Memory-theater as cultural generativity:: Eslingena:: A musical in Toronto and Riga

Linking the concept of generativity to expressive culture as a communicative resource, this article asks how recontextualization shifts meanings. I focus on the reception by audiences in Toronto and Riga of Eslingena: A Musical, a play about life in a Latvian Displaced Persons camp in post-World War 11 Germany. North American audiences responded to Eslingena as performed memory. Anticipation of its performance in Riga suggested it might evoke countervailing memories that would trigger memory as a competition about suffering. Instead, Eslingena successfully mediated diasporic and homeland memories to produce a dialogue about agency grounded in differential experience.