On Reenactment: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools
| ,Solos
Watching Dances from the Past: Considering Performance Analysis in the Realm of Reenactments
Texte intégral
- 1 This is a slightly reworked version of a chapter that appeared under the title “Aufführungsanalyse (...)
1Uferstudios Berlin 2011: The dance collective Lupita Pulpo is showing their current piece, New.1 The situation looks a bit like a rehearsal room at the beginning of a new production: Ayara Hernández Holz, Felix Marchand, and Irina Müller enter the stage and immediately pause, somewhat perplexed, it seems. We witness moments of reflection, of walking around, then finally the suggestion: “Or we could enter from here” – followed by the statement: “This has been done.” It quickly becomes apparent that this question-and-answer format will dominate the piece. Every suggestion of a scenic idea or a pattern of movement is immediately countered with the statement that this has happened before. Nothing is new, it seems, in the aesthetic discourse of dance over the last several decades, nothing that could be shown or assert itself as something newly created – or this at least is what we are led to believe by the repertoire that the three performers appear to remember. Moments of recognition concurrently arise in the audience, too, depending of course, on their own visual experience. We can hear laughter or other forms of approval whenever an apparently significant pattern of movement is shown, recognized, and thus identified as not “original”. When this game of recognition is played by the audience, it becomes a review of each spectator’s own catalogue of what they recognize or think they at least ought to recognize.
- 2 In dance, for example, these are supported by programmes such as Tanzfonds Erbe, which are committ (...)
- 3 Christopher B. Balme, Einführung in die Theaterwissenschaft [1995] (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 2014): (...)
2Performance formats such as reenactments, reconstructions, re-performances and other repetitions of past dance and performance events have become a familiar art form on the theatre stage.2 And as I will argue here, this development has complicated methods for performance analysis. Of course, the perception, reception, and ultimately analysis of what is seen on stage cannot, as a rule, be about merely apprehending the theatrical event itself. Rather, this understanding must be framed by seeing how the performance is embedded and contextualized – for instance, in terms of specific prevailing discourses of theatre.3 My view, however, is that performances such as those of Lupita Pulpo – whose representations essentially consist exclusively of references made as allusions, and which thus constellate a kind of intertextual theatre – succinctly demonstrate the limits of a performance analysis merely based, for instance, on semiotic or phenomenological approaches. In this case, an analysis cannot proceed without certain background knowledge in order to make “sense” of what is seen – even if the one carrying out this analysis realizes that they lack this knowledge. In this case, questions arise as to how to fill this gap.
- 4 However, Mark Franko addresses the issue of how the “audience receives historic material” in the r (...)
- 5 See Frédéric Döhl and Renate Wöhrer and here especially Joy Kalu and Benjamin Wihstutz, who point (...)
3I am not talking here about the fact that the intention, concept, and the discursive and cultural frameworks of a performance must be fully revealed in order to “complete” an analysis. In pieces like New, we find a broad system of references to dance from the last several decades that itself constitutes the basic concept of the performance. And here, issues come up that almost automatically go beyond the usual receptive capacity of an audience.4 In this sense, New is not even necessarily new. It’s not just performing artists who work with quotations and intermedial references that can be discovered – or not – by analysis if they are not explicitly marked by the work.5 In its radical exclusions, however, New undercuts the foundations of performance analysis, almost demanding that we expand the frame. And in this respect New is not a special case, either. Rather, its interwovenness with what is outside of the performance shows that particular recent performance formats, such as reenactments, require even more complex, that is, combined approaches to analysis. How else should one contextualize a stage event that explicitly constructs its foundation on past events, if not also through a historiographical analysis?
- 6 Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (Abingdon-Ne (...)
- 7 Mark Franko, “Introduction: The Power of Recall in a Post-Ephemeral Era”, in The Oxford Handbook o (...)
- 8 Franko and Ruprecht, “Duet”, 125-136.
