UC Santa Barbara

This book examines the intersections of violence, memory, and material space and how it could contribute to a nuanced understanding of a material dimension of performance theory. Categorizing violence as performance offers insight into the dangerous repercussions of performances, as well as those that remain, reanimate themselves, and ‘scrutinize’ themselves in everyday life. My case studies, The Washington National Cathedral (Washington, DC), The National Civil Rights Museum (Memphis, TN), and the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre (Sandy Hook, CT) are cross-historical cases that offer poignant sites to investigate the repercussions of the performance and re-performance of violence in the United States, specifically at sites that have been deemed “national” vestiges of memory.A performance studies-based analysis of sites of violence and the material remains challenges the notions that “original” is equal to “authentic,” since violence has no legible beginning and/or end. Performances are layered, collapsed, and in these utterances codified social norms and mores are determined. Acts of violence affects how we construct our societies, as well as the way we carry on within them. I use the term “theatres of violence” when addressing these sites of violence to allude to the various dimensions these performances take: somatic, temporal, material, and sacred. The fourth dimension, or the sacred dimension of performance, is built in the gaps between the somatic, temporal and material. Sites of violence, particularly sites of collective trauma, are transformed into sacred spaces, and that sacrality dictates how bodies move, how time is collapsed and simultaneously extended, and how material is maintained and signified. Theatre, in this regard, refers to the dramaturgical framing of spaces in which violence is being considered. Additionally, “Theatres of Violence” refers to the role of theatre as a space of collective gathering and draws on the metaphysical processes in which theatre is used to debate culture within community through ritual. Memorialization is not a response to a violent act, but rather a contribution to its role in culture, and its archives. These theatres of violence are spaces where these various contributions are played out. Although official narratives are produced, these debates remain. By reading the in-betweenness of theaters of violence— the careful design of curated museums constructed on the footprint of trauma— scholars can understand how various hierarchies are established and reaffirmed in production of social norms and expectations of behavior within public spaces.