UC Riverside

This dissertation inserts itself into the place where the body meets architecture by asking whether and how the maneuverings and dances performed by visitors at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (VVM) shift our understanding of the practice of memorialization. I tangle memory studies, architectural theory, and dance studies within each other. By attending to the moving bodies at the memorial site, I seek to push further the ontological boundaries of dance, to include within its folds, the constant and articulate corporeal gestures and dances of the everyday. Because my project is rooted in and emerges from dance studies, I ask in these pages, what other ways the presence of the body can figure into the narrative of national memorialization. I trace the historical arc of the production of the VVM and account for the role of its primary designer, Maya Lin with the body in mind, by re-imagining the presence of bodies in the production process and re-imagining Lin's choreographic participation in building the VVM. This effort suggests that the body plays a necessary role for understanding the development of the VVM. Because my point of examination is a national memorial, I also intervene on the discourse of memory studies, which is embroiled in a conversation about the utility of aligning memory with a material signifier. Currently, memory scholars see dissolution in the Western alignment of the concept of memory with a materiel object. However, by including the body's actions at the VVM into dialogue about memorial architecture and memory, I attempt to make a case for the necessity of materiality when we speak of memory. I argue that the idea of (national) memorialization is a multi-faceted concept that not only includes an architectural node, but also embraces the archive and the body as carriers of memory and signifiers of memorialization. In reading dancing carried out at the VVM, I argue that the practice of memorialization is layered with gestures of mourning.