Review: Ellouise Schoettler’s “Arlington National Cemetery: My Forever Home”

By Roger Thompson, Stony Brook University 

See Ellouise Schoettler’s Arlington National Cemetery: My Forever Home here. Start a discussion with Roger and others who’ve viewed the performance below.

roger
Roger Thompson

Two years ago, I visited my father-in-law at Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery in San Antonio. He had been buried in 1997, two months before I married his daughter, and since that time, neither I nor my wife had returned. For my wife, a visit was too complicated. The difficulties of family dynamics had, in his death, left her under a shadow whose boundaries she had yet to trace, and the fact that he had not made known to any of his family, even his own wife, that he had made plans to be buried alone in the military cemetery caused confusion and even anger. I did not share that family history, and though his secret decision seemed to me hurtful, it also seemed to me full of some meaning that needed to be honored, and at some point, understood. My trip to his grave was an attempt to help my wife try to tell her father’s story and choice of final resting place again, perhaps in a new way. It was also a way for me to try to, more than ten years after his death, reconnect with the person who would have been my father-in-law had cancer not claimed him in his fifties.

Screen shot 2013-11-04 at 12.48.32 PM
Screenshot from Schoettler’s Arlington

Connection is at the heart of Ellouise Schoettler’s story-telling, and I get the sense, watching her Arlington National Cemetery: My Forever Home that her visits to the resting place of both one of her daughters and her husband at Arlington National Cemetery is more than just, as she says at the end of her performance, “remembrance” of the dead. Her performance derives from the finest traditions of story-telling, and it is about animating the lives of the dead so that the living connect with them, understand them, and recognize them as neighbors breathing life into us like the first spring air that breaks winter. That Schoettler concludes her nearly hour-long rumination on death without so much as mentioning the word “death” is testament to the fact that she’s actually more interested in life, or that, more accurately, she is interested in collapsing the line between life and death in order to make it so thin that marking out its boundaries is like trying to distinguish one brilliant white marble headstone from among all the others in their perfect rows. Step in close, you will see the firmly etched name of an individual.  Look up and cast your eyes around, and you will see only the collapsing certainty of the white rows.

Schoettler’s story-telling is complex. While it leans on a sentimentalism like that from Keillor’s mythical Lake Wobegon, it doesn’t rest in that place.  Instead, it complicates such sentimentality by the use of remarkable juxtaposition.  Her narrative opens with the burial of one of her children nearly fifty years ago, and that story is the force that moves her toward the burial of her husband in 2012 after more than fifty years of marriage. As her story moves onward, she punctuates the family remembrance with stories of her future “neighbors,” those who are buried next to her husband, her child, and one day her. These are reminisces of death, beautifully told, and in each case, focused not on the loss, but on the breathing, loving, and continuing lives of those left behind.  Arlington is transformed in these narratives, then, into a community that bustles with energy. It is no less lonely than any other cemetery (the image of survivors sitting next to their loved ones’ headstones repeats in her tales), but, unlike other stories of loss and loneliness, there is in Schoetller’s Arlington the certainty (not merely possibility) of reunion, connection, resolution, and perhaps even peace.

The most striking of the juxtapositions gestures toward this certainty.  Schoettler is driving into Arlington on one of her many trips to see her husband, and as she drives toward the grave, she is overrun by a mass of twelve year old children. They are on a field trip, and they roll toward her like a wave up the road. She pulls over to let them pass, and as they do, she engages one of their teachers in conversation. They are here on a field trip, having driven in from New Jersey, and after seeing the tomb of the Unknown Soldier, they are making their way to lay a wreath at the grave of an alumnus of the school who had been recently killed in Afghanistan. The children, of course, are full of life, darting along, laughing, running, enjoying a warm day out and away from school, and yet, despite their clatter, they are “beautiful” to Schoettler, their sounds pressing life into the sacred space. They are also the exact opposite of the dignified procession of her husband’s burial related earlier in her narrative, and while she makes no comparison explicit on this point, it is impossible in listening to her relate the story of the field trip, not to have in one’s mind the contrasting images of the flag-draped carriage drawn by Marines down the road and the bubbling mass of children swarming up it. One image focuses on ritual and silence, the other on buzzing and blissful chaos.  Maybe more, it is also impossible for me not to hear in that story the recovered voice of her own daughter, chattering above the earth. She begins the performance with the death of her child, and as her narrative weaves its way to a conclusion, the mass of children arrive, crowding her out, pushing her to the side to make way for their almost impossible joy in summer. Her loss, then, is new life not only for herself and her family, but for her child, who lives now in her listeners, and she essentially erases the line that separates us from the dead.  We hear them as well as the children. We hear her as well as her child and husband.  We hear the story of parents, children, warriors, and civilians as they spin out from Schoettler’s tales, and we are ultimately witness to their enduring parade.      

