Claire Warden [CW]: Could you briefly explain who you are and what you do?

Jessica Walker [JW]: I’m Dr Jessica Walker. I am a singer and writer. I trained at the Guildhall as an opera singer. I then diversified away into writing, initially for my own performance. I felt strangely unfulfilled creatively and had reached an age when I was confident enough to start creating myself. And I haven't looked back. I then started researching my own work because it struck me that as a classically trained singer I was in a unique position. Generally, classically trained singers are quite passive in their work; they wait to be employed. Given that I was creating my own projects, I wanted to work out what was shifting in terms of my creative autonomy and the agency that lent me in my own career.

I also looked at it in terms of the structures I was working in, how independent artists have become somewhat subservient to arts organisations. So unwittingly I became very politicised in this process. I hadn't anticipated this as an outcome; I was just interested in taking things apart in a practice-as-research process. But I came out the other side completely changed. It changed the work I made but also my attitudes to the nature of work itself: what being an art worker means and how you are uniquely exploitable. It's been a really interesting process for me because everything coalesced in a way I hadn't expected. It made me want to empower the next generation of artists which has led to me working at the Royal Academy of Music in artist development, where the one thing I say to my students is ‘who are you as an artist? That is your starting point.’ They look at me as though I am completely mad, because they just want to go and practise their violin for eight hours, but after a bit of time, they do get what I am talking about. So, I have been on a massive journey over the past ten years from solely being an employed opera singer to doing all these different things.

CW: How have you assimilated the legacy of modernism into your work?

JW: When I started creating work I was looking at why I wanted to sing.

As I write the introduction to this section on remembrance and reconfiguration, I feel somewhat surrounded by memorial. During the development of this volume, we have celebrated the emergence of dada (1918), a reimagining of what language might or might not mean, and the founding of the Bauhaus (1919), which transformed architecture and design. 2022, the year we conclude the preparation of this manuscript, is modernism's annus mirabilis, 100 years since the publication of James Joyce's Ulysses and T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. While these centenaries are engendering celebrations, in the public imagination at least, these years are perhaps recognised more readily as markers of a century since the horrors of the Great War. In fact, all these memorialisations are fractured and fraught. In an artistic sense, the move away from (or at least weakening of) the canon has meant these anniversaries demand a more nuanced approach, a commitment to uncovering ‘lost’ artworks and figures obscured by the domineering modernist behemoths for so long. How to commemorate the Great War remains deeply problematic; jingoism and uncritical nationalism – two trends we certainly do not need more of in the 2020s – so often creep in.

Modernism was infused with the troublesome matters of remembrance and reconfiguration from its inception. Despite Ezra Pound's determination to ‘make it new’, modernism – whether the Variety Theatre sensibility of the futurists or the harking back to ancient Greece by Isadora Duncan – is constantly playing with the past. More than this, for all its professed modernity and futurity, modernism is more regularly defined by ‘memorial culture’. The proximity of death, war and violent revolution infiltrates not only the modernist imagination but also the landscape with statues, sculptures and gymnasiums erected to memorialise the dead.

Indeed, it is impossible to escape the memorialising fingerprints of modernism in our contemporary landscape, though many of these traces are defined, not by the excitement of aesthetic experimentation or scientific wonder, but by mourning and melancholia. Alongside the Children's Peace Monument in Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park (Figure 1.1), for example, an image of youthful optimism for the future, stands the Hiroshima Peace Memorial itself (Figure 1.2). The former Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Hall is a modernist building, built in 1915 and designed by the Czech architect Jan Letzel.

In 1939, on the cusp of the Second World War, W. H. Auden wrote three elegies: ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’, ‘In Memory of Sigmund Freud’ and ‘In Memory of Ernst Toller’. The last is a melancholic ode to the exiled German poet, playwright and activist whom Auden and his collaborator Christopher Isherwood met in 1935 in Sintra, Portugal, while writing their play The Ascent of F6. In his essay collection Exhumations, Isherwood remembered Toller as ‘beautiful, with the immediately striking, undeniable beauty of a peacock, or a great lady of the theatre […] He was all that I had hoped for – more brilliant, more convincing than his books, more daring than his most epic deeds.’

Auden's poem presents Toller, who took his own life at the Mayflower Hotel in New York in May 1939, as one of the ‘war-horses’, an ‘example to the young’. Here Auden suggests a potential legacy for the suffering artist, a legacy that might escape from the lonely hotel room where he languished in debt, haunted by images of children wounded and scarred by the Spanish Civil War. ‘What was it, Ernst,’ Auden asks, ‘that your shadow unwittingly said?’ This chapter takes Auden's question as its catalyst to track what indeed it was that Toller's shadow unwittingly said and continues to say to British theatre. Later in the poem he encourages Toller to ‘lie shadowless’, to rest and allow the next generation to take up the mantle. The shadows had haunted him and, for Auden, led to his death. And yet, the question of what Toller left behind, the silhouette he casts, stands. For Toller's work has a fascinating yet broken legacy on the British stage. In the 1920s his plays enjoyed unrivalled popularity amongst leftist theatre companies eager to discover activist voices that were also aesthetically experimental. Falling out of popularity, Toller was rediscovered in the 1980s and 1990s, and retains an influence over twenty-first-century theatre too. In this chapter I track this historiography, claiming Toller's combination of poetry and politics as the key reason for his appeal.

