Commemorative Theatricality: Embodied Dynamics of Memory and Memorial (Staging Difficult Pasts)

By: Bryce Lease

Commemorative Theatricality: Embodied Dynamics of Memory and Memorial rethinks remembrance as an embodied, relational, and contested practice. Moving across museums, memorials, statue parks, urban spaces, and performance works in Central and Eastern Europe, the book examines how memory is not simply preserved or displayed but enacted through bodies, sites, objects, affects, and movement.

Challenging assumptions that theatricality is merely spectacular, artificial, or ethically suspect, the book proposes commemorative theatricality as a critical framework for analysing how audiences are positioned as witnesses, participants, and implicated historical subjects. Case studies include POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, Budapest's House of Terror, Lithuania's Grūtas Park, and participatory performance projects in Berlin, Copenhagen, Krak w, and Vilnius.

Bridging theatre and performance studies, memory studies, museum studies, heritage research, and cultural theory, this book shows how commemoration can both reinforce ideological narratives and open spaces for shared history, critical reflection, and collective grief. It invites readers to understand remembrance not as inert tribute, but as a living encounter with the past that shapes responsibility in the present.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1041383312
• ISBN13: 9781041383314
• Release Date: November 2026
• Publisher: Routledge
• Length: 212 Pages