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Staging Loss pp 19–36Cite as

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There is Some Corner of a Lincolnshire Field…: Locating Commemoration in the Performance of Leaving Home

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Abstract

Westerside’s chapter uses the analysis of a large-scale site-specific project, Leaving Home (2014) to critically determine the distinctions between performance-as, and performance-of, commemoration. Drawing on the work of Hiro Saito, Anita Hagerman, Rebecca Schneider, Debra Marshall and Jerome de Groot, the chapter locates performance-as-commemoration at the cultural and political intersections of re-enactment, ritual and public memorial. Against a backdrop of commemoration in the public sphere, it considers the relationship between time, place and event as a crucial triangulation in this delicately balanced collective practice.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Located roughly 14 km north-east of Lincoln.

  2. 2.

    Amy and Rev. Prince William Thomas Beechey had a total of fourteen children, eight boys and six girls. In order of birth: Barnard (1887–1915); Charles (1878–1917); Maud (1879–1885, (aged 5) of measles); Leonard (1881–1917); Christopher (1883–1969); Frances (1885–1977); Frank (1886–1916); Eric (1889–1954); Harold (1891–1917); Katherine (1893–1971); Margaret (1894–1963); Winifred (1895–1976); Edith (1987–1992); and Samuel (1899–1977).

  3. 3.

    While Chris survived the war, and lived to the age of 85 (1969), he was confined mostly to a wheelchair following repatriation to Australia.

  4. 4.

    Played by a performer, with blessing of the incumbent Vicar of St. Peter’s.

  5. 5.

    The restoration of the bells at St. Peter’s marked the first time they had been rung in a century.

  6. 6.

    Notable here as the first recorded public silence in Western history.

  7. 7.

    Studies of commemoration, with regard to broader cultural and historical scholarship, are decisively more widespread. From commemoration in medieval cultures (Guerry), Israeli Holocaust commemoration (Zandberg) and the commemoration of 9/11 (Neal), to McDowell and Braniff’s work on commemoration, conflict and peace processes (2014) and Andrew Jones’ work on memory and commemoration via the study of material cultures (2007), there is substantial critical work already undertaken on the subject of both commemoration as such and in relation to specifically bounded historical events.

  8. 8.

    There is a clear resonance here between this and what Clifford McLucas (in relation to the work of Mike Pearson and Brith Gof called a ‘placeevent’, where ‘a place and what is built there bleed into each other and constitute another order of existence’ (McLucas in Kaye 2000, 56).

  9. 9.

    I read Collins’ entrainment here as somewhere between entrapment (as it would be defined in engineering) and as a synchronisation to an external rhythm (as in biomusicology).

  10. 10.

    The performance of the naval ‘Crossing the Line’ ceremony, discussed by Gaughan in Chapter 10, presents itself as a useful illustration of this idea.

  11. 11.

    I am called to mind here, with specific relation to the idea of the ‘machine’, of Adam Alston’s work on immersive theatre. In that particular field, he persuasively argues for performance (by developing an idea from American analytic philosopher Robert Nozick), as:

    experience machines […] enclosed and other-worldly spaces in which all the various cogs and pulleys of performance – scenography, choreography, dramaturgy and so on, coalesce around a central aim: to place audience members in a thematically cohesive environment that resources their sensuous, imaginative and explorative capabilities as productive and involving aspects of a theatre aesthetic. (Alston 2016, p. 2)

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Lincoln, Lincoln, UK

    Andrew Westerside

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  1. Andrew Westerside
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Correspondence to Andrew Westerside .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Lincoln, Lincoln, UK

    Michael Pinchbeck

  2. University of Lincoln, Lincoln, UK

    Andrew Westerside

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Westerside, A. (2018). There is Some Corner of a Lincolnshire Field…: Locating Commemoration in the Performance of Leaving Home. In: Pinchbeck, M., Westerside, A. (eds) Staging Loss. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97970-0_2

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