In approaching the question of whether modernism is still alive, meaningful and salient in contemporary theatre – and if so, how so – the editors of this volume have had the opportunity to discuss our own experiences in theatres around the world over the past twenty years. We have identified most often as audience members, but also as practitioners, facilitators, allies, critics and academics, in a rich variety of cultural contexts across four continents. What these conversations have revealed is a remarkable commonality that pre-dates our collaboration and marks one way of articulating the genesis of this book: each of us reports multiple occasions of sensing the presence of ‘modernism’ (as we understood it at the time) while experiencing a piece of theatre that is ostensibly new. This not only occurred in the case of obvious or external linkages, where the source material or dramaturgy explicitly referenced the avant-gardes of the early twentieth century, but also emerged in unanticipated locales, contexts and situations, often in cases where the rhyme between centuries seemed unconscious on the part of the makers.

In online pandemic-era theatre, we found a strange revenge of naturalism (in work that surrounds actors with their own objects) alongside resonance with surrealism (in work that foregrounds the inner life of those objects), despite assurances that livestreaming marked a new era of drama. At experimental theatre festivals in Cairo and Fez, we saw non-narrative work composed mainly of coloured light and geometric shapes – except in lieu of referencing the Bauhaus, these works deployed abstraction to navigate political censorship. In the English theatre, we saw grotesquery and anarchy on stage that ostensibly owed a debt to Alfred Jarry – except the drama graduates who made the work in question claimed never to have heard of Ubu Roi. In the Irish theatre, we saw fierce young companies appear to rediscover the anti-audience activities of dada and futurism and marry them to the earnestness and eschatology of expressionism – except everyone said their strongest influence was the postdramatic, defined as whatever is happening in Berlin.

While modernism seemed to keep arising by surprise, was it also disappearing from the places we would expect to find it?

In Moscow stands the Shabolovka Radio Tower. Designed by Vladimir Shukhov during the Russian Civil War and completed in 1922, it is emblematic of a proletarianinspired avant-garde, not only in its design (reminiscent of the famous constructivist tower designed by Vladimir Tatlin in 1920), but also in its purpose: to affect the masses by transmitting radio waves across the new Soviet state. The tower still stands, rusting and decrepit – an obsolete yet strikingly beautiful emblem of modernism that perseveres despite the ever-encroaching city.

Radio towers, many of which are still etched on our landscapes, were icons of modernity and technological progress in the early twentieth century, enabling a wide(r)-scale transmission of information and culture. As a broadcast medium, radio was a ‘vital source of entertainment and information implicated in complex networks of transmission, reception and feedback’, notes Ian Whittington in his book on the BBC during the Second World War. Radio also provided a ready means for propaganda and misinformation to enter the home. Melissa Dinsman observes that radio was, and remains, a ‘medium historically connected to both the transmission of language and the military’, reminding us that modern mass media and communication technologies (including telephony, television and, more recently, the internet and social media) can be diverting and emancipatory as well as potentially destructive and repressive.

Transmission is a tremendously generative keyword for both modernity and modernism, and it has special purchase in theatre and dance. Technologically enabled transmission of information, ideas and culture is not unique to modernity, of course, but new forms of media, such as radio, meant that transmission could happen more quickly and at greater scale; such transmission could also be more egalitarian in terms of access. Modernity supercharged a human universal – the conveyance of information from person to person, place to place, and generation to generation. This is fundamental to culture, which, as George Steiner notes, depends on ‘the transmission of meaning across time’ as well as ‘the transfer of meaning in space’. In modernity new technologies and infrastructures, including those pertaining to transportation (trains, cars, aeroplanes), altered spatio-temporal experience and led to increased and enhanced opportunities for informational and cultural exchange.

In 1938, Stephen Spender imagined a ‘revolution in the ideas of drama’, a theatre that could both deal with the complex socio-politics of the decade and take on new aesthetic challenges. The trouble, of course, was what this drama might look like in practice. In fact, in addressing the multifarious artistic and political disputes of this period, drama in the 1930s resists easy critical definition, residing in a liminal sense betwixt and between positions, terminology, and aesthetics. It can be read as highbrow, lowbrow, or middlebrow, with many individual examples flitting between these permeable categories.