4In her seminal theoretical approach towards reenactment and its impact on the ontology of performance, Rebecca Schneider places the entanglement of times encountered in reenactments at the core of her investigations: the “then and now punctuate each other [in the] syncopated time of reenactment”.6 Focusing on the temporality of dance highlighted in reenactment, Mark Franko stresses that reenactments “engender an awareness that dance occupies a unique time and space between past and present”.7 Hence, Lucia Ruprecht points to the crucial question of how to approach “pastness” in the “non-positivistic genre of reenactment” given that, with Freud, there is “no primacy of presence”, no original, but an always already “belatedness” that becomes evident in choreography as the very “object that animates”, as Franko again accentuates.8 Given that the crossing-over of past and present is one of the crucial points in reenactments, I wonder how methods in performance analysis would have to adapt to this.
5In the following, I would like to take New as an example to outline the methodological possibilities and limitations of performance analysis based on seminal models, to then address questions of historiographical entanglement using the example of the reenactment A Mary Wigman Dance Evening by Fabián Barba (2009). Both examples will also allow me to critically ask about the necessity of prior or contextual knowledge for a performance. My main point of reference lies in German theatre studies, following the methods usually taught in the respective undergraduate programs at universities in Germany.
“This Has Been Done”
- 9 See Susanne Foellmer, Am Rand der Körper: Inventuren des Unabgeschlossenen im zeitgenössischen Tan (...)
6Nearly halfway through the performance of New, dancer Felix Marchand performs a few poses with the help of his T-shirt. Irina Müller is watching him. The following dialogue unfolds, part of the scheme of offer-and-rejection that spans the entire piece. Marchand pulls his shirt over his head and asks: “What about this?” To which Müller replies: “Done”. “Or this?” – he stretches out his arms with his shirt over his head, exposing his naked upper body. Müller: “Done”. Finally, Marchand bends forward, as his T-shirt continues to cover his head and upper arms, and lands in a pose similar to the downward-facing dog in yoga, that is, with his hands and feet on the ground, hips pointing up and backward, and legs stretched out: “Or?” Müller: “Done”. A murmur of recognition runs through the audience: some of its members have identified Marchand’s pose as a movement still of the piece Self Unfinished by dancer Xavier Le Roy (1998). The work has become iconic in the memory of contemporary dance,9 which is why it is apparently familiar to many in the audience.
- 10 Erika Fischer-Lichte, The Semiotics of Theater [1983] (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana Unive (...)
- 11 Erika Fischer-Lichte, The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics [2004] (London: Ro (...)
7With reference to Erika Fischer-Lichte’s model of semiotic performance analysis, we can examine the scene I have described within the framework of a complex sign system. Fischer-Lichte’s analysis is influenced by linguistics in her understanding of performances as theatrical texts, yet she develops an expanded model of text that includes space, sound, and the body together with its various gestural, mimic, and proxemic signs.10 Her attention mainly lies on spoken theatre with a focus on actors. When she first suggested this model, it represented a valuable approach to broadening the analysis of theatre beyond its limitation on the dramatic text, in order to grasp the medial complexity of performances. Fischer-Lichte later supplemented this scheme with a consideration of phenomenological aspects of the performance that transcend a highly immanent linguistic model, such as the way the analyser themself is constructed as the interpreter of the text, or the environment and atmosphere, as elements that elude a clear semiotic taxonomy.11
- 12 Fischer-Lichte chooses this example to illustrate the constructed nature of theatrical signs: seen (...)
- 13 Fischer-Lichte, The Semiotics of Theater, 39-58.
8Here, however, I would like to return to a focus on semiotics in order to pose my earlier question in a more precise form: to what extent is a nexus of linguistic and embodied signs productive for analysing the scene I described above? A split between linguistic expression and embodiment is immediately apparent (if we disregard the somewhat disparaging facial expressions that Irina Müller makes when she encounters what she has already seen). We are dealing here with dance, and this immediately manifests a category reversal: embodied signs (in this case the various poses offered by the dancer) come to the foreground, but the posing of the question “What about this?” reinforces their status as an offering that is then rejected. In this case, spoken signs accompany movement and not vice versa. This may simply be a frequent idiosyncrasy of stage dance, though contemporary productions are not the first to regularly integrate verbal texts into the performance. But what interests me here is the question of what exactly happens in this scheme of an offering made via the body with a question and rejection, and if this could be analysed using the method of semiotics. It becomes clear in the spoken dialogue that both what is shown and what is said refer to something outside the performance. Yet this, in turn, is no outside functioning in the sense of a system of references of interrelated theatrical signs, which sometimes also transcends simple objects – for example, a table that can denote something beyond its function as a table.12 In New, what we see is rather a focus on the deictic function of the theatrical sign itself, in the sense emphasized by Fischer-Lichte,13 and especially the function of gesture: the respective sequences of movement are “present” essentially only in order to refer to an outside consisting of cultural patterns – in this case, those of contemporary dance. The specific arrangement of the scene renders the mere description of what I see on stage obsolete as long as I do not follow the “finger-pointing” that the dancers are constantly giving me.
