Foreword to Stephen Snow, Performing the Pilgrims (University Press of Mississippi, 1993). ================================================================= Foreword Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett Plimoth Plantation is a beautifully faceted jewel (or perhaps a Chinese puzzle). Its meaning cannot be exhausted, nor its paradoxes resolved. Turning and examining the site from every angle, Performing the Pilgrims demonstrates brilliantly just how good Plimoth Plantation is to think with. Stephen Eddy Snow, a pilgrim thrice over, is our expert guide. Descended from Pilgrims, he played Pilgrim roles for two seasons at the Pilgrim Village. His vivid analysis of this experience is itself the result of an intellectual pilgrimage. An unscripted ensemble performance that is environmental and improvisational, the Pilgrim Village aligns itself more with experimental performance modes than with conventional theatre, understood as European drama constructed on Aristotelian principles for a proscenium stage. To capture the distinctive quality of this tangible yet elusive site, Snow works with an expanded notion of the performative. He draws not only on the history of avant-garde performance, postwar experimental theatre, and postmodern performance art, but also on his experience with Asian performance forms. The result is an important contribution not only to the emergent discipline of Performance Studies, but also to the history of museums and theatre, which stand in a complex relation to one another, and to new forms of performance at the electronic frontier. Living history, as explored here, goes beyond recreation and simulation. It is an extraordinary experiment in virtuality. As Snow so vividly demonstrates, the legacy of the Pilgrims' antipathy to theatre is encoded in the history of how the site has been commemorated, represented, and animated. Ceremonies, banquets, orations, processions, festivals, tableaux, pageants, and exhibitions have celebrated the Pilgrims for almost two centuries, blurring the boundaries of ritual, theatre, and museum. During the early nineteenth century performances that would have been objectionable to conservative Protestants if staged in a theatre were acceptable when presented in a museum (or as civic ceremony), even if there was little else to distinguish them. Reframing performances in terms of nature, science, history, education, and commemoration made them respectable. In what might be characterized as a reciprocity of means and complementarity of function, museums used the theatrical craft of scene painting for exhibits and staged performances in their lecture rooms, while theatres used the subjects presented in museums. Museums served as surrogate theatres during periods when theatres came under attack for religious reasons, while theatres brought a note of seriousness to their offerings by presenting edifying entertainment. Today's Plimoth Plantation is both museum and theatre, literally. Plimoth Village, the living historical museum, has not displaced the Exhibit Gallery, where archeological actualities are labelled and displayed in vitrines. Rather "experience theatre" stands in a strategic relationship to the "theatre of objects." There is a drama in objects--in the processes by which they are made and used. Consider the visual narratives of Diderot's plates in the Encyclopedie, which show the object, its parts, how it is made, and how it is used. Or the work displays so central to agricultural fairs. Otis T. Mason, an anthropologist at the Smithsonian Institution, addressed the theatricality of objects in 1891 when he defined "the important elements of the specimen" as "the dramatis personae and incidents." Archeologists understand this when they try out tools, whether replicas or present-day versions, as a way to better understand them and the processes of which they are part. Most recently, Elaine Scarry reimagined the object as "a projection of the human body" that "deprives the external world of the privilege of being inanimate." That privilege is fully forfeited in the Pilgrim Village. The Pilgrim Village is a homunculous of history, fashioned not from clay but from the living tissue of twentieth-century actors. More than an embodiment of history, the Village is an imaginary space into which the visitor enters. Gone is the fourth wall. Immersed in a total environment, the visitor negotiates a path through the site, both physically and conceptually. The brochure invites the visitor to interact with the Pilgrims, to "talk with them, ask them about their lives, and listen as they tell you, in the seventeen regional dialects heard throughout the Village, what it was like to come to this foreign place and build their future." In contrast with the Exhibit Gallery, which is silent as a tomb, Plimoth Village is full of "the sounds of life, laughter, songs, and voices. Although the days of the pilgrims and Native People are filled with chores, there's always time to include you in the lively discussions, storytelling and games that balance their lives." The visitor inhabits the icon. Two trajectories--the history of archeology and the history of theatrical commemoration--converge at Plimoth Plantation. Digging painstakingly in the dirt, meticulously sifting and recording every scrap of evidence from the garbage heap of history, the archeologist infers a totality that is utterly virtual. Living history takes the archeological imagination-- reconstituting wholes from parts--the extra mile. If the archeologist cannot excavate the whole pot in tact, or all of the