Dancing impossible histories: commemoration, memory and trauma in screendance

This chapter discusses the ability of dance performance to create sites for the representation and embodiment of voices and experiences that have been omitted from “official” historical narratives underpinning commemorative events. It focuses particularly on women’s stories connected with commemorative events employed in the perpetuation of exclusionary “idea[s] of a nation” in Ireland (WB Yeats, p. 493), through an examination of two screendance works - Medicated Milk (2016) by Áine Stapleton, and Falling Out of Standing (2016, 2017) CoisCéim Dance Theatre and Anu Productions. It also explores how dancing these voices into visibility raises troubling questions and uncomfortable affects through the embodiment of memories and traumas that are oppressed and/or forgotten, but that continue to linger on the fringes of social consciousness to haunt the present. Ernest Renan proposes that ‘the essence of the nation is that all its individuals have many things in common, and also that everyone has forgotten many things’. In the discussion of these dance works, I highlight how the voices and memories of women who have long inhabited cultural blind spots in Irish history are danced into remembrance, lending flesh to unacknowledged, traumatic experiences connected with nation-building commemorative events and cultural artefacts. I also propose that these choreographies create space for alternative and productively troublesome sites of commemoration that are located both in the dance works themselves, and also in their spectators, who carry the experience of the works beyond the performance event to their engagement with future narratives of commemoration.