Performing Wales

People, Memory and Place

Lisa Lewis

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781786832429
• eBook ISBN: 9781786832443
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Britisches Drama

Beginning from the premise that culture can be analysed as performance, this study approaches Welsh culture as performative practice and explores four distinct cultural areas – the Museum, Heritage, Festival and Theatre – concentrating on how they contribute to a shared sense of identity among participants. Through specific examples, the author traces the way cultural performance in Wales both creates and sustains specific relationships between people, memory and place, revealing reflections of ourselves and constituting our remembrances of others and of history. The discussion emphasizes the significance of performance in voicing issues of identity within a peripheral context – a position informed by the author's own perspective as a bilingual Welsh and English speaker.

1

PEOPLE, MEMORY AND PLACE: IDEAS FOR A CONSIDERATION OF WELSH PERFORMANCE

Cenedl: people

In considering Wales as an entity and the Welsh people as a body, I am referring to all who reside in Wales and understand the place as culturally, linguistically and historically unique, whatever our background, wherever we have come from. In this context, Welsh culture is as diverse as the people who constitute it. Coming from Cardiff, I am acutely conscious of the deep intercultural and transcultural relationships that have defined the city’s cultural milieu and of the role of the Welsh language in this. In my deliberations on Welsh culture I do not mean to exclude any version or conception of Welshness; it is merely that my own positionality is critical to the way I understand and talk about culture as a performative act in which I have participated.

The Welsh term cenedl, used to signify nation, actually alludes to the people as a people and is a reminder of the importance of dwelling on the civic in discourses around nationhood and nationness. Historian Prys Morgan locates the change from a conception of people as cenedl (kin-group) to something approximating the present use of the word to denote ‘nation’ during the late twelfth century, a shift that was a consequence of recurrent historical invasions and the subsequent need to become ‘more keenly aware of a kinship or nationality that was superior to... loyalty to local dynasty.’1 This slippage in the meaning of the term cenedl, literally kindred, tribe or clan, to the idea of nation as separate entity, is indicative of the increasingly ambivalent relationship, historically, between the notion of what constitutes a people and the idea of nationhood. Morgan writes of the turn in historiography that has seen a focus on the role of imagination, mythology and images in the constitution of ‘modern nations states, or groups’ and the attempt to understand the role of human activity in their construction.2 This historiographic turn runs against the idea of the nation state as an entity that has inadvertently been established in an organic way over centuries, an idea often associated with a modern revival of Welsh nationness. Morgan acknowledges that some would describe Wales as having an inevitable physical unity based on its geography and a historical and linguistic unity based on the fact that the majority of the population spoke Welsh until approximately the turn of the twentieth century.3 His focus, however, is on the role of mythology and imagination in the definition of Wales over the centuries and, in particular, during times of crisis. In this analysis, the sustaining power of the creative impulse has been imperative in maintaining the existence of a country/people that has not always had a political state.

Similarly Timothy Brennan, in his examination of ‘the national longing for form’, refers to nation as being both ‘historically determined’ (the modern nation state) and ‘something more ancient and nebulous – the ‘natio’ – a local community, domicile, family, or condition of belonging’.4 He quotes Raymond Williams, who emphasises the need to distinguish between these meanings and suggests a strong connection between ‘nation’ and ‘native’, for ‘we are born into relationships which are typically settled in place’, a form of association of ‘fundamental human and natural importance’. In this context, the notional jump from emplaced relationships to the concept of nation state ‘is entirely artificial’.5 Referring to Anderson’s Imagined Communities6 as one of the few texts to focus on the concept of the nation as an imagined formation, Brennan comments on how it is ‘rare in English to see ‘nation-ness’ talked about as an imaginative vision – as a topic worthy of full fictional realization’.7 The difference with the treatment and conceptualisation of nationness in Welsh culture could not be starker, for in the Welsh context it is often explicitly evoked through symbol and metaphor and forged into being as a cultural imaginary. Even when the nation is conceived as a political and civic entity, it is hardly ever claimed as a wholly political reality, partly because the discussion must dwell instead on the concept and processes of becoming a nation.

