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he Journal of Aesthetic Education 39.4 (2005) 95-103

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Staging History:
Aesthetics and the Performance of Memory
Belarie Zatzman
I want to talk about a certain time not measured in months and years. For so long I have
wanted to talk about this time, and not in the way I will talk about it now, not just about
this one scrap of time. I wanted to, but I couldn't. I didn't know how. I was afraid, too, that
this second time, which is measured in months and years, had buried the other time
under a layer of years, that this second time had crushed the first and destroyed it within
me. But no, today, digging around in the ruins of memory, I found it fresh and untouched
by forgetfulness. This time was measured not in months but in a wordwe no longer
said "in the beautiful month of May," but "after the first 'action' or the second or right
before the third. We had different measures of time, we different ones, always different,
always with that mark of difference. . . .
Ida Fink, A Scrap of Time and Other Stories1
What are the boundaries of remembering? How do we make manifest the ruins of
memory? How do we enter that time not measured in months and years? How do those
not directly affected by the Holocaust encounter its meaning? How do we move toward
the performance of memory with youth as co-creators, when we must be awake to the
act of staging histories "both remembered and not remembered, transmitted and not
transmitted"?2 In designing aesthetic practices of remembrance in the present, we face
both the specificity of time and the collapse of time as a way of knowing. This paper
articulates the design of a project, titled "Wrapped in Grief," in constituting personal and
public memory in the aesthetic space made available by arts education. How can our
drama work "capture the aesthetic of memory, its instability and its contingency"? 3
"Wrapped in Grief" responds [End Page 95] to these questions about the performance
of memory by articulating a process for constructing and rehearsing our own identities
among the narratives of others, present and past. Contemporary research examining
memory and memorial underscores the fact that in provoking history as an act of
remembrance for a new generation, we are narrating a sense of self. The paradox of retelling these personal and public histories is that we are playing out that which cannot be
represented. In this sense, drama education offers an aesthetic frame that allows us the
possibility "to be the story and to repeat its unrepeatability." 4
"Wrapped in Grief" was produced with youth between the ages of twelve and sixteen
years old. As a Holocaust memorial project, it was designed as a scaffolded pedagogy in
which historical contexts became the foundation informing all of the exploration that
followed. First, young people created tableaux to locate particular events during the
Holocaust; for example, Kristallnacht (9-10 November 1938), the Warsaw Ghetto
uprising (19 April-16 May 1943), the book burnings of 10 May 1933, and the White Rose
movement (public demonstrations against the Nazi regime by a network of students and
faculty in Germany, 1942-43). The second stage of this arts education project asked

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

from her, STOLEN. I struggle to shed my childhood, I want to be an adult, I want to be

