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he Journal of Aesthetic Education 39.4 (2005) 95-103
participants to work on the identification of loss in their own lives, in juxtaposition to the
historical archive with which they had been presented. "Wrapped in Grief" culminated in
the staging of a mise-en-scene of memory, in which the young people fashioned largescale sculptures as an artifact of their experience of memorial.
The aesthetic frame that circumscribes the design of this "Wrapped in Grief" structure is
threefold, and it takes up the challenge of staging history by (1) creating narrative
relationships between diverse textsautobiographical, legal, documentary; scripts,
photographs, visual art forms; diary, memoir, survivor testimony; (2) exploring the
relationship between the range of source materials and the students' personal and
artistic reflections about them through writing, images, improvisation, tableaux,
movement, scene study, or visual art activities; and (3) considering our relationship not
only to the Holocaust, itself, but to how it shapes our lives in the present. As such,
"Wrapped in Grief" stands as one in a series of arts education projects I have produced
in which "youth are invited to theorize their lives in performance as acts of retrieval." 5
Because the aesthetic frame of my practice is necessarily self-reflexive and situated, 6 I
asked students to keep journals about the development of their drama and Holocaust
work as a way of recording their in-depth and perceptive efforts to face "difficult
knowledge."7 I wanted to create opportunities for our students to take ownership of the
knowledge they had constructed, to question, and to deepen their engagement with
issues about the Holocaust, both historical and contemporary. For me, the performance
of memory necessarily locates the participants' sense of identity along a [End Page 96]
negotiated continuum of self/other, personal/public, process/product, past/present, and
local/national. After James Young, I have benefited from the profound insight that "the
facts of history never 'stand' on their ownbut are always supported by the reasons for
recalling such facts in the first place."8 I am also acutely aware of the aesthetic
relationship between content and form. As I have noted elsewhere, "the recognition that
what we choose to tell, to whom we choose to tell it, and indeed, how we choose to tell it,
all matter."9 Accordingly, the cultural production of memory in my work demands a selfconscious shaping of both form and content as an inherent feature of the aesthetic
frame. In staging history as a narrative way of knowing, I am compelled to ask how we
represent ourselves in the text. How do we find form for representing our participants'
storied lives in storied ways?10
The staging of history in this project was designed to support the students' sense of
agency and shared authority in the re-telling and remembering. This is particularly
significant given that in crossing generational boundaries we are addressing relational
issues between time past and time present. Marianne Hirsch speaks directly to this
concern when she distinguishes "post-memory from memory by generational distance
and from history by deep personal connection." Post-memory identifies the experience of
"those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own
belated stories are displaced by the stories of the previous generations." 11 In addition,
post-memory has come to signal a "space of remembrance" more largely wrought, in
which empathy and imagining carry us toward remembering the suffering of others. As
collaborative co-creators of the aesthetic space of "Wrapped in Grief," we move across
these post-memory landscapes of history with young people, excavating their knowledge
and experience, foregrounding their sense of social justice and action, their efforts to
attend to previously unknown, forgotten, hidden, and/or silenced narratives. Further, in
the performance of memory, I am interested in the students' agency, not only in the
telling of their own or received narratives, but also in the witnessing and enabling of
stories staged across fluid marginsan aesthetic frame in which both fact and fiction
illuminate truth, each in their different forms.
"Wrapped in Grief" asked students to identify, witness, and perform narratives within the
aesthetic space shaped by these intersecting and intertextual processes of inquiry.
Consequently, in staging history, we deliberately looked to young people's everyday
storied lives at home and in schools, to the journals in which they had recorded their
process of writing themselves into personal and public memory. For example, the
intersection between the domestic and familiar vis-a-vis the extraordinary and
incomprehensible is evidenced here in one student's journal response to the examination
of the burning of books as "pre-text";12 "Where one burns books, [End Page 97] one will,
in the end, burn people."13 Her tableaux and role-playing about books, writers, writing as
resistance, as well as the sanctioned isolation of a population, all allowed Mac to
recognize the rupture of the intimate, material, concreteness of everyday life and to
articulate her sense of loss:
I remember anne frank
even what her diary looked like
that red-checkered cover
and I wonder how much the diary gave her the feeling of
ordinary everydayness
to write in it each day
even though nothing about their lives
was ordinary
(or maybe it was too ordinary and everyone around them let it be ordinary, when they
should have been screaming at the top of their lungs to stop it all)
and I wonder if she felt grief when she had to leave the diary behind and if she thought
about it tossed on the floor when they pulled her out the door, passed the secret
bookcase and down the steps.
