consider.  Each participant will produce a series of three ATCs:  one to be kept by the artist; one to be traded with a classmate, another class or school; and one for the researcher.  There is no permanent memorial here—rather its discursive function and its circulation across local, national, international boundaries is the focus of the art-making.  Similarly, my current challenge is to design a large scale public authorship project as a provocation to academics, teachers, students and the public—one which will link past and present. My hope is to mark the 70^th anniversary of the Holocaust in a Canadian context, once again using Theatre for Young Audiences plays as touchstones for interacting with difficult knowledge. To this end, I would welcome suggestions of other models for mediating memory and creating a negotiated, relational, collective process within the extended spaces of TYA.  I am also in the midst of compiling a list of TYA scripts which address issues of memory, broadly (with respect to either the characters or the relationship to the audience, for example).  I would be grateful for any suggestions readers of this paper might offer.