fragments, then he can fill in the gaps, inferring from a few shards what the whole might have been. Having reconstituted the pot, why not the potter? Why not his studio, home, and marketplace? And why limit the reconstruction, let alone the exhibition, to drawings and words? The curator is a dramaturg of the metonyms of history, fashioning a mimetic recreation of the totality of Pilgrim daily life from archeological fragments, some of them on display in the Exhibit Gallery. The Pilgrim village is a consummate performance of connoisseurship. Several display traditions are at work here. First, living historical museums are an extreme example of the passion to imagine the past in the most literal detail, a passion perhaps most familiar in meticulous reconstructions of what is described in the Bible. Architectural drawings and scale models of the Tabernacle, the Temple, Noah's Ark, and the entire city of Jerusalem have a long history, stimulated in part by the Protestant Reformation and the fascination with the literal truth of the Biblical text. In this respect, it is perhaps less ironic that the Pilgrims, who so detested theatre, should be represented so literally at Plimoth Plantation. Second, the habitat group became a popular during the nineteenth century as a way to display natural and cultural specimens. Rather than arranging them in a decorative pattern or according to some purely formal taxonomy, curators staged objects within their "habitat." The legacy of this approach may be seen today in the dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History, the recreated environments of animals in zoos and in period rooms, wax museums, and the foreign villages at world's fairs. Such exhibitions are surrogates for the sites, near and far, that they represent. Third, even when tourists travel to distant destinations, what they encounter is often an exhibition of where they are or of somewhere else. Travel panoramas so popular in the nineteenth century offered a "you are there" experience, including the very cities in which they were staged. Indonesia in miniature is installed just outside Jakarta. Even as historic recreations in our own day model themselves on the tourist experience, tourism itself recodes space as time. Travellers are routinely promised idyllic escapes from their harried lives to destinations where time "stands still" or the past lives on, untouched by modernity--typically tropical islands, rural areas, exotic locales, and historic recreations. Time does indeed stand still at the Pilgrim Village--it is always 1627 in the virtual world that emanates from the deep hole of archeology. Traces once fixed in layered sediments of time can be seen in the Exhibit Gallery. There is at work here, in both the archeological and the curatorial imagination, a performance epistemology that places a premium on experience--visceral, kinesthetic, haptic, intimate-- and a performative pedadogy more akin to the nascent medium of virtual reality than to older models of learning. Immersed in an experiential situation, the visitor uses all her senses to plot her own path, at her own pace, through an imagined world. She is never told what questions to ask or given definitive answers. Learning here is all process and discovery. It is partial, negotiable, polyvocal. More like hypermedia than a play, the site is truly interactive. Visitors do not "passively" watch a performance on a stage, look at displays in a museum, or take "rides" through installations in a theme park. They actively engage the site and those in it. The virtual world they are exploring "pushes back." We can see in the display history of the site a shift from ceremonial to virtual, from commemorative to exploratory, from discrete moments, objects, and scenes, to the waking dream of a virtual Pilgrim world. But Plimoth Plantation keeps alive the tension between actualities and virtualities. Denigrated by some as Disneyworld history, as ersatz, the Pilgrim Village should be seen in relation to the history of exhibiting copies. In many ways, American museums of the nineteenth century were virtual museums, consisting in large measure of copies of the great works of western civilization. Copies did not have the degraded sense they do today, when they were commissioned or collected and exhibited by museums with pride. Whether wax, plaster, marble. autotypes, or created in some other reproductive medium, copies were subject to their own distinctive aesthetic values. Copies might even be preferred to originals because their very presence indicated that education was the primary objective of the exhibition. Modelling is a way of knowing, whether projecting back to a past that must be imagined into completeness, or forward to what has not yet been experienced. Even the older notion of copy, while submissive to its source, is more than a surrogate for a missing original. Why else keep alive the relationship between archeological artifacts displayed in the Exhibit Gallery and the "full-sense fantasy" of the Pilgrim Village. The brochure invites the visitor to compare them: "Many of the originals upon which the copies have been based may be viewed in the museum's Exhibit Gallery." The pleasure of the Pilgrim Village derives in part from the tour de force of its staging, which is all the more amazing given the fragmentary nature of the archeological remains. But realness, or the fidelty of the virtual world of the Village, is not enough. The "actual" must be exhibited alongside the "virtual" in a show of truth. The result is a shifting locus of authenticity, a trade-off