The Battle of Orgreave (1984)

The coming together of performance, art and heritage is nothing new. However, all too often they are separated out through their own disciplinary concerns, so the opportunity to examine their shared values is less frequent. And whilst performance and heritage studies have explored the affecting potential of coming together to engage with traumatic sites of memory, there is still much more to do to consider what recent participatory art practices can contribute to this subject (Taylor 2008). In particular, whilst performance and heritage studies were exploring the necessity of finding shared values in protecting and safeguarding intangible forms of practice in the first decade of the millennium, contemporary art was similarly engaging in new forms of thinking about participation and documentary forms of history (Bishop 2012; Taylor 2016). The 'participatory turn' in contemporary art seemed to gamer little response from critical heritage studies, however. This chapter explores one such project that encouraged the use of participation and performance in exploring a recent historical trauma.