9That said: do I need to know what the performers refer to? Would it not be enough to know that something is being indicated to me, even if it is something I might not be aware of? The fact that a game is being played here with the cultural canon of recent contemporary dance “history” is evident at the latest when we integrate the phenomenological level into the analysis of the performance. Specifically, this becomes clear when including the level of the audience situation and the atmosphere of recognition that is evoked here, which in turn can be identified by paralinguistic signs: murmuring, panting, laughing and the like (and which, incidentally, also replace the verbal signs, because in the theatre, it is generally expected that spectators themselves do not speak).
- 14 Upper-level seminar re.act.feminism, BA theatre studies, advanced modules “Theory and Aesthetics” (...)
- 15 Maria Katharina Schmidt, Getanzte Zitate: Vom choreografierten Déjà-vu (Berlin: Aisthesis, 2020): (...)
10It would matter here, of course, where exactly the focus of the analysis should lie and whether the contextual knowledge of the implied citations should be a part of it. All the same, we cannot avoid the fact that we are left with a somewhat unsatisfactory situation when a performance is explicitly constructed as a theatre of references whose indexes escape our own individual knowledge. I am making this point so clearly because attending this performance was part of one of my seminars, and I found that my own visual experience, unsurprisingly, did not match that of the students, which caused some frustration:14 some of them were able to enjoy the piece as such, but others felt exposed or ambushed by a performance that provoked “knowing laughter” on the part of other spectators, which disturbed their own experience or made them feel excluded.15 Hence, in this case, the strategy to analyze the piece merely in terms of its deictic function appears to be insufficient. What is to be done?
Con-Texts
- 16 See Ayara Hernández Holz and Felix Marchand, New: Booklet zur Aufführung (Berlin: published by the (...)
11Two years later, in 2013, Lupita Pulpo is given a grant from the Berlin Senate to return to the piece. New is being shown again, and once again in the Uferstudios. This time, however, the collective provides a veritable package of information: a booklet describing the course of the performance, with short descriptions of the scenes and movement sequences, the tasks, and the movement instructions on which the respective sections were based, along with the works that are referenced. In addition, on one of the evenings, a scenic reading of this “script” takes place. The booklet almost seems like an aid for performance analysis since it carefully arranges sections of movements, tasks, and references chronologically in a table16 – a kind of friendly service offered by the collective that can be used as an additional source of information and as a memory aid.
- 17 Balme, Einführung in die Theaterwissenschaft, 80-88.
- 18 “[A] play in performance is made up of three discrete levels that in the act of perception are dif (...)
- 19 Ibid., 127.
- 20 Balme, Einführung in die Theaterwissenschaft, 89. In this sense, for instance, Balme emphasizes re (...)
12Writing about methods of theatre studies, Christopher Balme pleads for us to interweave three levels in analysing an Inszenierung,17 to use the German word, or a “play in performance”, as he puts it in English18 – a concept that can be extended here to an analysis of New. He, too, bases his interpretative model on a notion of text, but he distinguishes between the “theatrical text” – for example, the text of a drama or the choreography a performance is based on; the “staging” or “mise-en-scène”, which designates the conception of the piece, “a particular artistic arrangement and interpretation of the text”; and finally the “performance”, which is “what spectators actually see on any given night”.19 Balme thus criticizes the oft-postulated singularity of a performance; instead, he locates the performance within an intertextual network of these three levels.20
- 21 Balme, Einführung in die Theaterwissenschaft, 114. Interestingly, Balme makes these claims in rela (...)
