All the world's a stage...

In his seminal essay on the debate surrounding a controversial World War Two documentary The Valour and the Horror historian Graham Carr noted that historians shy away from referring to the act of creating and maintaining history (or, more specifically, public history) as ‘performance.’ The problem, as noted by another historian, is that the word carries the connotation of conceit or deception. Regardless of post-modern critiques of history historians are a relatively honest bunch, and any agenda within a body of historical work tends to be stated, not subversive.

Yet the idea of performance remains an important sociological/anthropological concept that has been introduced into history that has allowed us to explore how people expressed themselves through their customs, cultures and rituals. When I first heard the word ‘performance’ I thought of it in terms of what you would expect from a car, or what we expect from a high-caliber athlete: performance as an act of excellence. Having read into the subject, I recognize that performance is more situated on the act itself than the sense that the subject is living up to some kind of intrinsic value.

I wonder though, if every person has many parts to play – as Shakespeare might say – who plays the audience? Certainly ‘performance’ is usually an unconscious act. But wouldn’t many acts of performance be under scrutiny? A society creates a flexible set of rules to provide some guidance as to how to act in almost any situation, which varies in innumerable ways. Historians usually establish this kind of social context so that the reader understands how the performance is perceived and understood in its particular context.

People perform in different social situations and we must admit that every performance could be an act or an expression of something. Who is the historian to judge what is admissible and what is not? But people in the past did judge what an acceptable performance was and what was not. The RCMP based their ideas about proper ‘Canadian’ conduct based on a set of ideas that included certain qualities, especially those surrounding heterosexuality. Performance of hetero and homosexuality in the Cold War was very much contested and defined by the ideas of others, and many people concerned themselves over this particular idea of performance: it was deemed to be a matter of national security, after all.

Performances have an actor and an audience, and works that only consider one half of the theatre risk stifling the full breadth of the performance. Even in the debate over The Valour and the Horror and the contested public history over the Second World War, each group – historians, veterans, and the Canadian public – performed its part to one another. Debates about society and history tend to bring out lively performances in which historians are inevitably drawn into. Bringing in the audience brings in the praise, critiques and other judgments of the performance, and recognizes the innate human desire to respond to the actions of others.

After all, what else are blog comments for?