Pedagogy, performativity and ‘never again’: staging plays from the Terezín Ghetto

Abstract

ABSTRACTAs collaborators on the project Performing the Jewish Archive we worked with students in the US and in the UK to devise two separate peformances based on a script from the Terezín Ghetto (in German, Theresienstadt) titled Comedy about a Trap. By developing with them what we call ‘co-textual’ scenes, we engaged in a type of performance pedagogy that we hope will achieve lasting transformation: the students created and performed a relationship between the script, their new knowledge of the past and their own views in the present, leading to transformative insights regarding the lives of the prisoners and the need for action today.