13So, what would be the texts in this work by Lupita Pulpo? Balme’s concept of performance analysis is located within a rather narrow system of dramatic text/choreography – mise-en-scène – performance, even though he considers background knowledge indispensable, such as knowledge of the field of contemporary choreography.21 But what is to be done if a spectator is only at the beginning of their studies and simply lacks this knowledge? How can New’s “theatrical text” be comprehended, given that it consists of a multilayered tissue of recent dance art, which, moreover, originated from the performance memories of its three participating performers? It is apparent that, at this level, Balme’s textual concept needs to be expanded. The category “theatrical text” or choreography cannot (still) be thought of in such a linear way, especially in contemporary dance, and in the context of production formats that favour the collective production of a piece: creation is practised here as a joint process, contrary to the model of a “prescribed” choreographic text that the dancers would simply perform in rehearsal.
- 22 Hernández Holz and Marchand, New: Booklet, n.p.
14The text on which New is based is thus a combination of a network of quotations, the remembering bodies of the performers, and, last but not least, a quotation that itself in a sense encompasses the entire work – because even the conceptual idea of the piece New is not new; it is an intermedial reference to the video work by the Polish performance group Azorro entitled Everything Has Been Done (2003). In this piece, the three performers formulate the impossibility of creating anything new in the visual arts, and with the recurring phrase “This has been done” they lay the foundation for Lupita Pulpo’s citational adaptation of the concept.22 This level of meta-quotation creates yet another complication that arises from the referential characteristic of the piece New: How can one distinguish between the theatrical text and the text of the staging in the analysis of this work? What would be the concept of the piece, and what would be its foundational text? What exists before the rehearsals, or what emerges as they take place? And what would be the concept, what would be the performance, if – we have here yet another layer of complexity – the performance is presented in the format of a rehearsal? And then, there is also the fact that, with its 2013 booklet, the collective presents nothing less than a script of the performance. But is this the theatrical text? The booklet is preceded, of course, by another “text”, which it references, the one of the previous performances in 2011. Hence, is the booklet rather a text at the level of the staging, a kind of staged text provided “after the fact”, and therefore as a document?
- 23 See Balme, Einführung in die Theaterwissenschaft, 90-91.
15There is no simple answer to these questions. Rather, such enquiries make clear that even heuristic textual distinctions like those made by Balme in a framework of intertextuality do not work (any longer) for productions like New. Balme, in turn, points out the necessity of studying sources, that is, of having a knowledge of the theatrical text. Combined with this, he suggests to use one’s own notes and video recordings of a performance, together with the programme, reviews, and such, as aids for the analysis of a performance.23 In this sense, the booklet is an unquestionably useful source. But what would that mean concretely? Even if I can see exactly which dance event the performers are alluding to in each citation, what sense does it make to look up the respective references and possibly even research photos or videos of the performances if I don’t know the “original”? Would this make the analysis more complete, or render the performance of the mis-en-scène more transparent? Or is the fundamental point here rather that New is a work that only paraphrases what it cites?
- 24 Ibid., 91.
16Two anecdotes support this hypothesis. In my seminar, a student told me that although she mostly did not understand the references to which the work was alluding, one situation at least was familiar to her: a reference to a performance by Jérôme Bel (Véronique Doisneau, 2004), which she had seen in a video in another seminar. Hence the citation does not even need to have been “seen with one’s own eyes”; but can enter cultural memory through various medial systems of reference. This, in turn, speaks for Balme’s postulate that we do not limit ourselves to the performance as the sole model of reference for analysis, but rather that we include its medial extensions (such as video). Balme is aiming here for a more precise analysis of dance performances – something that he thinks can be made possible, for instance, by videos.24 In my view, however, including these various materials has even more far-reaching consequences, since this does not only situate performances like New in a discursive web of comparisons in the context of current trends – through reviews, for instance, in the way a piece is approached or situated in a context by its creators in programme notes or booklets, or in the way that performers create their own “downstream” products, such as videos (be they a long shot, artistically shaped via cuts, or a fragment).
- 25 Ibid., 121.
- 26 Ibid., 139-140.
- 27 Hernández Holz and Marchand, New: Booklet, n.p.