I have kept a diary since I was in grade two.
I can't ever stop writing.
Mac, 14 years old
The "aesthetics of everyday life"14 are made manifest in the performance of memory,
even as another student, Leslie, mediated between past and present. His is a journal
entry that underscores the acts of retrieval, remembrance, and mourning embraced
within the aesthetic space made available by this "Wrapped in Grief" brief:
OK, don't laugh but I remember when I lost my turtle (it was a stuffed animal not the real
thing!). I was only about 7 and we were travelling to Arizona to take my brother there (he
had asthma). Turtle got left behind in the little hotel room where we had all piled in and
slept. I remember crying myself to sleep and my brothers teasing me really badly. It was
awful . . . how do you leave everything behind and move into the ghetto? . . . everything
and everyone you care about. The world was upside down. In that photo it's the faces of
those kids holding hands that gets to me. They couldn't have been more than 7 . . . .
Leslie, 12 years old
The students' discovery of embodied learning, both lived and performed, was also
highlighted as a dynamic of the aesthetic experience of "Wrapped in Grief." In
juxtaposing historical events against their experience of becoming, "Wrapped in Grief"
explored the discovery of loss and grief in gesture and movement.
As memories are recalled, they are reinterpreted and as they are performed, they are
unfixed and may be archived in another's body. [End Page 98] Dramatically representing
their own and others' stories is, therefore, to become an archivist, a process which draws
on physical memories as well as those that are linguistic and cognitive. This invites a
new way of thinking about the body in space and time. 15
Nicholson's notion of the body as archive is particularly resonant here, given that we
must too often fill the absent body in this work. In inhabiting others' stories, and archiving
them in the body through performance, "witnessing"with its requisite obligation to retellbecomes part of the participants' lived experience. "There's no absence if there
remains even the memory of absence. Memory dies unless it's given a use . . . . If one
no longer has land but has the memory of land, then one can make a map." 16 Through
tableaux, improvisation, role-play, and visual art, students were mapping knowledge,
physically and metaphorically, all the while giving authority to their lived experiences. The
participants' reflexive writing documented these investigations about how loss and grief
might be represented in their own bodies. For example, Edna draws forward
autobiographical fragments of memory that help shape the kind of relationship she
establishes with the historical past.17 In her reflections on Kristallnacht, she measured
"the breaking of glass" against "the breaking of my father's heart." Personal memory,
loss, and embodied learning were recorded in her journal:
It was October I think
You could smell the trees
and the leaves weren't high enough yet to jump into and
I think it was a cloudy day all around me
When I got to Mrs. T's driveway (where we'd always skipped double dutch when I was in
grade 4)
there, across the street, about three houses away from my house
I could see the front screen door.
This feeling just dropped over me and I stopped walking.
It stopped me right there near Mrs. T's driveway.
I just knew something was wrong.
I remember it kind of in slow motion
My grandmother had died.
My dad was standing at one end of the kitchen near the side door. He was crying.
I don't remember what he said, he was talking to my mom, who was standing near him.
I'd never seen him cry before. Standing there, I knew in my body what loss was
and I could only watch.
