22 HISTORY OF THE FIELD

UlfOtto

Reenactment studies is a new field and its institutionalization is still in its early stages. While the practice of reenactment has long been organized around clubs and societies, reenactment studies has yet to exhibit the typical features that lend academic fields their shape—professional societies, specialist journals, and professorships.

However, with burgeoning interest, the field of reenactment studies is gaining disciplinary recognition.

Since the history of the field is still in the making, what lies in its past might be best described as a prehistory. It is linked to the question of how the perception of reenactment has shifted from an amateur pastime to a subject worthy of serious scholarly attention within the humanities, and hence to the publication of this Handbook. This includes the question of how reenactment has become a stable epistemic object and how it is articulated as a subject of theory that promises to contribute new knowledge. During this constitutive phase, the field has generally been defined by three interconnected developments. First, formerly disconnected things are being grouped under a common heading: what is referred to as reenactment comprises a plethora of things that were formerly seen as radically disparate, including historically informed performance, reality television, performance art, and experimental archaeology. Second, the things newly grouped together under the umbrella of reenactment are now being discussed using a shared framework of questions and concepts. Third, a common genealogy is being constructed to give the concept of reenactment a shared heritage, pointing back to traditions of historical pageant, revolutionary festivals, or medieval passion plays (Otto, 2010b).

This constitution of the field has not followed a single line of development; rather, it has been characterized by parallel processes and interdisciplinary entanglements.

What might be called the dominant strand of reenactment studies emerged at the juncture of literary scholarship and contemporary history. In 2004, a special edition of Criticism put reenactment on the intellectual agenda; this was followed by a special issue of Rethinking History in 2007. Both journal issues were edited by editors of this volume. They forewent using reenactment in the title, but reenactment served as the central concept connecting all of the articles. The Reenactment History series, published by Palgrave Macmillan, shares key similarities with these early journals: Settler and Creole Reenactment (2009), edited by Vanessa Agnew and Jonathan Lamb, and Historical Reenactment: From Realism to the Affective Turn (2010), edited by Iain McCalman and Paul Pickering, set forth a line of thought that draws upon perspectives from primarily Anglophone and Continental literary studies and is informed by postcolonial discourse. It focuses on various media and deals with issues concerning the popularization and consumption of history. Its point of departure was a contemporary boom in reenactment—on the one hand, historically framed docu-soap formats like the internationally successful House franchise (i.e. 1900 House, UK, 1999; Outback House, Australia, 2005; Schwarzwaldhaus 1902, Germany, 2002) that became popular at the end of the 1990s, and, on the other, a renewed public interest in Civil War reenactments, represented by works like Tony Horwitz's 1999 [1998] bestseller Confederates in the Attic. Noteworthy is Agnew's 2004 advocacy for taking up the challenge posed by amateur historians, rather than simply dismissing their claims because of their apparent shortcomings and contradictions, including their ahistoricity, their positivism, and their naive concepts of authenticity. By accentuating the fact that history is constantly experienced aesthetically—be it in novels, television, or computer games—scholars began dedicating their energy to studying the doing of history as a cultural practice in the everyday.

Turning their attention to reenactment, scholars emphasized that history is more than the end result of narrative constructions (White, 1973). History is itself a historically contingent concept (Koselleck, 1989) and has to be contextualized within broader memory cultures, their mediality, and their performativity (Assmann, 1992).

It was precisely this situatedness of reenactment at the crossroads of memory, performance, and media that drew the attention of scholars already interested in the relationship between performance and media. Around 2010, the term reenactment became trendy, the number of publications referring to it as a general concept rose dramatically, and new perspectives emerged that married different theoretical backgrounds and drew on new kinds of source material. Research in the areas of fine arts, dance scholarship, and performance studies—all concerned with the representation of history—contributed new perspectives on reenactment. Performance studies scholar Rebecca Schneider's widely received 2011 publication, Performance Remains, marked the climax of these interventions, pointing to a shifting conceptualization of performance within contemporary theory.

In the fine arts, two points are noteworthy. First, the term reenactment is often used in the field to refer to the repetition of seminal performances from the 1970s. Second, the significance of reenactment in the visual arts is most convincingly articulated in a number of important exhibitions that have exerted an outsized influence on the field: A Little Bit of History Repeated at the Kunstwerke Berlin, taking place on two days in 2000—2001, was a new production of historical performances; it served as a precursor to Marina Abramovics Seven Easy Pieces at the Guggenheim in New York in 2005. In the same year, Sven Luttickens book Life, Once More: Forms of Reenactment in Contemporary Art broadened the perspective, bringing together works by Mike Bidlo, Bik Van der Pol, Rod Dickinson, Omer Fast, Andrea Fraser, Robert Longo, Eran Schaerf, Catherine Sullivan, and Barbara Visser; the volume also included seminal essays by curator Jennifer Allen and performance studies scholar Peggy Phelan.

