35 PERFORMANCE AND Performativity

Katherine Johnson

Performance is, of course, fundamental to reenactment; to reenact is to perform again. Notions of performativity are thus crucial to examining the many practices that can be considered reenactment.

Given these variations of perspective and approach, what exactly is meant here by performance and performativity? Performance, theater, and their adjectival forms are often used interchange­ably; indeed, reenactment has more frequently been discussed in relation to theatricality than performativity. In theater and performance studies and the cultural industries, however, the term theater usually refers to script-based productions that center around verbal dialogue, narrative, and a character or characters. Performance, on the other hand, can include theater but also encompasses devised performance, physical theater, live art, performance art, movement-based practices, and post-dramatic theater. The term can also be used as a demarcation from theater, framing work as beyond the conventions of the theatrical form. This distinction is important, for while all forms of reenactment can be productively analyzed as performance, many reenactments are not theater, in the above sense of the word.

Furthermore, the word performativity carries an additional significance that theatricality does not.

The most prevalent form of performance used in museum and heritage-site/event reenact­ment is first-person interpretation. This involves the reenactor acting the part of a real or imag­ined historical character, through whom they impart information and answer questions. This is usually performed in period attire and sometimes in period language, with varying degrees of accuracy. The interpreter might focus on a particular topic, occupation, or object featured in the exhibition or might take a broader approach, discussing what life was like for someone of their class, gender, or race in that period. Some hobby reenactors use a similar approach by adopting a historical persona that they perform, often playfully or even ironically, while participating in some activities and events (Figure 35.1).

Variants of first-person interpretation in professional and leisure reenactment can be under­stood as forms of role-play (Agnew, 2004; Handler and Saxton, 1988; Snow, 1993). For example, non-professional persona-based medieval and Viking reenactments, such as those performed by the globally popular Society for Creative Anachronism, converge closely with LARPing (role-play; gaming).

First-person interpretation at living history museums has been understood by Richard Schechner (1985) and Stephen Eddy Snow (1993) as a form of ethnohistorical role-play, i.e., a representation of selected aspects of historical culture through performing research “in role” In a similar vein, Jay Anderson (1982, 1991) suggests that, in many living history museums, “simula­tion” functions as an interpretive tool to not only represent but also research history.

Performance and performativity

Such character-based reenactments often draw on techniques from naturalistic acting—the most prevalent form of acting in Western performance, pioneered by Constantin Stanislavski and developed into “method acting” by, among others, Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler. In both professional and hobby varieties, it is not uncommon to create a character profile and develop a backstory, based on both research and imagination. Reflecting on his own and others' practice at the Plimoth Plantation living history museum in Massachusetts, Snow (1993) discusses the use of units and objectives, which are components of script analysis widely used by naturalistic actors, and of Chekhov's psychological gesture, a movement that encapsulates the character's psyche. This merging of performance and history is encapsulated by the term actor-historian, by which some professional reenactors describe themselves. Actor-historians deliver performative lectures as a character derived from the period and setting on which they speak, often working in a free­lance capacity across museums, schools, heritage sites, and festivals.

Such fusions of performance and history are prevalent not only in museums and the heritage industry, but also school education programs, documentaries, and historically-themed reality television, such as Victorian Slum House (2016) and The Ship (2002). Historical reenactment has also been used in other forms of performance, particularly performance art, often to revisit or reconsider events and issues. In The Battle of Orgreave, artist Jeremy Deller engaged approximately 200 former miners and 800 historical reenactors in a site-specific reenactment of the iconic 1984 confrontation between strikers and the police. The multidisciplinary nature and use of reenactment seem to reflect a wider blurring of disciplinary boundaries in the arts, humanities, and social sciences (Snow, 1993).

In many forms of reenactment, performance functions as both methodology and record: an embodied archive of historical skills, trades, arts, and culture (Johnson, 2015; 2016; Schneider, 2011). Dancing with the performed nature of history, Diana Taylor asserts the importance of what she refers to as the repertoire—history in and as performance, performance as an alterna­tive or complementary form of archive (2003).

Reenactors have described intense moments of felt historical connection—moments when they feel almost as if they were in the past or as if they really were, for a moment, the historically inspired persona they perform. In such moments, the performativity of reenactment evokes a poignant but transitory affective response in the reenactor (emotion). Actors, too, prize such occa­sions, when self and character fuse. But they are temporary; in such performative moments, the (reen)actor is, to borrow from Schechner (1981), temporarily transported, but not transformed. Of stronger epistemological and ontological significance is the corporeal inscribing of culture which can gradually occur when reenactment is an ongoing and regular practice that molds present

bodies with materials, movements, and mannerisms of past bodies. Here, we return to Butler's concept of performativity, which asserts that cultural values and expectations accumulate on, in, and through the body. This “sedimentation” of cultural mores is produced by, and produces, a “set of repeated acts,” which inflict a “repeated stylization of the body” and embodied identity (Butler, 1999, p. 43). Working in correlation with the (re)production of gender “enacted on a large, politi­cal scale,” sedimentation occurs as part of a “more mundane reproduction of gendered identity [that] takes place through the various ways in which bodies are acted in relationship to the deeply entrenched or sedimented expectations ofgendered existence” (1988, p.

Recognizing the capacity of performance to function historiographically—to record and relate aspects of the past in, on, and through the body—carries significance for and beyond reenactment. Reenactment potentially enables more active engagement in the historiographic process and in the questioning of dominant ideologies and identities, facilitating a more dialogic critical engagement within a broader sector of society. This feeds into larger, more significant socio-historical issues. With so much of history (re)written by a Western male elite, the per­formed histories of Indigenous and other minority groups and cultures are a vital platform for voices, stories, and insights that might go unheard or be silenced if performance is not acknowl­edged as a valid way to share and stimulate knowledge (Taylor, 2003) (iNDiGENEiτγ).The central­ity of performance is not particular to reenactment or even public history; it is at the core of all historical inquiry. If, as historian and philosopher R. G. Collingwood (2005 [1946], p. 282) asserts, the “task of the historian is to reenact the past in his [sic] own mind,” then we might say that the product of the historian's work is a performance of the past. History is not simply a text to be read or written; it is a production that retells and refashions selected, pieced-together stories of periods, places, and people. As ethnohistorian Greg Dening argues:

History—the past transformed into words or paint or dance or play—is always a per­formance. An everyday performance as we present our selective narratives about what has happened at the kitchen table, to the courts, to the taxman, at the graveside. A quite staged performance when we present it to our examiners, to the collegiality of our disciplines, whenever we play the role of “historian.” History is theater.

(2002, p. 1)

In short, performance, history, and reenactment are interrelated, inextricably. This suggests we need to further reconsider (and, perhaps, reconfigure) the relation between reenactment and academic historical inquiry—and the inherent performativities of both.

Further reading

Magelssen, S., 2007; McCalman, I., and Pickering, P., 2010; Schneider, R., 2011; Smith, L., 2011; Snow, S., 1993.