The Camouflage Project
2014
- “Memory and Remembrance: Following the Women of the SOE” presented by Lesley Ferris and Mary Tarantino at NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, for the conference Following the Fighting Women In Asia and Europe during and after World War II, Wassenaar, NL
- “The Angels of History: Memorializing the Women of the Special Operations Executive” essay by Lesley Ferris and Mary Tarantino, book chapter for Working Memory: Women and Work in World War II (forthcoming).
2012
- The Camouflage Project: 2012 Center for Cryptologic History Tour, a 55-minute touring rendering of the original production, is performed at the University of Maryland at the request of the National Cryptologic Museum Foundation.
- Lecturer and Discussion at the National Security Agency's Center for Cryptologic History.
2011
- “The Camouflage Project: Cryptology in a Performance | Exhibition,” presented by Mary Tarantino at Johns Hopkins University, Cryptology in War and Peace: Crisis Points in History, bi-annual conference.
- The Camouflage Project premieres at The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio.
- The Camouflage Project Symposium is held May 19-21. Highlights include:
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Jenny Morgan, documentary filmmaker, screening of Behind Enemy Lines: The Other Charlotte Grays
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Juliette Pattinson, University of Strathclyde, presents the Keynote: “Passing as a French native: Camouflaging the British body in Occupied France”
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Kate Vigurs, Imperial War Museum consultant, University of Leeds, presents “Post War Representations: Memorializing the Women of SOE F-Section", moderated by Anna Birch, Royal Conservatoire of Scotland Performance and Technology Research
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Rita Kramer, independent scholar and author of Flames in the Field: The Story of Four SOE Agents in Occupied France, New York, presents “Stumbling Into History: Reflections on the Search for Historical Identity”
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Roy Behrens, University of Iowa, presents “Camouflage as Art and Illusion”, moderated by William Childs, The Ohio State University Department of History
- M.F.A. Actors develop the initial script for The Camouflage Project in a course on devising.
2010
- M.F.A. Actors use a research course to learn more about the agents, their training and the war.
- M.F.A. Actors and undergraduate students participating in The Ohio State University London Theatre Program develop a staged reading which is performed at Teatro Technis.
- Principal Investigators Lesley Ferris and Mary Tarantino find themsevles standing at the gates of the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp site, with Rita Kramer’s book in their hands, following the steps of the four women who died there in July 1944.
- Video interviews were conducted with M.R.D. Foot, SOE's official historian, Noreen Riols, a former F-Section SOE “secretary” who did more training than she did secretarial work, and Tania Szabó, the daughter of SOE agent Violette and French Foreign Legion Officer Etienne Szabó.
- Research continues with support from consultants Dr. Roderick Bailey, Roy R. Behrens, Dr. William Childs, Peter Cutts, Rita Kramer, John Mueller and Nicholas Rankin.
2009
Initial discussion about The Camouflage Project begins after Principal Investigators Lesley Ferris and Mary Tarantino discover several books. The first was Etta Shiber’s 1943 memoir Paris-Underground that gave an account of her efforts with her French companion Kitty, to help nearly 200 British soldiers escape occupied France. This book initiated a search for other stories in which women played a central, but hidden role in the war effort. A second book was Agnes Humbert’s Résistance: Memoirs of Occupied France, an account of her work in helping to organize one of the first groups of the French Resistance. Sarah Helm’s A Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins and the Missing Agents of WWII provided a gripping tale on the events in France and England. Rita Kramer’s Flames in the Field: The Story of Four SOE Agents in Occupied France provided a specific focus for this project: Andrée Borrel, Vera Leigh, Sonia Olschanezky and Diana Rowden, the four women killed at Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp.
In their research they also discovered that art and theatre practice were central to the war effort. Nicholas Rankin’s Churchill’s Wizards: The British Genius for Deception, 1914–1945 introduced them to the history of camouflage and clandestine warfare. Artists and theatre designers were recruited to assist in a variety of ways, from developing camouflage technique to designing fake armies to fool the Germans. Leo Marks’s Between Silk and Cyanide: A Codemaker’s War, 1941–1945 articulated a clear connection between codes and the Special Operations Executive (SOE) agents he helped to train.
Further research and historical digging provides many stories to tell; stories that cannot be contained within a conventional theatrical space. So, out of necessity, the creative team has re-imagined the stage as a multi-sited space, not neatly bifurcated into performance and exhibition, but with numerous overlapping areas. Theatre, the art form of ghosts, has the ability to transport these silenced and invisible figures into the light of contemporary discourse.
Thus, The Camouflage Project is conceived as a three-part interdisciplinary endeavor:
Performance: Devise a new performance work as a collaboration between The Ohio State University Department of Theatre and the Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design (ACCAD). The Camouflage Project is envisioned as a multi-media work combining digital animations and video projections with experimental use of 3D printing, 3D scanning and projection mapping.
Exhibition: Create a visual environment parallel to the performance space, which will have a second life as an installation/exhibition. The installation will feature historical background (interviews and soldier training films) on the science and art of camouflage in both World Wars organized around a visual study of selected SOE (principally female) agents and espionage circuits in France, examples of military equipment, devices, disguises, gadgets and weapons of deception.
Symposium: Organize and host an international symposium on the multiple artistic and instrumental meanings of camouflage. The symposium will feature panels of Ohio State and international experts from military history, political science, and the Imperial War Museum addressing the subject of camouflage and the SOE.