Theatre and history: Decade and 9/11

Museums, as institutions of public memory, fail for the most part to engage with contemporary perspectives on history. In trying to understand why this is the case, I was fascinated to go to the theatre – actually, to a disused conference hall in an office block in Katherine’s Dock in east London, a short walk from Tower Bridge and the Tower of London.

Decade – headlined “Two towers. Ten years. Thousands of opinions” – presents a selection of scripts by 19 playwrights, produced by Headlong Theatre, directed by Rupert Goold. The world premiere welcomes the audience through a security check which resembles an airport lounge – body scanner gates and bag checks with US uniformed guards. This is truly site specific theatre.

Once past the interrogation, we were shown to a red carpet area where waitresses clutching clipboards showed us to our tables – exactly like an expensive American resaurant – the World Trade Centre’s Windows on the World.

Weirdly, they greeted us with a too bright “Good morning” which chilled me to my bones. Menus on each table “Welcome to America’s most famous and highest grossing restaurant” are themed to include prices for the breakfast offerings – omelettes, seasonal berries and papaya, griddle cakes with butter and maple syrup – as well as information on the restaurant itself: The boundless landscapes seen from the towers inspired the thinking and planning of the menus. The stage set is incredibly convincing, and unsettling – the views are indeed boundless, and recall convincingly those bright sprakling blue skies of New York that infamous day.

This is strong theatre. The production is intense, well choreographed, fast moving. It blends dance routines with slow motion movement sequences, and spans different writing techniques and styles harmoniously. The acting is variable, but the tension is constant. We time travel back 10 years, with the annual memorial day get-together of 3 widows over coffee helping to pace the calendar for the audience and providing an anchor for the other episodes on stage.

This is a strong interpretation of history. I know of no museum or interpretation centre which reflects on the impact of 9/11 in quite such a sweeping manner, allowing reflection, criticism, alternative viewpoints, dialogue, interpretations. If possible for theatre, why do museums find it so difficult to reflect in a similar open ended way?

I have come to the conclusion that often, although peculiarly well positioned to help reflecting on and critiquing history, museums are stuck in their interpretations because they focus on their collections – sometimes exclusively so. The material history they preserve seems to stifle their capacity for new interpretations. They fail to make that all important leap to writing the history of the big picture, considering their collections only tangentially.

This is what I herald in terms of narrative museums. This is a strong interpretative lesson: do not think about what collections can do for you, but what you can do with the collections. In other words: think what you want to say, not what the collections can say. Only then, extrapolate how best to say that using them.

Remembered history, living memory

The bookshop owner’s personal memorial on this corner of Dubrovnik that I blogged about in my previous post is one of the only testaments to the conflict in ex-Yugoslavia 1991-1992 that I could find in the city. I found it poignant, and alarming – there is no other official history or public reflection on the events, but this man’s personal effort to remember and document.

The black and yellow panel, written in Croatian and English, reads:

Our city was savagely attacked early in the morning by the Serbian and Montenegrian army on St Nicholas Day, 6^th December 1991. It was the saddest Friday in the history of Dubrovnik! At 7 o’clock that morning, the cross on the mount of Srd was destroyed. Already at 7.10 am a shell, one of the first to hit the city, hit our house, at 7.20 the third fateful one set our house on fire! I tried to extinguish it in the attic with a few buckets of water, but I failed. Shells kept falling and we had to abandon the burning house! I carried my old mother (aged 88) to the groundfloor and then to the neighbourhood. I ran twice to the second floor to take the most important documents, butane gas canister, the lamp, and my sister’s shoes. My sister Merica managed to run to the neighbour’s house with blankets over her head. Somehow, I too managed to run across a little later with a pot on my head. We threw pots, pans and bottles filled with water into the burning flames in a delusive hope. By the nightfall, 7 mortar shells fell on the house, three of them incendiary bombs.

Thank God we were not hurt!

A reminder that whether museums are wary or scared of reflecting on events, public history is always very personal. So the choices for institutions of public memory are either to face the interpretative challenge, or, by avoiding it, censor it.

“Militant” public memory institutions

Le musée militant is an expression coined in the 1970s by Tomislav Sola, a Croatian museologist who is the driving force and philosopher behind the Best in Heritage movement, a yearly conference which takes place in Dubrovnik in Autumn.

At this year’s edition, Professor Sola stated that political and social engagement is something museums and heritage institutions are called on to provide a platform for. Public memory institutions – and I would say all forms of public interpretation – must respond to the language of everyday life. How else can they claim to be public? How else can they become relevant to more and more people, from more and more diverse backgrounds?

He harked back to the 1970s, when the militant museum movement was embodied by the increasingly popular ecomuseums. These institutions, riding the long cultural wave of democratising history and its interpretation, brought together people’s stories, community narratives, folk traditions and launched a new policy of collections acquisition which meant something for the communities in which they operated. Some museums today continue that tradition – the ethnographical museum in Frankfurt being one. Others have misplaced their mission, and stagnated. The Ethnographic Museum in Dubrovnik, pictured below, which I visited during the conference, is just one example of a forgotten museum, a lonesome repository of something past which provides no fresh interpretation relevant to the present.

The idea behind militancy in a public memory institution (I like this expression because it brings together museums and heritage for their joint mission of communicating rather than separating them for their specialist forms of collection) is about being upfront with presenting dilemmas which we face everyday, and offering different interpretations.

The issue was brought home to me while walking around the streets of Dubrovnik, a site which was martyred during the ex Yugoslavia conflict in 1991-1992. The so called ‘pearl’ of the Mediterranean, a UNESCO World Heritage site, is absolutely beautiful: a walled city accessible only to pedestrians, medieval in its conception and planning, built around a market and port, a city state to rival Venice in the 13^th and 14^th centuries. Its deep red terracotta roofs are pristine: they have all been replaced in the last 20 years, and look very new and modern. It has been beautifully reconstructed from the ravages of war, which are visible only in photographic books available in some bookshops, in a tiny display in the Napoleonic fortress which overlooks the city, and a strange personal memorial corner in one of the beautiful side streets. Stuck on the wall by the bookshop owner whose books, manuscripts and editions were charred and burnt when his house and shop were bombed.

Where did Dubrovnik hide its recent history? Who wished it be swept under the carpet of tourism? Is it admissable, today, to retreat into silence? Is it simply more comfortable this way?

The recently re-opened Ulster Museum was awarded the 2010 Art Fund Prize for, among other things, being passionate about its public: “We were impressed by the interactive learning spaces on each level that are filled with objects which visitors are encouraged to touch and explore, and by how the museum’s commitment to reaching all parts of its community is reflected in the number and diversity of its visitors. The transformed Ulster Museum is an emblem of the confidence and cultural rejuvenation of Northern Ireland.”

The museum presents, among many other themes, the Irish Troubles which ravaged the northern tip of the island of Ireland and had long tentacles radiating into mainland UK between 1969 and 1990s. The museum’s interpretation strategy was to avoid object selection – they intentionally did not want to present a history by dividing communities around questions such as which objects are most prominent and most important and – of course – which have been left out. The story is too raw, too recent, too real to do this. So the interpretation perspective shifted. The museum team sought not to present a perfect, neutral survey of information – perfect but useless - but rather provide a new depth and a new breadth to the content, to carry a metamessage around its re-presentation of history: this space is a space for community, where content must remain purposeful in order to continue meaningful.

A new meaning of militant. Lessons we still have to learn.