Grounded: a review by Eduardo Ramirez

This fall, Susannah Martin directed George Brant’s play Grounded at the San Francisco Playhouse. Eduardo Ramirez, MSgt, USAF (Retired) attended one of the showings thanks to the complimentary tickets Kirk Johnson and Nickie Braucher of the SF Playhouse offered free of charge for veterans. As follows, Ramierz shares his brief review of the play:

Lauren English played a US Air Force, Major, F-16 Fighter Pilot’s like a true military professional.  The opening lines took me back to the days of my 22 years as an Airman. I relived my Air Force experience though the roles of Lauren. GROUNDED is a hard view of the realities facing our Women in Combat, wife, motherhood, career, PTSD, war, all factors facing today’s women in the military. War is hell but having to fight it from a trailer stateside is worst, daytime warrior, nighttime wife and mother, a hard life to live. Lauren brought the true spirit of what our military faces daily, whether it’s a deployment to the dessert, or leaving your family behind GROUNDED was real and Lauren brought it to life.

I salute Mr. Brant, Mrs. Martin, the Staff of GROUNDED and Lauren English, on behalf of all service men and women, veterans past and present. Thank you…

Eduardo “Eddie” Ramierz, MPA MSgt, USAF (Ret)

SF Playhouse poster
SF Playhouse poster

The Arts and the Military: Dominic Fredianelli, by Tara Leigh Tappert

The work to launch the Arts and the Military/Arts, Military + Healing (AMH) week in the Washington, DC area this past May is beginning to do what we all had hoped it would do — the event is inspiring new and exciting ventures throughout the country, as well as bringing tremendous press coverage to the work of Combat Paper Project.

On view this fall were two Combat Paper Project exhibitions in galleries at two different campuses of the University of Maryland:

Click here and here to view the gallaries.

Denise Merringolo, a public history professor who teaches at the Baltimore campus, attended the AMH event at the Corcoran Gallery of Art and School of Art + Design.  Moved by the Combat Paper exhibition on view at the Corcoran, shortly thereafter she began pursuing the possibility of a show on the UMBC campus for the fall, 2012 semester.  Her show then propelled Jason Hughes, a student curator and artist on the College Park campus, to request another Combat Paper show for the Stamp Gallery in the student union.  On December 5, 2012, an amazing critique of the UMBC exhibit, written by Bret Mccabe, was published in the Baltimore City Paper.

Mccabe began his review with a piece created by veteran/artist Dominic Fredanielli who participated in the Corcoran’s Combat Paper Project workshop this past May.  The genesis of Dom’s involvement in the  Arts and the Military/AMH event began nearly a year earlier when I attended the 2011 Silverdocs film festival and saw the Emmy award winning Where Soldiers Come From.

Set in a small town in Northern Michigan, and in the mountains of Afghanistan, the film follows the four-year journey of childhood friends, including Dom, who return as 23-year-old veterans dealing with Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) and PTSD.  While this documentary beautifully captures the coming of age of these young men, there is another story woven like a “red thread” through the film — the artwork of Dominic Fredianelli and how he uses art making to cope with his war experiences.  Care 4 Me . . . I’ll Remember You is the piece Dom made in the Corcoran’s Combat Paper Project workshop.  It is a memento mori to his friend Josh Wheeler who went to war but did not make his way through the trauma when he came back home.  Josh was killed in a car accident. He is acknowledged in the closing credits of Where Soldiers Come From, and also in Dom’s Care 4 Me . . . I’ll Remember You, an amazing image on Combat Paper that is now a part of the                         Combat Paper Project Exhibitions Collection.

Dominic is continuing to work as a practicing artist.  Since the Arts and the Military/AMH week he has created murals in Chicago and in Santa Barbara — the first for the National Veterans Art Museum and the second for the University of California at Santa Barbara.

We thank all our collaborators and sponsors who support the Arts and Military/AMH event, and whose mission is to help those service members and veterans dealing with both visible and invisible wounds of war.

Tara Leigh Tappert, JME Art Editor and Founder, The Arts and the Military.