Moving Bodies Moving Architecture

Abstract

This essay uses the Vietnam Veterans Memorial to trouble the critique that permanent, enduring architecture no longer effectively stands in for shared, collective memory. Dance studies and memory studies concern themselves with formations of epistemologies emerging outside traditional, text-based sources. For both fields, the performing body is a source of knowledge through which to respectively address the production of culture and the storage/transmission of memory. As such, I insert a dance studies optic, which approaches the body as a meaning-making force, into discourses of architecture as contextualized within practices of commemoration. By pairing investigations of the body as constructed in the archive-tracing processes of memorial production and with an analysis of visitors engaged in an embodied interaction with the actual memorial site, I argue that the Vietnam Veterans Memorial architecture and site harbors the capacity to mobilize into action, acting as a choreographic collaborator in the formation of bodily texts, which participate in memory discourse.