between the aura of actuality, of the archeological remain, and the (tele)presence of virtuality, the recreated Pilgrim world. The mediating term is process. Visitors are urged to "Browse through the museum's renowned gift shop, where many items created using authentic 17th-century methods are available for your own private collection." Authencity is located not in the artifacts per se or in the models on which they are based, but in the methods by which they were made--in a way of doing, which is a way of knowing, in a performance. The Village as a whole is based on this principle, which is taken to an extreme in the technique of first-person interpretation. It is as if the tool not only animated a hand, but also a total sensibility--and so fully, that using an adze to understand how it works extends from the hand to the body to the mind to the inner state and way of being in the world that constitutes the person who might have used the tool in 1627. The mementos in the giftshop acquire their authenticity from this chain of effects. What are the implications of Plimoth Plantation for the historical consciousness of actors and visitors alike? Forfeiting third person omniscience for the partiality of the first person seems a small price to pay, for what is lost in historical comprehensiveness is gained in immediacy and detail, in the completeness, and penetrability, of a small virtual world. The pilgrims live in a narrow strip of time defined by particular moments in 1627 and repeated annually, even though they work hard to create deeper and richer 'memory' of the years preceding. A major task of the pilgrims is to deny that which came after 1627, to deny the time that intervenes between 1627 and 1992. This puts the visitor in the fascinating position of seer into the future. It is not so much that the visitor enters the world of the pilgrim to experience 1627 (there are no doubt flashes when that happens, when the time machine as an instrument recedes from consciousness). Nor is it so much that 1992 confronts 1627. Rather, the visitor has the uncanny sense of seeing into the future, converting what he understands to be our past into the pilgrim's future. In a curious sense, actors and visitors collaborate in an historical imaginary that denies and jumbles time by sustaining one small slice of it indefinitely, even while abutting it with the present moment. It is in the nature of tourist productions to produce just such an effect. However persuasive the representation, finally what you experience is the site itself. The juxtaposition of simulation and tourist amenities, the intercalation of quotidians (theirs and ours), the breaking of frames, is deliberately engineered and a source of pleasure in its own right. The brochure instructs the visitor: "Upon your return from the Village and Homesite, take a break from the arduousness of Pilgrim living conditions before travelling to Mayflower II. Have a bite to eat in the Courtyard, Gainsborough Room or Picnic Pavilion." This is always a double experience, an experience of then and now, which enhances its role as historiographic corrective: "At the waterfront a double treat awaits you. After your visit to the Ship, enjoy authentic 17th-Century baked goods- -not at all the bland taste so often imagined--at the J. Barnes Bake Shop." History at Plimoth is so real you can taste it. Freeze frame, by making time stand still, also interrupts the inexorable narrative of origins in its tracks and displaces the unbroken line of its exclusive genealogy. Pilgrim displays past and present are in conflict, not only in relation to each other, but also internally. The refusal of the Wampanoag to pretend to be themselves, their refusal to give up actuality for virtuality, is but one indication. Snow's account of difficulties that arose when an African-American became part of the virtual village is another. Such tensions give the Pilgrim quotidian and its virtuality their ideologically charge. As Snow notes, the Pilgrim Village, billed as the "Living Museum of Everyman's History," is supposed to be more democratic because "Total history gives rhyme and reason to everyone in a historical community, the nobodies not less than the somebodies." Everyone is offered a chance to (re)live Pilgrim daily life in all its detail and elusiveness--or at least to walk among the living dead. But can the "democratizing effect" of Plimoth Plantation really remedy the exclusions and inequities of history? The recent Ellis Island Restoration faces the same problem. As does the Columbus Quincentennary. We are witnessing an era of historical identification by consent (and dissent), rather than descent. Sites long associated with a discrete historical experience and exclusive set of participants, whether Pilgrims landing at Plymouth Rock or immigrants coming through Ellis island, compete for the status of definitive master narrative. How shall the founding of the nation be told? Which site can be more inclusive, which is to say, more "democratic"? At Ellis Island, virtually anyone, no matter when he arrived in the United States or through which port, can pay $100 to have his name or the name of an ancestor inscribed on the American Immigrant Wall of Honor that rings the island--and that includes the Pilgrims and their descendents! Ellis Island, in a slick taxonomic move, has absorbed Plimoth. The rock is just another port of entry for just another group of immigrants. Just how all of this works is the subject of Performing the Pilgrims, which may well speak to the Nintendo generation in ways never anticipated.