Forgetting as an act of remembering

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the well-known Uncle Sam figure reappeared to call Americans back to a collective effort. His pointed finger first appeared during World War I to encourage military service. More than a century later, he appeared in public health messages urging Americans to wash their hands and stand 6 feet apart.

For Madeline Fanton, this shift demonstrates how performance can help a nation remember its past while simultaneously setting history aside. As the Debra Martin Chase Assistant Professor of Film Media Theater at Mount Holyoke College, Fanton studies the relationship between memory, performance and national identity. She notes that during the pandemic, Uncle Sam no longer defined patriotism through war but through a new set of behaviors intended to protect public health. “What do we remember about the past, and how does performance help us remember and also strategically help us forget certain things?” she asks. This process, she continues, allows nations to construct cohesive ideas about who they are.

Fanton’s interest in human behavior began as an undergraduate drama student at the University of California, Irvine. She was drawn to questions about what motivates people, whether real or imagined. Later, during her master’s program, she developed an interest in Irish literature and drama, focusing particularly on how those works engage with Irish nationalism and the struggle for independence.

Fanton intended to continue studying Irish drama during her doctoral work at the University of California, Santa Barbara. However, when the pandemic made international travel and archival research impossible, she redirected her questions toward the United States and its limited cultural memory of World War I.

Fanton’s research examines how performances helped Americans remember, reinterpret and sometimes forget the war. Political and cultural appeals to restore an idealized past, she argues, require us to question what has been removed from that version of history. “What do you have to forget?” she asks. “What do you have to erase from the picture of the past in order to sell this idea?”

In her acting classes, Fanton’s first priority is building an ensemble. Her students spend the opening weeks learning to take risks together before progressing to open scenes and partnered scene work. By the end of the semester, pairs perform scenes from different sections of the same play, allowing the class to compare how multiple actors interpret the same characters.

In her class on performance history, Fanton compares Greek drama with Sanskrit drama and other global traditions. Her students examine theories of what makes a successful play and consider what theatrical works reveal about the places and times in which they originated. A modern production of “Antigone,” she notes, inevitably performs different cultural and political work than the play did when it was staged in Ancient Greece.

Mount Holyoke offered Fanton what she calls a “unicorn job” — a position bridging theater, film, media, scholarship, teaching, acting and directing. She was also drawn to the close relationships possible within a liberal arts college. “I really love teaching college students,” Fanton recounts. “It’s one of my great joys to walk alongside them as they become adults.”