Reenactment redefined
One way or another, reenactment attempts to copy the past. As the past does not exist any longer, access to it is limited and shaped mostly by remains (physical and archival) and by traditions.
Thus, if reenactment is to take place it must to some extent be imagined. That is, reenactment must be pictured in the mind, and then—accompanied by as many alibis as documents, tradition, and material remains will allow—incarnated. If the incarnation works well, then sufficient energy is released to fuel belief in the being of the past, for it has just this minute become present to our senses as a living and moving phenomenon. Therefore, reenactment requires affect in its performers and aims to elicit affect in its audience. In proportion to its success, the experience is immersive for a subject who is struck by the singular and original appearance of the past, with all sense of a copy eliminated. As for the spectators, they are exposed to a view of the past whose authenticity is proportionate to the community and extent of their own aroused feelings. Reenactment, then, breaks with grand narratives and tendentious explanations. Its interests may be focused on local, cultural, political, or national affiliations, but its success relies on the surprise of the moment when what was imagined takes shape, and not always as imagination had anticipated. However, there is at the other end of the spectrum a species of reenactment much cooler, more efficient, and not reliant upon imagination or afflatus. Largely enabled by technology, it is capable of reproducing the past as datasets so densely arranged and cross-referenced in a virtual space that it is not passion which fetches the past into being, but proof. In between these two extremes, dividing (on the one hand) the excited subject facing an imaginatively reconstructed historical object from (on the other) a jury of witnesses inspecting a virtual site replete with information, there are degrees of involvement variously reliant upon differing investments of imagination, affect, spectatorship, accident, evidence, and objectivity. While it may be that the excited subject is moved by mere likeness, resemblance, or verisimilitude, the jury is much stricter in applying standards of representation. As opposed to those who are content merely to be present “as it were” at the reproduced event, the jury demands a simulacrum indistinguishable from what really happened there and then (mimesis).Although reenactment has become a topic of scholarly debate comparatively recently, its importance to devotees of various faiths has always been crucially important. Consider that the Reformation turned on a debate about representing the history of the life of Jesus Christ, especially the Last Supper and its incorporation into the liturgy of communion. For Roman Catholics, the figural dimension of wine and bread as representing the blood and body of Christ himself is not a figure at ah, but what they call the “real presence.” In the course of reenacting the supper, the figural resemblance is incarnated as the reality of the sacrifice that was shortly to be made in Jerusalem. For Protestants, this has only ever been a figure, a manner of speaking, an analogy made of words and so to be understood as a metaphor, not a metamorphosis. This sort of division is repeated in those forms of mimesis where the agent and medium of representation is elided, as in the still lifes of the Dutch artist Torrentius, where not even a brushstroke is detectible, compared with the lavish laying on of paint in Turner's paintings of sea and sky, van Gogh's landscapes, or modern color field painting. The same contrast can be observed on the stage, where method actors usurp the character they are representing, as opposed to those exploiting Brechtian techniques of alienation, where each scene provides a signature of action and (for the audience) a station of reflective thought, a formalist arrangement of possibilities occasionally perforated by the pathos of a song. The same formalist possibilities are evident in fictional narratives, which may either wear their devices on their sleeves, or disguise them as letters written by the characters themselves.
So, questions range from: “Who or what is the subject of reenactment?” to “What is its object?” and “What is the medium of the encounter between the two?” Is it thought, sensation, dream, music, gesture, dance, speech, battle, air, water, machinery, a prosthesis, technology, or data? And finally, what is its target—affect, information, knowledge, truth, sympathy, suffering, shame, aesthetics, persuasion, reflexivity, or presence?This Handbook reflects upon these questions, embracing a wide range of different perspectives and understandings of what reenactment entails. It sets out a spectrum of its practical and theoretical implications, and it encourages the reader not only to distinguish between different techniques but also to spot where there appears to be an anomalous overlap between them, such as the probative function of Cokroboration going hand in hand with affect, or the alienations of formalism accommodating pathos. How is it that a carefully planned scenario only succeeds because an unexpected accident interfered with its unfolding? The degree of imagination present in a reenactment is always important to notice, for it is an index of how much invention is needed to supply the want of material facts; contrariwise, there may be so much information packed into the narrow box of forensic enquiry that imagination is scarcely needed at all. The question of aesthetics is never far from a review of reenactment, for the allurements of music, song, tableau, dance, panorama, and spectacle are important parts of its repertoire. These questions are aligned with the key terms that are currently used to describe and analyze the field of reenactment studies. It is a field developing rapidly in company with adjacent disciplines, such as theater, heritage, media, and performance studies, and it will be important to identify where the possibilities ofjoint research lie. The Handbook’s purpose is to encourage exchange across these frontiers and to refine and strengthen the conceptual structures they have in common.