Thoughts about Reenactment

Twenty years ago, Peggy Phelan defined the ontology of performance art as “representation without reproduction”, an art whose only life is in the present, which “becomes itself through disappearance” (Phelan 1993:146). According to her, it is a form of art which cannot be saved, recorded or documented – which cannot participate in the representations of representations. In other words, it cannot be reenacted. But is that really so? What has changed since then in our notion of the possibility to reproduce performances? In recent years, we witness a growing interest in that question.

This current issue deals with reproduction in its various manifestations, most of which involve repeating a certain action, be it a historical or a performative one; together they form a wide range of artistic-theatrical interpretations of this phenomenon. This issue of Maakaf is published following the “Performance 0:2” conference, held last May at the School of Visual Theatre, which examined “the idea of secondariness – acts of restoration and re-enactment of events that have already taken place and of previously performed pieces.  (from the conference’s program).

Dafna Ben Shaul explores the ideas of restaging and repreformance as expressed in the panel she curated and hosted during the conference. The participators in the panel, titled “Re:Turn”, were Elad Yaron from the Empty House group, Walaa Sbait from the group of young Palestinians returning to Ikrit, and Dana Yahalomi, Saar Székely, and Hagar Ophir from Public Movement. Ben Shaul examines whether the action of returning to a place and the repetition of ritual and cultural practices can be used to create reenactments. “Situation” and “Action” are taken out of their original context, and become, by the use of performance and aesthetical patterns, a civil and public action.

The “flies on the wall” editorial in this current issue, by Anat Katz and Erez Maayan, who eavesdrop to a conversation held between the participants in Ma'ayan Miriam Mozes’s work, Three Different Speakers, premiered  in the conference. The three different speakers, Uri Levinson, Hader Abuseif and Yana Friedman, reenact episodes of personal discrimination in the presence of the audience, and create a (hardly flattering) portrait of Israeli society.

Also in this issue, Moran Shoub speaks to Niv Sheinfeld and Oren Laor about their latest work, A Two Room Apartment, a reenactment of Liat Dror and Nir Ben Gal’s dance work from 1987. Shoub uses the interview to display her thoughts about “originals, representation, reproduction, examination, repetition, shifting, interpretation, language and abstraction”.

It is worth noting that Two Room Apartment seems to be the first in a new wave of  Israeli dance works dealing with reenactment, as this phenomenon has recently received a significant push in the form of the Israel lottery council for culture and arts, who initiated “Beikvot” project, which encourages dance makers to create new versions of past dance works (and perhaps the articles included in this issue can help shed a light on the discussion of different reproduction forms and their meaning, an exploration which questions the project’s prerequisites and methodology).

Outside of Israel, the issue of reenactment has been widely discussed for over a decade. One of the most familiar examples is Marina Abramović’s Seven Easy Pieces. In the show, held in the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2005, Abramović reperformed seven seminal performances, and evoked a lively discussion about the ephemeral and transitory character of this art form. Abramović’s retrospective in 2010 in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York raised a similar controversy, in particular following her proposal that "reperformance"—the reenacting of previously performed works—is the definitive model of preserving performance art. Abigail Levine – one of the 39 reperformers who trained with Abramović and enacted her works daily over the course of two and a half months – writes about her experiences from the show, and discusses other issues arising from reperformance, from the performer/reperformer’s point of view.

An entirely different aspect of reenactment in performance is expressed in the conversation between Guy Gutman and Milo Rau, the director of performance group IIPM (International Institute of Political Murder), many of whose projects include artistic reenactments of historical events. Guttman talks to Rau about his latest piece, Hate Radio, a reenactment of an RTLM genocide radio show, which played a significant role in the 1994 Rwandan Genocide. Rau wishes to use his reenactment works to reintroduce theater into the public space, as it was defined by philosopher Jurgen Habermas – the site and precondition for the existence of debate in society, a place that is not subject to the authority of the state or any other institution, and enables a discussion which is open, rational and free from coercion between the various components of society.

Noam Brusilovsky also wishes to expose the various political and critical aspects of reproduction. In his article, he reviews the latest work by Rimini Protokoll, many of whose projects deal with various forms of reproduction, across various genres, media and platforms. Situation Rooms is a multi participant video work, which presents the stories of different “real” people, whose biographies have been shaped by weapons and war. The work uses role play and reenactment of experiences set in a space built especially for the show, in order to blur the boundaries between spectator and performer, and raises questions about the way artistic reenactments validate reality or criticize it.

In our “Visual correspondence” section, Karni Barzilay examines the presence of reenactment in the installation pieces of Orly Hummel. Although Hummel's works in the visual art field, the questions Barzilay raises about authenticity and the relationship between original and reproduction are of special relevancy to live art, following her suggestion that reenactment occurs in the meeting place between the audience and work, on the axis between image and action, and can activate an experience based on a personal, cultural or historical narrative. The relevance of this insight is strengthened also in the conversation between Gutman and Rau. Rau expresses a similar view and claims that it is loyalty to the emotional experience, rather than to a strict historical-realistic truth, which guides him in designing IIPM’s theatrical reenactments.

Hillel Kogan, free from realistic-historical loyalty of any sort, traces an alternative course of history by describing the evolution of Palestinian dance before the forming of the state of Israel. Kogan’s writing indicates other possible lacunas in the prevalent description of the evolution of Israeli dance, and perhaps of the fictitiousness of this narrative to begin with, in its pretension to delineate a continuous linear development.

If we look back at Phelan’s definition, suggesting that “without a copy, live performance plunges into visibility—in a maniacally charged present—and disappears into memory, into the realm of invisibility and the unconscious where it eludes regulation and control” (Phelan: 148), then there is necessarily a political aspect to the act of reproduction – as the struggle for memory is also a struggle for identity. This aspect is present in all of this issue’s articles, as well as in the works they discuss. All the participating artists contemplate the past through a political-critical prism. They all use their criticism of the past to testify of the present – they mold the present out of it. In the words of Giorgio Agamben:
"The contemporary is he who firmly holds his gaze on his own time so as to perceive not its light, but rather its darkness. All eras, for those who experience contemporariness, are obscure. The contemporary is precisely the person who knows how to see this obscurity, who is able to write by dipping his pen in the obscurity of the present" (Agamben 2012:7).

Enjoy your reading!

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Translated by Michal Shalev