Enacting History ed. by Scott Magelssen and Rhona Justice-Malloy (review)

Reviewed by: Enacting History ed. by Scott Magelssen and Rhona Justice-Malloy Scott R. Irelan Enacting History. Edited by Scott Magelssen and Rhona Justice-Malloy. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2011. 240 pp. + 10 illustrations. $19.96 e-book, $24.95 paperback. These ten essays clearly trace "ways recent performance practices have been used to select, devise and perform narratives of the past to their participants and audiences" (1). Rather than attempting an all-inclusive collection, the editors have done well to choose a short list of contributors who deftly tease out "the contours of contemporary performance practices that bear witness to a moment or a set of moments of the past, whether actual or imagined" (3). From this approach emerges a focused, sophisticated "conversation about the kinds of knowledge these performances do a good job of producing, even if the jury is still out on whether the knowledge they produce is beneficial to all parties" (5). In "Present Enacting Past: The Functions of Battle Reenacting in Historical Representation," Leigh Clemons suggests that the Battle of Coleto Creek/ [End Page 213] Goliad Massacre reenactment and the alleged Texas history on display "are trapped together in a symbiotic relationship of progressive clarification and determination" (10) with the primary goal being commemoration rather than "authentic" re-creation. Dealing, too, with powerful sites of remembrance, Lindsay Adamson Livingston explores Mormon cultural memory and the production of space both in Palmyra, New York, and Nauvoo, Illinois. She argues that spatial or embodied performances found here work to connect tourist-spectators to a site via "echoes of events and personalities associated with the spaces" (37). Equally, "Tourist Performance in the Twenty-first Century" recounts Scott Magelssen's experience as an "illegal migrant" in Parque EcoAlberto's Caminata Nocturna. He asserts that by "participating bodily in tourist performances that invite visitors to take on the personae of those who have been made abject by violent or oppressive forces," tourist-performers construct embodied knowing beyond that of print sources (175). Magelssen does concede, though, that considerable slippage "is found between the meanings intended by the producing bodies" and "the bodies that perform them" (175). Taken together, these three glimpses into the complexities of constructing both public memory and communal identity—national, religious, ethnic, or otherwise—are quite absorbing. Amy M. Tyson, Aili McGill, and Catherine Hughes offer fresh perspectives on historiographic performance. Tyson, writing as a participant-observer at Historic Fort Snelling in St. Paul, Minnesota, analyzes "quality control" practices at the site in order to get at the "hives of subtlety that surround how enacting history affects workers' subjectivities" (47). She finds that gendered "authenticity" encourages a "culture of surveillance wherein co workers monitored one another's behavior" both in the past and present (61). McGill's "Defining Museum Theatre at Conner Prairie" turns from institutional policing of "authenticity" to creating successful guest experiences that not only "inspire creativity and foster learning" (91) but also include "emotional engagement, artful story development, and skilled character development and interaction" not always in use with first-person interpretation events (110). Encompassing both notions of "authenticity" and affective response, Hughes uses reception study data to propose that a "sense of realness can emerge" from theatrical performance at places like the Kentucky History Center and the Museum of Science, Boston, particularly when "the spectator is invited into the play frame" (149). The ways that these authors discuss institutional approaches to enacting history point to intricate layers of connection for both workers and guests as they seek a present connection with a past community. Richard Poole uses "History, Archive, Memory, and Performance: The Lewis [End Page 214] and Clark Bicentennial Play as Cultural Commemoration" to remind readers that dramatizing history "offers considerable challenges, among them many possible interpretations of history" (81). Although Poole's analysis does not always offer novel findings, the way he queries his decision-making processes as writer/ director/producer forms a telling case study. Patricia Ybarra also handles issues of commemoration and re-membering. Using her experience as director for . . . And Jesus Moonwalks the Mississippi, she contends that the production's inherent "performance of difficult history" regarding slavery (117) "produced a necessary supplement not only to dialogue but...

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