Abstract
Ellin and Lawrence’s chapter examines performances commemorating the Dam Busters raid and the history of Bomber Command commissioned by the RAF and the International Bomber Command Centre (IBCC) respectively. Focusing on archive-driven practices, the chapter also highlights the role of performance in exhibition interpretation and how historical material can be embodied by writers, directors and actors to generate impressions of authenticity for their audiences. Analysing how contemporary responses to aerial bombing can be mediated through different modes of performance, Ellin and Lawrence explore how historically informed theatre-makers and performance-aware historians can combine to generate methodological approaches to understand, stage and commemorate combat loss.
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Notes
- 1.
The ‘impossible task’, as elucidated by Goulish, is one set as a mode for generating new performance material in rehearsal, which cannot reasonably be expected to be completed by a performer, but which might reveal, in the attempt, a new direction or moment in the performance being devised or rehearsed.
- 2.
The British Army’s Fighting in Built Up Areas training facility in the Brecon Beacons, at all other times off-limits to civilians, but which hosted public performances of Pearson’s adaptation of Aeschylus’s historical tragedy in 2010.
- 3.
The ‘fourth wall’ is a term highlighting the conceptual separation of actors from their audience, for which actors are traditionally trained to avoid any acknowledgement of or engagement with.
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Lawrence, C., Ellin, D. (2018). After Them, The Flood: Remembering, Performance and the Writing of History. In: Pinchbeck, M., Westerside, A. (eds) Staging Loss. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97970-0_7
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