responsible, I want to be appreciated. But that little girl, or little boy, they were forced to
mature too fast. I scold myself. Why am I rushing, when they never got to live? When all
they would dream about was to maybe be able to live another day. When their games
became real life or deathdeliver this gun into the ghetto wall or die. I am child, but I am
also a young woman. I have a woman's shape, a woman's breasts. I can't help but think
of those women, sitting on a train, bullets in their backpacks. Pretending not to be Jewish
to help the resistance fighters. It is a mission of great importance. If she succeeds she
has made a difference, however miniscule. What if she was caught? She would not just
be killed. She would be raped, tortured, and then murdered. Or maybe they wouldn't
even be nice enough to murder [her]. A woman, lying naked in the street, brutalized.
Lying just outside the ghetto wall, trying to deliver ammo. A woman, with a woman's
body. A body like mine. A woman just like me.
Sam, 16 years old [End Page 100]
The deliberately self-conscious act of constructing the aesthetic space is drawn
repeatedly through my fingers, well-worn beads of limitation and representation, form
and content, process and product; each a set of choices to which we must attend in
making art. Inevitably then in "Wrapped in Grief," there was reciprocity between the
materiality of the product and the emergent content of the process. In the final sequence
of staging history, we referenced the work of artists Shirley Samberg (1985-93) and
Magdalena Abakanowicz (1976-82),21 as visual pre-texts for the development of threedimensional sculptures. We worked with seven groups of four to five participants each,
building figures approximately two to three feet high. The young people fabricated their
figures as memorial, so that the sculptures became a site that held our public and private
remembering. Students used their accumulating knowledge of the Holocaust and their
own post-memory storied lives to animate the materials: burlap, logs, branches, and,
poignantly, found pieces of woodremnants of young children's school chairs. Even the
textile itself, burlap/sackcloth, references the trope of mourning (for example, as a sign of
grieving in Genesis 37:34). The construction of each figure emerged from the reflexive,
embodied, aesthetic experience of the participants. Each figure staged the participants'
resistance to a history they could not possibly understand; and each was developed as
part of the aesthetic frame of challenging and questioning the unspeakable:
We were building our figure of "Hanna" and I was covered with glue and the burlap was
rough and itchy. But I wanted to make something, something real to say that I
remembered, that I cared. The tableau we had made in the morning reminded me
physically of the stories we had "witnessed." We were building Hanna's body out of
burlap and branches. The burlap takes me to the earth . . . the branches that are her
arms and legs are long and twisted shapes. The four of us wrapped her joints with burlap
and string. She's so alive and so full of sadness. Her drooping head and her legs folded
underneath her made me want to get down on the floor beside our sculpture to tell the
story of her life. The story that no one knew. And to tell the story of all the things that I
still don't understand about her death.
Sara, 13 years old
As the culmination of this performance of memory project, these "Wrapped in Grief"
figures stood as archival remnants of an aesthetic experience designed to hold personal
and collective memory. Hirsch reads the aesthetics of post-memory as "a diasporic
aesthetics of temporal and spatial exile that needs simultaneously to build and to
mourn."22 Our aesthetic frame introduced agency, so that in fabricating one of the seven
sculptures developed from a historical context, Sara could express her distance from the
real, as well as her sense of "mourning about Hanna's death." The fictional character of
Hannaas an object of memory and as an act of remembrance"cannot but gesture
indirectly to what was lost and how we now [End Page 101] recall it."23 Further, these
artifacts speak directly to the students' sense of self in relation to their evolving, unfolding
history.24
Excavating these stories also signals the recovery of my own narrative. As we installed

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

Art and Architecture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 2.

9. Belarie Zatzman, "The Monologue Project: Drama as a Form of Witnessing" in How
Theatre Educates: Convergences and Counterpoints with Artists, Scholars, and
Advocates, ed. Kathleen Gallagher and David Booth (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 2003), 36.
10. Christine Hatton, "Backyards and Borderlands: Some Reflections on Researching
the Travels of Adolescent Girls Doing Drama," Drama Australia Journal, NJ 27 no. 1
(2003): 139-56.
11. Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), 22-23.
12. Cecily O'Neill, Drama Worlds: A Framework for Process Drama (Portsmouth, N.H.:
Heinemann, 1995).
13. Heinrich Heine in Michael Berenbaum, The World Must Know: The History of the
Holocaust as told in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (Boston: Little,
Brown, 1993), 25.
14. Madeleine R. Grumet, "Curriculum and the Art of Daily Life," in Reflections from the
Heart of Educational Inquiry: Understanding Curriculum and Teaching through the Arts
(New York: State University of New York Press, 1991), 76.
15. Nicholson, "The Performance of Memory," 90.
16. Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1996), 193.
17. Freddie Rokem, Performing History: Theatrical Representations of the Past in
Contemporary Theatre (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2000).
18. David Booth, "Towards an Understanding of Theatre for Education," in How Theatre
Educates: Convergences and Counterpoints with Artists, Scholars, and Advocates, ed.
K. Gallagher and D. Booth (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 17.
19. 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), 132.
20. Richard Courtney, Re-play: Studies of Human Drama-in-Education (Toronto: OISE
Press, 1982), 158-59.
21. Monica Bohm-Duchen, ed., After Auschwitz: Responses to the Holocaust in
Contemporary Art (London: Lund Humphries Publishers, 1995), 128, 110.
22. Hirsch, Family Frames, 245.
23. Young, At Memory's Edge, 67.
24. Tom Barone, Aesthetics, Politics, and Educational Inquiry: Essays and Examples
(New York: Peter Lang, 2000).
25. Booth, Towards an Understanding of Theatre for Education, 22.