On Tue, 18 Oct 1994 09:39:39 EDT, Barbara Weitbrecht, Smithsonian wrote:
>Of course in one sense, rapes are reenacted all the time, in movies and
>theatrical productions. Which leads to the deeper question of how a
>reenactment differs from other kinds of theater.
>
>We are used to graphic gore in movies, but would it be appropriate to
>stage a Civil War battle reenactment with the kinds of prosthetic
>gore used in civil defense training exercises, to accurately simulate
>real battlefield injuries? I doubt it... just as I doubt that
>there could ever be a Williamsburg-type recreation of a concentration
>camp, though we have seen them many times on stage and screen.
>
>The difference seems to be of emotional intensity, for the audience,
>and even more for the participant. What struck me most about the
>the Williamsburg slave auction reenactment were the statements from
>the reenacters that the experience had changed their lives. That,
>I think, was sufficient justification for attempting this kind of
>controversial living theater.
>
> +------------------------------+------------------------+
> | Barbara Weitbrecht | [log in to unmask] |
> | National Air & Space Museum | [log in to unmask] |
> | Smithsonian Institution | (202) 357-4162 |
> +------------------------------+------------------------+
Barbara is on to something here; re-enactments, and living history in
general, may or may not be theater -- another controversy we don't need to
have here -- but it is clear that the "audience" does not interpret them
in the same framework of conventions and rules it has learned to apply to
plays, film, and other familiar media, including books. In interacting or
reacting to these other media we have no trouble understanding that this
is not reality we are experiencing but an attempt to interpret or
understand a part of reality in the context of and governed by the
conventions of the particular medium. Interestingly, the fact that we
know we are watching a fictional movie about the holocaust or slavery
does not mean that we don't react emotionally or thoughtfully to the
experience; indeed, it may conceivably make it easier to do so -- we
know the rules, we know how to let the medium work on us, how to read
its artifices as a kind of surrogate for the given actually.
In fact, however, the audience may not recognize that living history and
its cognates are media and that what they are experiencing also has
rules, conventions, and artifices: that some events have been selected
for portrayal and many, many others omitted; that human beings, their
behaviors, and their motivations have been interpreted by someone or ones
and that other interpretations were possible but chosen; that a theory
of causation, however tacit, is at work, that weight has been given to some
evidence and not to other evidence, that a lot of evidence doesn't even
exist, that what exists is ambiguous, fragmentary, or disputed. In fact,
they may not get that history is not the same as the past -- have I said
this before -- but a construct. Unprotected by an understanding of the
medium and its rules, the audience is exposed and at risk in ways one
isn't in, say, a movie -- you can't just sit in the dark and cry, if
that's what you need to do.
Obviously, as a proud refugee from Plimoth Plantation, I feel there is an
important place for living history in the process by which Americans and
others make sense of the past. But it is incumbent on museums and
others who use it have a responsibility both to prepare audiences
beforehand and, more importantly, be prepared to help people sort out what
happened to them afterward -- my word for this is debriefing. It sounds
like CW did a good job with that and that they have ventured across an
important threshold.
Ken Yellis
Assistant Director for Public Programs
Peabody Museum of Natural History
170 Whitney Avenue
Box 208118
New Haven, CT 06520-8118
[log in to unmask]
(203) 432-9891/9816(fax)
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