The large-scale historical pageant of Murowana Goslina is a new phenomenon, based upon a participatory framework, engaging a group of more than 300 local volunteers in reenacting events of Polish past. Initially a grass-roots initiative, it gained wide support and generous funding of the central government. The spectacle turned out familiar to the new, official version of history, understood as a set of templates of conservative values, nationalism and Catholic faith.
However, rather than on a conservative shift in official politics of memory, in my ethnographic fieldwork among actors I focus on historical imagination, or historicity, that emerges among them in the preformative circumstances of the show backstage. Through participatory observation and engagement in the spectacle preparations, I try to explain the way the imagined past is being constructed, enacted, how the past events are made live again, and how the links between the past, present and future are established in practice.
In this paper I will focus on one selected element of the backstage experience among volunteers and its influence on the emergent historicity – the constant, common and spontaneous drive to improve the show, its looks, the choreography, the details. I argue that this process of permanent modifications of the reenacted past can be understood in terms of performativity. Using Judith Butler's model of performative identity (2008) and Marshall Sahlins model of the dynamics of symbolic systems (2006) I suggest that the creative process of constant engagement in improving history guarantees that the perceived truths about the imagined past are in a constant social usage, they are actively acted upon and re-interpreted, constantly adapted to the shifting social reality. This, in turn, creates a situation where an underlying historical narrative becomes an uncontested source of a fixed matrix of values and beliefs, determining possible variations of national identities.