That the performance of Welsh nationness has not really been tethered to a consideration of the state, and has manifested itself primarily in and through cultural means, suggests that the people involved in it have foregone the impetus towards self-determination through state citizenship, constructing a sense of cultural identity that rests on performances of difference.

Writing about Welsh identity in the early 1980s, in the aftermath of the 1979 referendum in which Wales voted against devolution, Raymond Williams remarks on a ‘national feeling’ that constitutes a kind of ‘common perception’ of Welsh identity as ‘primarily cultural – in language, customs, kinship and community – rather than in any modern sense political’.8 Even so, ‘nationhood’, though relegated to the realms of culture, perhaps due to the political situation at the time, is nevertheless understood to be a historical possibility and its revival is perceived to be, according to Williams, an almost inevitable social shift, a ‘working through of history, among now radically dislocated as well as subordinated people, rather than the fortunate re-emergence of a subdued essence’ (p. 22).

In a more complex consideration of the tripartite relationship of Wales, Britain and the people, Welsh philosopher J. R. Jones (1911–70) deconstructs the forces that bind these entities together as those of gwladwriaeth (state) and cenedl (nation). Jones defines human communities by a number of bonds, some of which are essential for binding people as national community: namely, a defined territory, the specific language or languages of the territory and the amassing of the territory under a sovereign state. According to Jones, a community formed by only two of these bonds – say territory and language – and lacking its own state systems, is a community of ‘People’, and the basis of their formation is ‘the interpenetration’ of language and land.9 He outlines the meaning and the implication of this interpenetration between the external formational ties of space and the internal formational forces of a People’s ‘spirit’ in terms of language as a bearer of tradition and heritage, rather than simply a means of communication. Consequently, the relationship of language and land can be explained in terms of a subjective interpenetration within people and an objective interpenetration in society. This view enables Jones to state: ‘Tafell o groen naturiol y ddaear sy’n gorwedd rhwng Lloegr a Môr Iwerddon. Ynom y mae hi’n “Gymru”.’ (‘It is a natural piece of the earth’s crust that lies between England and the Irish Sea. It is within us that it is “Wales” ‘). Furthermore, he sees that the poetic tendency of the act of naming the land in Welsh culture reveals the way in which the ties of people and place are interwoven; ‘it is as though they see and discuss and love the land through the mirror of their language.’10 The ‘mirror of their language’ suggests a conscious playing out of the awareness of place in the cultural performances structured in and through language and leads to the assumption that language itself is understood as a performative stance. This is language operating in such a way that it represents the relationship of people and place, evoking a deep, embodied awareness of place as cultural construct.

While the establishment of the National Assembly for Wales in 1998 causes us to reflect again on Jones’s definition of people and nation, perhaps forcing a partial re-definition of the argument in so far as we can say that Wales now has some of the operational structures of state, and operates (or does not) as ‘nation’ within the British Isles,11 it is not an easy task to postulate as to the long term cultural impact of devolution, especially in terms of the impact on cultural and civic national identity.12 Because of this, and mindful of the tensions between definitions of nation and people, I have chosen to adopt Homi K. Bhabha’s word ‘nationness’ to refer to the binding social and cultural aspects that define a people or nation. This is nation ‘constructed through and out of cultural text and context, and specific to its locality’,13 a distinct formation related to the cultural experience of a group of people in a particular location, defined further as a ‘form of living the locality of culture’.14 Expounding the idea of nationness as ‘a form of social and textual affiliation’, as opposed to a historicism that defines a people, nation or national culture as ‘an empirical sociological category’, Bhabha describes a category of thought that permits consideration of the strategies and methods of cultural identification by which a people (or a nation) are made the subjects of certain ‘social and literary narratives’ (p. 140). It is within the production of the nation as a process of narration that Bhabha perceives a division ‘between the continuist, accumulative temporality of the pedagogical, and the repetitious, recursive strategy of the performative’, stating that ‘it is through this process of splitting that the conceptual ambivalence of modern society becomes the site of writing the nation’ (pp. 145–6). Drawing on Anderson’s concept of nation as imagined community Bhabha perceives the idea of the imagined community originating in the past and gliding ‘into a limitless future’, as well as its quality of historic newness, as proof of an inherent ambivalence in the idea of the nation. The pedagogical and the performative are conceptions that describe the ways in which the nation perceives itself as ‘immemorial’ as well as new. The pedagogical tendency is present in social practices and institutions that represent the nation as timeless, while the per-formative inclination is present in the representation of the nation in daily life; the former dictates what the nation is, while the later conveys or expresses it. The performative tendency is potentially disruptive, however, because the ambivalence of the situation has the potential for other cultural identities to emerge, and this is where Bhabha perceives an opportunity for minority discourse to enter into and interrogate the seemingly ironclad narrative of the nation state.

