The Room Where it Happened

What if the rooms in which you speak of how institutions are haunted by violent histories are haunted by those same histories?

To be haunted by violence is not just to bury it.

Violence buried is violence repeated.

What if those you are speaking to can’t make it into the room in which you are speaking?

Because of those same histories.

No, the title of this post is not a reference to a song from the play, Hamilton.

It is about being in the room with violence.

Where the past is present.

In Shakespeare, Trauma and Contemporary Performance, Catherine Silverstone analyses the programme accompanying Henry V, (dir. Nicholas Hytner), played at The National Theater in 2003. She describes the programme as paying “homage to a pictorial history of representations of war in its inclusion of images from ancient, medieval and early modern cultures.” She states that “given Hytner’s interest in the play speaking to current events,” it is “striking” that the collection of images in the programme does not “include any of the military action in Afghanistan and Iraq.” However, she notes that the National Archives holds research materials used by the cast for rehearsal. This archive included images from the invasion of Iraq in 2003, which are, like all the other images, held “in clear plastic sleeves,” giving them the quality of “specimens.”

The photographs “by keeping sometimes violent moments open to scrutiny,” “make claims upon the viewer to acknowledge the violence of war.”

What Silverstone’s careful analysis shows is that the materials that might force acknowledgement of violence that is happening now are removed from the programme, from the room, the theater, the building.

And so;

What they claim, we might not see.

There is violence in the removal of violence.

Next week I will be giving a lecture in memory of Catherine Silverstone. It is a profound honour and joy to follow her lead, to bring into the room the violence that is already there but too often turned into specimen or spectacle. I will be sharing material from my new book, No Is Not a Lonely Utterance: The Art and Activism of Complaining.

You can listen to the lecture in person and on livestream.

It is important to me that any lectures I give (especially on complaint) can be heard live by those who are not in the room. Why? Because