Edna, 15 years old
David Booth's call to "continually remind ourselves of the complex and different contexts
that allow us to enter the 'as if, what if' world" 18 is [End Page 99] important in
understanding that this research project was designed around the construction of
specific historical contexts, with the intent of supporting thoughtful and critical
improvisation, role-playing, art-making, as well as in and out of role writing about the
Holocaust. The complexity of this undertaking lies in the recognition that we are working
between spaces of documentation and the (im)possibility of knowing. In performing
historical events, "Wrapped in Grief" bears witness through arts education, so that like
the best curatorial practices, we, too, can "reach tentatively and resonantly across the
performative bridge of imaginative projection." 19 Indeed, Richard Courtney addressed
"imagining" as "the fundamental operation of the aesthetic." 20 In imagining within an
aesthetic frame that claimed absence, impermanence, participation, and context, youth
were invited to inscribe not only their questions but the boundaries of this work. For
example, in response to the historical context of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, a young
woman named Sam navigated these shifting boundaries and difficult questions as a part
of her experience of the memory act itself. Moving back and forth across the threshold of
intimacy and distancein the shared authority of her post-memory relationship to the
Holocaustshe wrote:
I've learned that in order for the Warsaw ghetto uprising to take place, it was the women
and children who had to put on that fearless face and risk their lives, so that the people
of the ghetto could fight for theirs. I am a woman and yet, I am also a child. I am in that
in-between stage, not yet a full woman and not yet done growing up. I have my whole life
ahead of me. I dream about kissing boys, playing games with my friends, travelling,
laughing. I can whine and pout and cry over spilt milk, but I am also mature and
thoughtful, I want to heal the world, I can put on a brave face if necessary. I love to read
and sing, and spin and spin and spin in the sunshine. Boom! The little girl is blown to bits
trying to sneak a gun through a hole in the ghetto wall. Her childhood was taken away
the finished sculptures, I walked among the figures and was drawn into my received
family memories of Malka, the mother found with her arms still wrapped around her two
children in Staszow, and into the post-memory narrative of Esther and Issak, two of the
youngest of my father's family in Warsaw. A single sepia photograph remains. Esther and
Isaakhe with the dark-rimmed circular specs; she with dark curls tied back with a white
bow. My son is named for him. Their small photograph hangs on the wall of my father's
library. It is beside you on the left, as you cross the threshold and step down into the
room. My father's space smells of old books and time. Esther and Isaak. They have
disappeared into time. When? In 1941? Were they in the Warsaw Ghetto? I can never
bridge this trespass. Here, at least, is a space within which I can represent the rupture.
As an identity project, "Wrapped in Grief" helped shape each of us and our shared
performances of memory. Within the aesthetic space of "Wrapped in Grief," memory was
transformed in performance; narratives transformed by research. "I need theatre in all its
forms and guises and formats to enter my world more fully, to help me see more clearly,
to feel and think at once. I want to behold the world somehow differently. I want to be
educated by theatre."25 Indeed, in confronting the paradox of distance and intimacy in
staging history, we behold the world differently, embodying histories mediated by
imagination. In staging history, "Wrapped in Grief" made visible the ruins of memory
these complex narratives, meanings and relationshipsas a powerful act of memory and
memorial.
Belarie Zatzman, Ph.D., is Associate Dean in the Faculty of Fine Arts, York University.
Her research focuses on issues of history, identity and memory in drama and arts
education. She has published extensively and works internationally in fine arts and
Holocaust education. She has been invited to conduct workshops or present in such
venues as the Lorraine Kimsa Theatre for Young People, Toronto; Stratford Festival of
Canada; and the International Drama Education Research Institute. Among her recent
publications is "The Monologue Project: Drama as a Form of Witnessing" in Booth and
Gallagher's (eds.) How Theatre Educates.
Endnotes
1. Ida Fink, A Scrap of Time and Other Stories, trans. Madeline Levine and Francine
Prose (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1983), 3.
2. Sara Horowitz, "Auto/Biography and Fiction After Auschwitz" in Breaking Crystal:
Writing and Memory After Auschwitz, ed. Efraim Sicher (Urbana and Chicago: University
of Illinois Press, 1998), 278.
3. H. Nicholson, "The Performance of Memory" in Drama Australia 27 no. 2 (2003): 84.
4. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, quoted in Andrea Liss, "Artifactual Testimonies and
the Stagings of Holocaust Memory," in Between Hope and Despair: Pedagogy and the
Remembrance of Historical Trauma, ed. Roger Simon, Sharon Rosenberg, and Claudia
Eppert (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), 120.
5. Belarie Zatzman, "Narrative Inquiry: Postcards from Northampton" in Research
Methodologies for Drama Education, ed. Judith Ackroyd (Stoke on Trent, UK: Trentham
Books Limited, in press).
6. D. Jean Clandinin and F. Michael Connelly, Narrative Inquiry: Experience and Story in
Qualitative Research (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000). [End Page 102]
7. D. P. Britzman, Lost Subjects, Contested Objects: Toward a Psychoanalytic Inquiry of
Learning. (New York: State University of New York Press, 1998), 117.
8. James E. Young, At Memory's Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary