Making Silence Speak through Repetition: Reconstruction and Re-enactment as a Means to Materialise Erased History and Sometimes Correct it

Claude Lanzmann says that his film, Shoah (1985), was ‘made against its own possibility’ (qtd. in Rabinowitz 30). As a documentarian, he had almost no material evidence to draw on. The film, as its title suggests, is about the Holocaust, something which Lanzmann refers to as ‘not only the destruction of a people, but a destruction of the destruction’ (qtd. in Rabinowitz 30). This raises a more general question: how can media be used to tell the story and represent the experiences of those whose voices, for whatever reason, have been silenced or whose experience has been erased? I faced this challenge in my own practice when I began to attempt to document queer identity (in this case, my own childhood identity) in the 1980s rural Ireland, something that was denied voice, documentation, and representation.Ultimately, Lanzmann felt that the documentary form did not quite have the capacity to do so. Instead, he insisted that Shoah fell under the banner of art rather than documentary because ‘only art can ask the questions of history and memory his [Lanzmann’s] film attempts to answer’ (Rabinowitz 28).

In the practice work which I have made and which generates voice and personal agency from immaterial, voiceless experiences; there are a number of considerations which are useful to the larger reflections on power. Sound theorist Seán Street argues that silence can be a potent motor for the triggering of imagination and the generation of vocal capacity – ‘taking meaning where words cannot go’ (‘Sound Poetics’ 28). This was a central theme in my recent practice work which aimed to revisit the silences and erasure of my queer childhood in a conservative part of Ireland. I sought to plumb those silences and in them find scenes, moments and sensations I could reconstruct, revive and share. The result of this practice research was All That Is Solid Melts Into Air (2019), an hour-long live hybrid performance that combined spoken word, onstage narration, pre-mixed audio clips containing both ambient sound and spoken word and live gestural theatre re-enacting scenes from the past. When making All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, I had no primary source material to draw on for the purposes of documenting the queer experience of my youth. This utter silence compelled me to generate voice and physicality in the piece through reconstruction and re-enactment. I did this by mobilising a diverse array of narrative strategies (live spoken word, pre-recorded mixed sound clips; evocative props and re-enacting gestural theatre) to the service of my own personal excavations. Using these strategies, I navigated the unobserved, undocumented silences of my queer youth to then generate – on stage – voices, bodies and scenes from the past which I could re-inhabit in presence of the audience.

Criticality through layering

The narrative foundation of All That Is Solid Melts Into Air was a live, loosely scripted spoken narrative delivered by me on stage in presence of an audience. By adding layers containing other information – both verbal and non-verbal – to that primary, live verbal voice, I achieved additional potency and meaning for the past I was excavating. Layering in this way helped facilitate the occurrence of dialogue between various co-positioned layers in the work, creating a ‘dialectical distance’ (Bruzzi 59) in the material. This dialogue and its attendant dialectical distance, in turn, was used to help trigger audience criticality from within the story’s fabric.

For example, in a scene where I recall, reconstruct and re-enact a time when I was an altar boy in the church of my home village, I initiated the return to that past moment by establishing narration, spoken live on stage from my present-day perspective. Once that past moment was established through that retrospective narration, I triggered (through QLab^[1]) the pre-produced ambient sound of children playing in a belfry, creating two layers. This co-positioning of layers of information, with their differing temporalities and points of view, created the possibility for dialogue between them and thereby the opportunity for criticality in the audience vis-à-vis the ideas emerging from that dialogue. Once the ambient sound reconstruction was sufficiently installed in the performance, I recommenced live, spoken word narration – only this time I was speaking from within the scene, inhabiting that past moment. Onto this, I layered physical performance: climbing up a small step ladder that was on stage (to represent the actual, far longer ladder in the church belfry of my home village) and then jumping off it, when the right cue came in the ambient sound, to feign the grabbing of a bell rope and the plunging down in time with the giggles and bell peals emerging from the ambient sound playback.

Standing atop a stepladder, narrating live and about to jump when the right cue came in the pre-produced audio which was simultaneously playing out via QLab.

It might be useful to break down the various layers at play at this moment in the narrative construction (the same moment captured in the photograph above):

1. Present day, live narration from me on stage
2. Pre-produced ambient sound mix being played out on the sound system and which helps reconstruct the past moment in question
3. Narration delivered live on stage but temporally pitched to be located within the past moment and
4. Physical movement on stage, inhabiting and animating the reconstructed past moment

When I had these four simultaneous layers of voice at my disposal in the live, onstage delivery context of All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, I found the storytelling even more exhilarating. With this setup, I could apply these layers varyingly and give them different degrees of dominance in the overall combination, according to the specific energy and dynamic I was feeling from the audience at that point of the story in any given performance of the piece. This exhilaration was certainly due, in part, to the inherent thrill of live performance, but it was also due to the control and spontaneity that QLab’s multi-layering capacity afforded me as I performed.

There are, of course, all kinds of political and societal consequences that come with ‘making silence speak’ like this. Edward Said asserts that silence is of significant importance to the historians of subalternity. By finding a way to vocalise, he argues, those who have been oppressed and denied vocal agency can ‘shatter [the oppressor’s] wall-to-wall description leaving new space to be filled by people speaking for themselves’ (523).

