Description
This paper explores the (re)scripting and performance of war in public through investigation of of the spaces occupied, relationships forged, and performances staged by the British Army in collaboration with Artists towards the development, launch, and staging of the 2017, 2018, and 2019 Army@Fringe programmes occurring within the annual Edinburgh Festivals. Sponsored by the British Army in Scotland as a means to close the ‘civil-military gap’, ‘facilitate conversations about war, conflict and the role of the British Army in the modern world’, and devised in cooperation with Edinburgh Fringe Festival Art Managers, Army@Fringe emerges as a crucial site for negotiating and staging the performance of embodied – gendered, sexualized, and racialized – experiences and memoirs of war. Drawing on extensive fieldwork ethnographies and interviews conducted throughout the 2017 and 2018 Festivals with key stakeholders including Army personnel, artists, audiences, and Edinburgh Fringe Festival venue programmers , in this paper we posit that despite the official self-representation of Army@Fringe as a platform for military-civilian dialogue and the Army’s self-positioning as an inclusive, multicultural, and ‘compassionate’ institution, a combination of mechanisms of 1) Army/Artist co-optation, self-policing, and co-performance and 2) a structuring frame of Military Family – Familiar Military work to reinforce existing hierarchies within the British Army and beyond into civil society contributing to the ongoing naturalization of soldiering and militarism instead of opening up spaces for civil-military dialogue and debate.
