Introducing the Team: Angela Bartie
I am one of the co-investigators on the Redress of the Past project. I’m a lecturer in History and a core member of the Scottish Oral History Centre team in the School of Humanities at the University of Strathclyde.
I’ve come a bit later to historical pageants than other members of the team. For a number of years I’ve worked on the history of arts festivals, specifically the Edinburgh Festivals (which includes the ‘official’ international Festival as well as the more ‘rebellious’ Fringe), Clyde Fair International (a short-lived festival of the west of the Scotland), and Mayfests (annual popular arts Festivals in Glasgow). I’ve published a book, The Edinburgh Festivals: the Arts and Society in Post-war Britain, and a number of chapters in edited collections on this subject. My interest is not just in the origins and development of these festivals, but what they can tell us about broader social and cultural change in modern Britain. I use the annual festivals as a ‘lens’ through which to explore these shifts, a large and ever changing stage if you like, through which we can observe clashes over the meanings of ‘culture’ and ‘the arts’, as well as instances of ‘moral conflict’ – especially during the upheavals of the 1960s. For example, a theatrical happening involving a naked woman being wheeled across the gallery of McEwan Hall during the International Drama Conference of 1963 provoked concern about the social changes associated with the 1960s finding their way from London onto Scottish soil. It also focused anxiety about the influence of ‘godless’ artists and writers, and raised major questions about morality and religiosity in Scotland: the young woman concerned was charged and taken to court for ‘acting in a shameless and indecent manner’! My research has shown that we can discover so much by exploring the arts, and especially the dramatic arts.
So, when Mark and Paul contacted me to discuss their research on historical pageants and to ask if I was interested in joining the team for the Redress of the Past project I was intrigued. Having read lots on theatre in Britain for my research, I had to admit I hadn’t come across much about historical pageants and knew very little about them. But the subject chimed with my interests in theatrical representations of the past and community arts, and the avenues I had peeked into but hadn’t gone down during my research on the Edinburgh Festivals. This was especially true of the ways in which the official Festival’s opening and closing ceremonies (and other performances) presented the history of Edinburgh and Scotland more broadly to audiences and visitors. Indeed, the interactions – and, at times, tensions – between local, regional, national and international identities played out in this international Festival helped to shape both the Festival and the Fringe and formed an important thread in my book. The approach – using historical pageants to explore broader themes – and the themes themselves -local, regional and national identities, questions about heritage, nostalgia and the place of the past in communities and organisations, and the changing character of community life – all offered a fantastic fit with both my approach to research and my interests in the past.
And as if that wasn’t enough to tempt me, I discovered that historical pageants are incredible, diverse and really fascinating events in their own right. I was staggered to discover a pageant in Glasgow that called for 7000 performers and a grandstand holding 16,000 audience members - in 1928! I’m looking forward to seeing what else we discover about pageants, about our changing relationship with the past (and the interplay between past and present), and about twentieth (and twenty-first) century society.