What is the future of literature studies, especially modernist research studies? According to Sasha Colby, it is the implementation of performance and performative studies. Sasha Colby's Staging Modernist Lives: H.D., Mina Loy, Nancy Cunard, Three Plays and Criticism explores the current state of theatre and performance along with three biographical plays dealing with the histories of significant modernist authors Hilda Doolittle, Mina Loy and Nancy Cunard.
The first part of the book, titled ‘Staging Modernist Lives: Theory and Practice’, focuses on why and how to integrate fine arts and humanities through creative forces. Colby discusses how Joseph Roach engaged this idea at the inaugural session of the Mellon School of Theater and Performance Research at Harvard University. According to Roach, ‘The poetics I have in mind is predicated on the re-integration of the arts into the humanities (for they have become separated unnecessarily, I think) with the methodological help from the sciences’ (p. 3). The UK and Europe have steadily integrated the fine arts and performance into scholarly research over the past twenty years but gaining momentum elsewhere is essential to target larger and more diverse public audiences (p. 5). Colby analyses various sides of this notion and research by citing Richard Schechner, Mike Pearson, Michael Shanks, Julia A. Walker and Stanley Fish. Colby locates how these concepts, including anti-performative bias, were viewed as early as Plato and recur in early modernism.
Colby defines two types of research theatre: performance-based research, ‘which can be defined as the pursuit of knowledge through theatrical methods such as improvisation and enactment’, and ‘research-based performance – the dramatization of literary knowledge that we have already acquired through more traditional forms of inquiry’ (p. 13). After giving examples of both, Colby discusses her methods behind three biographical plays that she wrote: The Tree, The Mina Loy Interviews and These Were the Hours. Before looking more specifically at her own research and intentions when writing each play, she returns to the idea of communicating the function and value of literature for the future of literary research.
In her essay leading up to The Tree titled ‘H.D.’s Autobiographical Theatre’, Colby explains that ‘the play, like H.D.’s most liferesonant writing, is created in the tradition of the kunstlerroman, especially in its attention to early influences and experiences’ (p. 29). The play is a twenty-five-character, one-performer play that begins with Hilda talking with her doctor/analyst Erich Heydt in Switzerland in 1953. The first major question asked by Heydt is if Doolittle knows Ezra Pound. The core of this play seems to be Doolittle's relationship with Pound, who is mentioned and/or a character in the other two plays as well as being considered the core of modernism and the Lost Generation. The play moves from Doolittle's childhood to the time she was sixty-seven years old, and explores moments dealing with significant relationships and major world events, often citing poems and writings of Doolittle's, including Bid Me to Live, Paint It Today and End to Torment.
Colby introduces The Mina Loy Interviews with the essay ‘Performance, Performativity, and the Search for Mina Loy’. Included in The Mina Loy Interviews are poems, letters, an interview with the Evening Sun in 1917 and a tape-recorded interview combined; these serve as Colby's frame for the play. The play features a researcher in an archive looking at these two interviews along with film excerpts. The archivist's final words – ‘Speaking as you, forty years from now … the archives tell you something. It's mostly fragments, in the end. There aren't a lot of stories, not complete ones’ – articulates what researchers and readers experience when analysing (auto)biographies and literature, while the performance brings the reader/audience closer to the subject matter and to understanding (p. 194).
Colby's essay ‘Nancy Cunard and the Heterotopic Stage’ establishes how Cunard fought for democracy and civil rights while turning her back on her wealthy shipping-fortune family. Her play, These Were the Hours, begins in Normandy, France, in 1928 with Nancy Cunard making strides to begin her printing company in order to publish avant-garde writers and builds from Colby's mission statement of research-based performance. It highlights what Colby has found most vital from Cunard's tumultuous relationships, activism and writings.
Colby concludes Staging Modernist Lives by reiterating the purpose and methods of research theatre. She states,
Within this book, three methods of dramatizing modernist structures and materials have been explored … As these descriptions imply, what is at play here is the balance between quotation and creation. Equally, the style and substance of the work of each individual writer create challenges and opportunities for both research-based performance and performance-based research. (p. 297)
Staging Modernist Lives by Sasha Colby is interdisciplinary and multifaceted. What allows Colby's work to stand apart is the inclusion of the plays themselves, allowing for a broad spectrum of interest in scholarly development and integration of the arts.
