Drama prof sees links between theatre and the military
BY RACHELLE COOPER
It's not surprising that thousands of people took part in the June D-Day re-enactments in France and that more than 500 re-enactors performed four days of battles from the War of 1812 in Wasaga Beach this summer, says Prof. Alan Filewod, English and Theatre Studies.
He has found in a new study that historical battles being restaged by people wearing authentic uniforms and carrying authentic weapons are a worldwide cultural phenomenon.
“Re-enactments are a transcultural, transnational practice that, in some respect, all cultures do,” says Filewod, who's writing a book on the subject. “There's no centre to it because it's everywhere. You can't categorize it because it's too huge, it's too vast. It's a human practice as widespread as music or art. I think everybody knows somebody who has something to do with re-enactments.”
Filewod has found more than 1,000 military re-enactment groups that have websites in the English-speaking world.
“People start out as collectors. They get an authentic Second World War uniform, then they find out how they can join a Second World War re-enactment chapter. Tens of thousands of people belong to the American Civil War chapters.”
Chapter members get together to train and elect officers. In private, they have more liberty to perform re-enactments more authentically because they don't have to comply with liability and insurance issues, says Filewod. They become so familiar with the role their character played that, when it comes time to perform a re-enactment, they don't really have to rehearse, he says.
“For ‘hard-core' re-enactors, the ideal is when, in uniform, they don't even think a thought that could have been created before the time period they're portraying.”
Filewod says the value of re-enactments is that they allow people to see how things would have occurred in the past.
“If you're wearing the same uniform and covering the same terrain at the same time of year, it allows you to work out what would have happened in the actual conditions.”
Most of the people involved in military re-enactments are men because that's largely who fought in the original battles, but Filewod says the men who take part in these events like to involve their wives and families.
“The events have an encampment culture. Families live in a camp together in the time period of the re-enactment. In Civil War re-enactments, women dress as prostitutes or nurses, and some play the women who disguised themselves as men so they could fight.”
Although he's found that people who take part in military re-enactments see themselves as personas rather than actors and believe they're giving an impression rather than a performance, Filewod believes the theatre and the army are closely related.
“They're both professional estates that have responsibilities to preserve, commemorate the nation and are based historically in male social displays. In a way, theatres are armies that don't kill, and armies are theatres that do. People who perform military re-enactments aren't really in the army and they're not really in the theatre, but they're at that point where the theatre and the army intersect.”
It's no accident that the military and the theatre use a lot of the same terminology, such as armies “deploying in theatres of operation” and “staging invasions,” says Filewod. Growing up in a military family himself, he always wanted to join the army, but when he turned 18, he decided on a career in the theatre because he thought it was the furthest thing from the army.
“Now, I realize that they mirror each other. It makes perfect sense that I went from one to the other.”
Much as in the military, directors or drama professors have extraordinary power over actors, he says. “In a regular class, if I said: ‘Stand on your head,' people would look at me like I was crazy, but in a theatre class or the army, they would stand on their head.”