17Balme’s model is a hermeneutic one: he understands theatre in the sense of a “communication system”.25 This includes knowledge of theatrical conventions and “sociocultural” frameworks, in addition to a consideration of how audiences affectively react26 – this is what I was pointing to above in noting how some spectators reacted upon recognizing the quotes in New. This knowledge then plays a part in a detailed analysis of the various levels of text described above. Yet my question is what there might be to understand in the case of New, and this leads me to my second anecdote, because some of the references I thought I recognized later proved to be “wrong”. At one point in the performance I thought I had identified a sequence from a piece by Eszter Salamon (Giszelle, 2001), but Lupita Pulpo was actually referring to a production by the group Forced Entertainment (Bloody Mess, 2004).27 While the performance is taking place, however, what matters is not whether I recognize the “right” thing but rather the fact that I believed in having recognized something. Without the booklet and its somewhat delayed revelation of these intended references, I could have continued to believe that my assumption was “correct”. And yet what the booklet reveals after the fact is not that any one reading of these references is “correct” at all, or that the artists’ intentions could definitively answer this question, but rather that as long as the mechanism of quotation is operating in the piece, it makes no difference what the reference actually is. In this regard, I think it is clear that here we are not dealing with any kind of detailed or even highly informed “deciphering” of the performance or even its text. Rather, Lupita Pulpo’s concept and thus the text of the staging consisting of this practice of referencing shift into the foreground, which, however, overlaps with the theatrical text as I have already shown.
- 28 Patrice Pavis, Semiotik der Theaterrezeption (Tübingen: Narr, 1988): 43.
- 29 Ibid., 31-32.
- 30 Pavis nevertheless pleads for a hermeneutic openness: in contrast to Ingarden’s textual model, he (...)
- 31 Boris Groys, On the New [1992] (London/New York: Verso, 2014): 43-44.
18This is the assumption that Patrice Pavis’s semiotics of theatre reception critically opens up. His approach focuses on the level of the spectators arguing that the reception of a performance can be “directed” or “guided” in several ways. One is “generic”, meaning reference is made to the “[the audience’s] knowledge about the genre’s structural laws”; another is “ideological”, implying that the frame of reference includes the “referential universe of the audience”.28 “Directing an audience’s reception” in this way, Pavis writes, is a “textual mechanism that is based on a certain reading strategy”.29 Pavis, too, is committed to a textual model in which the idea of directing or guiding the recipients appears to be quite strict.30 Yet however rigorous this concept might appear, it can produce insight in relation to the discourses of genre and the reading strategies that spectators always already bring to their experience of a performance. As I see it, in this context New exemplifies the possibility of the audience both becoming familiar with and failing to grasp certain generic characteristics and horizons of experience. Even if I am not capable of determining what is being referred to, one thing becomes clear in the performance: the process of referring is at once performed and exposed, that is, made visible and opened up to critique. And this shifts our attention to postmodern strategies that decentre interpretation away from the idea of an original toward a combination of intertextual references.31 What is worth noting in this context is that Lupita Pulpo essentially allows for indeterminacy – in case I do not recognize what is being shown – while also making it impossible: the booklet ultimately gives me at least the theoretical opportunity to “be in the know” about everything, even if only nominally.
19Such questions about the relationships structuring knowledge are especially pertinent when it comes to reenactments and their systems of reference. Moreover, they evoke aspects of historiography that I believe overlap with procedures of performance analysis.
Repetitions/Retrievals
- 32 Here, my knowledge refers to archival research that I undertook in 1998 as part of my diploma thes (...)
20Dance Congress, Kampnagel Hamburg, November 2009: a focused group of dance experts has come together to see the premiere of A Mary Wigman Dance Evening, a solo work by dancer and choreographer Fabián Barba, who trained in Ecuador and Belgium (P.A.R.T.S.). The piece is based on the reenactment of one of the dance evenings given by Mary Wigman, who, as one of the co-founders of expressive dance, was known especially in the 1920s for presenting programmes with short solo works. Hence the evening is a double reenactment. On the one hand, Barba has researched the individual solos in detail to “repeat” them, that is, to interpret them by dancing them again; and on the other hand, the entire one-hour piece repeats the performance format from Wigman’s time. On the seats in the audience, there are programme leaflets whose layout (for example, their font), resembles the flyers of Wigman’s time used to announce performances.32 The pieces presented are solos interrupted by short intervals, accompanied by music, in which Barba dresses for the next dance off stage and hidden from the eyes of the audience. Moreover, the individual dance numbers, such as Pastorale, Sommerlicher Tanz, or Raumgestalt, are themselves meticulous reproductions of Wigman’s dance repertoire: the qualities and forms of her movement, together with the costumes she chose and their particular materiality. Even the hair styling seems to resemble that of Wigman in her dance evenings.
