Description
Book SynopsisBeginning 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.
Table of ContentsPreface List of illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction 1 People, memory and place: ideas for a consideration of Welsh performance Cenedl: people Cof: memory Lle: place 2 Amgueddfa Amgueddfa Werin Cymru Sain Ffagan / St Fagan’s National History Museum: people, memory and place Sain Ffagan and the performance of culture as poiesis 3 Treftadaeth Ail-chwarae hanes, living history: making and breaking history through performance Re-enactment 4 Gŵyl: festival Eisteddfod: people, memory and place Performing Wales in America’s Front Garden 5 Theatre Places Brith Gof: place and poiesis National theatres and their places Theatr Genedlaethol Cymru: Wales as Place / The Place of Wales Crossings in performance and technology: memory and kinesis in the work of Eddie Ladd Afterword Notes Bibliography Index