Two years later, in 2007, came History Will Repeat Itself, an exhibition curated by Inke Arns and Gabriele Horn in Berlin (KW) and Dusseldorf. Comprised of a series of works concerned more with history proper rather than just the history of art, the exhibition opened new perspectives by posing pointed questions about the ongoing relevance of the past for the present. Both Arns and Lutticken showed convincingly how the reenactor's toolkit had entered the arts, and they used it to reflect on the agency of the past in the present. Understanding the works as personal and embodied attempts to re-appropriate objectivized image worlds, Arns described artistic reenactments as an ambivalent operation of sublating distance to the past and at the same time reestablishing this distance. By including a photograph of the 1920 Petrograd mass spectacle Storming of the Winter Palace by Nicolai Evreinov in an exhibition of otherwise exclusively contemporary artworks, Arns furthermore suggested that the other works presented had a shared genealogy with past events that

constructed history in and through the media. Not to be underestimated is the contribution of these exhibitions—and of the artists and curators involved in them—in shaping and formulating the concepts on which the burgeoning field of reenactment studies is built.

It took longer for the term reenactment to be accepted in the world of dance. The reason was simply that there already existed a long tradition of reconstructing seminal dance pieces, giving cause for a broad discussion on where exactly to pinpoint the differences between these reconstructions and “reenactment,” and whether the concept actually brought something new to the field. Against the backdrop of the general 20th-century Western tendency to conceive of dance as an expression of the “natural” body and therefore as a practice that evades the rationality and modernity ofWestern societies, the writing of the history of dance and questions about how to keep this heritage alive became an important topic.

Central to these discussions were the manifold attempts at reconstructing historical dances and the theoretical underpinnings of the transfer from body to archive and back. These issues were practiced and discussed in a series of events, such as Archive tanzen in Salzburg in 2002, Wieder und wider: Performance Appropriated in Vienna in 2006, Archive/Practice in Leipzig in 2009, and most importantly, a multi-million-euro German funding program for dance heritage that ran between 2012 and 2017. Under the heading of reconstruction, projects were partially driven by a nostalgic longing for the recuperation of the lost original, and debates focused on whether a reconstruction was an old or a new work (Franko, 1989) and on the degrees of authenticity that a work might achieve (Guest, 2008). The extensive adaptation of the term reenactment, as documented in the Oxford Handbook of Dance and Reenactment (Franko, 2018), has been accompanied by a turn toward the materiality of the archival documents and an insistence on the gaps between the document and the body (de Laet, 2010; Kruschkova, 2010). The aim of dance reenactments is not the more or less objective reconstruction of a heroic past, but the personal appropriation of a past whose meaning can only be found in the present. In this view of dance reenactment, the body emerges as an archive in itself. In contrast to the housed collections of written documents, the body as archive preserves a different kind of tacit knowledge that has long been neglected. Most interestingly, similar to the (visual) arts, here too reenactment is conceived of as a bridge between theory and practice.

The archive is a central point of departure in performance, art, and the study thereof. Rebecca Schneider’s 2001 article “Archives: Performance Remains” and Diana Taylor's 2003 monograph The Archive and the Repertoire reconsider the history of gesture and analyze the ontological status of performance. They address Abramovics concerns over how performance can enter the museum and become part of heritage culture.

Perpetuating a long tradition going back to Lessing that associates theater and performance with ephemerality, Peggy Phelan in 1993 conceived the “liveness” of performance as a form of absolute being in the present, one that contradicts and resists the mass media logics of recording and reproduction. Challenging this clear-cut distinction between a singular, immediate, vanishing “now” and an already concluded, inefficacious, recorded past, Schneider draws on Susan Sontag to argue for a concept of “syncopated time,” a present that is always haunted by other (past and future) times. Referring to Derrida’s critique of the archive as a social power that regulates what is permitted to be remembered and governs how what is remembered enters collective memory (1995), Schneider argues that thinking of performance as a vanishing “now” subscribes to an uncritical conception of the archive, reducing performance (again) to a reserve of reason. Calling the logic and power of the archive into question, she proposes that scholars conceive of performance as an alternative form of embodied cultural memory: “By this reading, the scandal of performance relative to the archive is not that it disappears (this is what the archive expects, this is the archive’s requirement), but that it remains in ways that resist architectonic ‘house arrest’ and ‘domiciliation’” (Schneider, 2011, p. 105). Thinking about performance from the vantage point of reenactment opens a new way for the past to exist “differently or in difference,” making it into a practice that stages counter-memories.

Schneider’s theoretical survey of the artistic potential of reenactment and her claim that embodied performance is of key significance for cultural memory in modern media cultures can therefore be read as a reply to Agnew’s earlier proposal that historians take up the challenge of reenactment. It offers an explanation as to why reenactment is engaged with historical traumata—be it colonial rule or the experience of violence.

To illustrate the point, this short history concludes with probably the single most influential event for the development of the field of reenactment studies: Jeremy Deller’s The Battle of Orgreave, a 2001 reenactment of the 1984 miners’ strike that was put down brutally by the police. The government had denounced the strikers as the “enemy within” and newsreels had been edited in a way to prove this take. Reenacting the event by bringing together contemporary witnesses, amateur reenactors, and media professionals, and using film to bring it back into popular memory, Deller confronted mediated history with embodied memories. In a hybrid mixture of high art, popular culture, and professional history, he brought together bodies and images in a festive performance that broke with traditional distinctions: popular culture appeared as high art, a hobby turned progressive praxis and aesthetic play became part of real history. It is within events like these, outside of written history, that the field first constituted itself, giving legitimacy and reason for the writing of its history in a handbook on an academic discipline.

22 HISTORY OF THE FIELD

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