In this book, I use ‘nationness’ to refer to a sense of identity aimed for or revealed by certain performances of culture that are significant in relation to the binding of a community as people. The aim in this is not to obfuscate the desire for political determination, which I associate with the basic conditions of living and with the civic, but to linger on the performance of culture and the way it relates to ideas of nationness as embodied in people.

Cof: memory

Un funud fach cyn elo’r haul o’r wybren, un funud fwyn cyn elo’r hwyr i’w hynt

I gofio am y pethau anghofiedig, ar goll yn awr yn llwch yr amser gynt. WALDO WILLIAMS15

Performances that are closely bound up with definitions of culture, such as the museum exhibit, the festival or the theatrical performance, serve a function as channels for the embodiment of culture in their audiences. The way this operates is complex and involves processes of remembering together, that is, ways of using memory in which certain groups are bound together. Performances that embody memory are at the centre of a people’s collective memory, the memory between people that sustains their communal identity. This form of memory is repeatedly performed through speech, gesture and movement acts and in art formations. Social anthropologist Paul Connerton refers to such performances found in both traditional and modern societies as ‘acts of transfer’, in which communal memory is perpetuated through the experience of ‘remembering in common’, itself enabled through repetition (often in embodied forms) that capture knowledge of the past and images of the past in the form of performance.16 This book attempts to analyse some examples of ‘remembering in common’ encapsulated in various cultural performances. In focusing on these acts of remembering we can examine the concept of performance as a network of relationships played out in order to sustain the memory of the group or community. The experience of culture as artistic or ritualised form, represented and lived through again and again in and through performance, provides distinct snapshots of the ideas and responses of a group of people at a certain time. These are glimpses of a community’s ideas and beliefs in relation to their social group and of their ways of remembrance as a set of shared ideas, beliefs and meanings. Performance is a rich and diverse complex of bodily practices and customs that relate or retell what we might have lived through together as a group. What we might have ‘lived through’ is a reference to what we might share as collective memory, though collective memory is not only constituted of what might have been literally ‘lived through’, for it can also include that which has been transmitted through intergenerational memory, or according to the social structures that constitute ‘tradition’.

The theory of collective memory put forward by Maurice Halbwachs (1877–1945) enables an analysis of the nature of cultural remembering and how this operates in terms of collective memory. Halbwachs’s theory defines memory as being dependent on cadres sociaux (social frameworks), even in the case of what is perceived by the individual to be their own personal memory, which is, according to Halbwach’s theory, part of a collective phenomenon of memory.17 The theory of collective memory is based on two distinct points, firstly that collective memory is the memory of the individual and that it operates within a sociocultural context, and secondly that collective memory includes cultural transmission and the creation of tradition, or the formation and awareness of a shared past. According to the theory, we experience things as part of a specific social group and also bear witness or recall many shared experiences, as well as individual ones, in the context of a network of social relations which elevates itself from the material to the symbolic. This is how people generate symbolic imaginaries, ways of thinking and experiencing that are formed through language and other communicativ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1: People, memory and place: ideas for a consideration of Welsh performance
• 2: Amgueddfa: museum
• 3: Treftadaeth: heritage
• 4: GŴyl: festival
• 5: Theatre Places
• Afterword
• Notes
• Bibliography