Performing Processions: Premonitions and palimpsests

Abstract

Aligning historic modes of public performance and participation with anthropological theory that questions the hegemony of Western linear notions of time, this article considers processional performance as a way of looking forwards and back simultaneously through analysis of two case studies of work. Blast Theory's Spit Spreads Death: The Parade (2019), a performance procession including interactive light and sound, took place on the streets of Philadelphia acting as a memorial and celebration of the 20,000 lives that were lost in the city during the Spanish flu epidemic 101 years ago to the day on the 28 September after the Liberty Loan Parade. Six months later, the most deadly virus in living memory, the COVID-19 pandemic, spread around the world and Blast Theory's performance procession seemed to be not only a memorial of the lives lost in the previous epidemic, but a premonition of what was to come. Guyanese-British artist Hew Locke's installation The Procession (2022) snaked around the marble columns of the Duveen gallery at Tate Britain London. Described by Laura Cumming as a procession of the ‘never-ending theatre of humanity’ (2022), this installation of over 150 figures leading towards a pavilion adorned with images of colonial buildings in Guyana both encapsulates and performs a palimpsest of stories of slavery, migration and the movement of people. Rebecca Schneider suggests that it is in the future that our pasts await us: our responses, revisions, or refusals (2018). Analysing these two examples of artworks of premonition and palimpsest, this article argues that processional performance can disrupt linear temporal narratives and memorialize in a way that expands and complicates narratives of sadness, remembering and grief.