FA/THEA 4334 6.00
Theatre of the Holocaust
Renowned scholar Robert Skloot suggests that Theatre of the Holocaust scripts can express their understanding of historical facts, and although the plays are not history, they would not stand apart from history. Holocaust plays and drama work can raise crucial historical and moral questions and make them more immediate. Traces of lives, real or imagined, help us become intimately involved in characters’ actions, choices, bravery and suffering. In so doing, drama links us to our own histories and provides a means for understanding ourselves. Further, beyond historical knowing, the significance of these scripts lies in their search for meaning –or at least intelligibility “in an event which shelters some kind of profound truth about us all” (1982).
The arts offer a form for shaping memory and memorial: through drama we invite the students’ participation in remembering as an active and collective force. Theatre, above all other forms of artistic practice, insists on the life of the community; it cannot be made without it. “Theatre of the Holocaust cannot take place without the participation of the community of spectators as living witness” (Fuchs, 1987). This class will study a range of Holocaust scripts, from adult to theatre for young audiences and will examine contemporary issues of representation in the Fine Arts. The class will also explore how to create narrative relationships between diverse Holocaust texts: legal, documentary, plays, visual or improvisational forms; diary, autobiography, memoir, survivor testimony. We will examine the relationship between source materials and the
students’ artistic reflections about them through writing, tableaux, movement or visual art. Finally, there will be a strong educational perspective to this course, as it considers how to engage the Fine Arts in the teaching of the Holocaust.