Commemorating Lee Roloff

ABSTRACT

Leland (“Lee”) H. Roloff made a profound impact on his students, colleagues, and friends. Detailing that impact reveals the ways the labors of commemoration both succumb to and challenge the view of performance as that which disappears. This personal memorial essay uses accounts of Lee Roloff’s pedagogy, references to the Greek myths and formulations of indigenous peoples, American poetry, the Jungian practice of sandplay therapy, and Lee’s own scholarship to discuss and celebrate his legacy.

KEYWORDS:

• Leland H. Roloff
• memory
• mentoring
• mourning
• performance of poetry
• sandplay therapy
• storytelling

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 In the mid- to late 1980s, Lee added his mother's maiden name as a hyphenated prefix to “Roloff.” She was of Swiss ancestry and he was, he said, “letting his Swissness live”: a performative connection to both his mother and to Swiss C.G. Jung, whose psychoanalytic theories were central to Roloff's own analytical practice and theoretical approach to performance.

2 The transposition of “told” and “lived” from Lee's 1979 essay “The story Told, the Story Lived” to his 2005 article “The Story Lived   …   The Story Told   …  Haboo” is a poignant one. Lee was very deliberate about his titles, and he was not in denial about his approaching mortality. In moving “lived” to the fore of the later essay, he marked the passage of the years and the stories that lived him as surely as those he told and lived through. This was part of his interest in the integrity and importance of passive voice as a reflection of experience. In a conference paper written for presentation at the National (then “Speech”) Communication Association in Chicago in 1986, he wrote, “It is important in any theory of performance or the study of performance to affirm the truthfulness of the active and passive voices. I perform, but also, I am performed” (“The Myth of Performance” 1).