Revisiting the past through re-enactment

Margulies argues that re-enactments provide the possibility to ‘critically revise the past and […] probe the interface between history and personal experience’ (7). It is a kind of history-making, one in which subjectivities are valid ‘historical agents’ (Rabinowitz 32). For Sven Lütticken, re-enactment can also be used as a tool of resistance in ‘acts of liberation’ from hegemonic, bourgeois historicity (33) or against the ‘commodification of the past’ (21). In All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, I usedlive, spoken word narrative combined with evocative / ‘vocalised’ natural sound mixes, excerpts of public-facing media, such as the Margaret Thatcher speeches or the theme tune to E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (Spielberg) and onstage gestural communication to reconstruct a past version of myself and past moments from my own history. Then, by employing re-enactment within those reconstructions, I was able to regain a certain power over the past by generating voices, bodies and moments from that time to encounter, critique and revise them.

At the centre of narrative re-enactment is a hybrid figure who can exist in the past or the present, or both at the same time. Margulies calls it the ‘split figure’ (5). Because of its ‘protean temporality,’ she argues, this ‘split figure’ of re-enactment has significant powers of revision (6). In All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, I was able to verbally reconstruct key moments from my own memory of my childhood, then physically re-enact them on stage, and then comment on, analyse and make sense of those moments from a present-day perspective through live, spoken word commentary. Part of the power gained from such re-enactments is the act of rendering public the secret, scary feelings and experiences of my past. The split figure’s power of ‘multi-directional temporality’ enables re-enactments to be ‘effective stages for actualization, exemplary purposes, and critical analysis’ (Margulies 11). By using this function of the ‘split figure’ device while on stage, I could easily switch between the past moment being re-enacted and the present-day moment on stage and thereby generate a rich dialectic through which to develop sustained and valuable criticality both for myself and (potentially) for the witnessing audience. Within these layers of compositional and revisionist activity, I could also add in – via the pre-recorded sound mix played out through QLab – the non-verbal ‘biotic voices’ (Toop 60) and ‘geophony’ (Watson qtd. in Street ‘The Memory of Sound’ 98) of the forest and bog landscapes of my childhood loneliness. Much like the broader criticality mentioned earlier, this criticality was also facilitated through layering, this time via the temporal layering of past and present voices and actions.

For a shared and public criticality to occur, the re-enactment needs to work as an act of public communication. In her work on the relationship between enunciator, text and audience in autobiographical essay films, Rascaroli asserts that these films’ ‘monologic, self-centred structure always hides a dialogue, which seeks a relationship with the audience’ (109). In All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, this dialogue played out in a very palpable way for me while I performed. The audience was sitting within a few metres of me, not a removed abstraction as it would have been if the project were an essay film. This physical proximity played a role in the ‘alchemy’ of the re-enactment I was trying to concoct on stage. It underlined the public ownership of both the re-enactment and the split-figure contained within it. Quoting Rowena Santos Aquino, Margulies asserts that the ‘split figure’ of re-enactment is ‘applicable to a collective since it narrates not only one’s past but also references others’ experiences and memories’ (10).

In All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, I had to take care to make the ‘split figure’ in the work a functional, generous, public body – one that was accessible and legible to people from different backgrounds of experience than mine. I achieved this, in part, through a continual blending of personal, micro level details with collective, macro level details – the combination of private and public memories. Culturally iconic figures like Thatcher and E.T., in addition to communally shared experiences like school and religious services, were blended with and became public access points to the private intimacies, feelings and experiences of my childhood. My intention in doing so was that the audience had the possibility to ‘become complicit in the process of meaning making, of making history’ (Rabinowitz 32). In this kind of participatory, historical culture, Margulies argues, ‘the replay of a contingent past activity raises it to a momentary universality making its value discernible for the present’ (10).

In this kind of excavation of history, where primary sources are non-existent, one must read ‘for absences as much as for presences,’ says Rabinowitz, adding that ‘the weight of evidence lies in the spoken word [of the witness] and its ability to evoke visual memory as the foundations of historical justice’ (35). Lanzmann, a Jewish filmmaker, was aiming to achieve historical justice for his people with Shoah despite an absence of material documentation with which to make it. ‘What was called the Holocaust was a tabula rasa,’ he said in his film The Karski Report (2010), when speaking of the making of Shoah, ‘and each time I found a survivor it was like a powerful exhumation.’ Simone de Beauvoir stated that Lanzmann’s art is in ‘making places speak, in reviving them through voices’ (qtd. in Lanzmann ‘Shoah: the complete text’ iii). In such a context, it is not necessary for the audience to see for themselves but to ‘look at those who have looked and to hear their emotional testimony’ (Lanzmann qtd. in Rabinowitz 29). In this storytelling paradigm, also extensively used in my work on All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, voice and story are generated from silence and used to overcome the forces that mandated that silence and to try to correct the damage wrought through that silencing. Through the approaches to narrative production detailed above, I (re)gained power at multiple stages: through the mere generation of voice from (and despite) the silence; through the critical reflection, revisions and corrections that were applied to that past once it had been reconstructed, and through the sharing – with a witnessing public – of the entire story and story-making process.