- 33 For an assessment of the performance at the London festival Dance Umbrella (8 October 2012) that e (...)
- 34 On Barba’s re-enactment of Wigman, see Timmy De Laet. In his view, Barba’s attempts to come closer (...)
21The performance was followed by debates that can roughly be summarized as a discussion about authenticity and fidelity to the original; controversy unfolded along the fault line of enthusiastic support or strict rejection. The disagreements revolved essentially around the question of to what extent the performance we saw on stage was in fact a “reconstruction” of the features constituting Wigman’s dance aesthetic and therefore working as a historiographical source; or whether here we had encountered a failed attempted at imitation.33 In my remarks in this essay, which focus on current questions of performance analysis, I cannot address the opportunities and difficulties or the ontological challenges afforded by reconstructions and other repetitions in dance.34 Instead, I would like to sketch the analytical prospects of a reenactment such as that performed by Barba and point out some overlaps between performance analysis and theatre historiography.
22If we now subject A Mary Wigman Dance Evening to a performance analysis, it quickly becomes clear that this cannot be done without the context of the historical event to which the performance refers. Even if I as the interpreter, or even just as a theatregoer, have no knowledge of Wigman and her performance practices, it becomes apparent that there is a reference here to something that lies beyond the performance. This is suggested not least by the programme booklet for the evening. The “now” of the performance is thus always traversed by a predecessor. However, in the case of reenactments, must we always consult historical sources to analyse a performance? And if so: how would contextualisation be possible if my investigations are based on the performance itself?
- 35 If, for example, the focus was on analyzing performed reenactments dealing with Mary Wigman, Barba (...)
- 36 Claudia Jeschke, “‘Updating the Updates’”, 78. André Lepecki generally positions reenactments in t (...)
- 37 Fabián Barba, “Reconstruction in Progress: Working Notes, Wigman reconstruction, May 2009”, in Are (...)
- 38 For example, Barba traces his motivation in turning to Mary Wigman to his own dance experience: th (...)
- 39 Jan Lazardzig, Viktoria Tkacyzk, and Matthias Warstat, Theaterhistoriografie: Eine Einführung (Tüb (...)
23The attempt to embed A Mary Wigman Dance Evening in its historical web of references immediately opens up an entire collection of questions. First of all, we must consider the purpose that is to be served by the use of historiographical sources about and produced by Mary Wigman. Would the intention be to get information about what was referenced, in order to be able to historically contextualize what Barba’s adaptation is about? Should the focus be on types and ways of reenactments today, for which Barba would serve as a prominent one of several examples?35 Or is the aim to carry out a comparative analysis, situated in the interplay between Wigman and Barba? This approach in particular opens up a field marked by multiple problems. On the one hand, we have the question of the original, which in recent discourses, especially in dance studies, is a category that has garnered critique. What exactly would the “original Mary Wigman” be? Claudia Jeschke offers a sceptical perspective towards such talk of an “original” – not only because reenactments are “versions” of a past event, but because this event itself is always already conceived as something that occurred multiple times, that exists in “multiple identities”.36 With regard to the “initial” event, then, we need to ask what exactly constitutes it. Is it the premiere of one of Wigman’s solos? Or a particularly “successful” performance? And of these versions, which is the one that ends up being accessible, and in what format? Or would the original in this case already be a copy, namely in the form of (the few) film clips that can be found in archives, or as photographic references? These are essentially the materials that ought to be used for a comparison, since they are among the materials with which Barba worked.37 But what would result from such a comparison, if it neither can nor should aim to determine how “faithful” a work was to the “original”? Instead of taking this tack, what we would need to examine would be the genealogies of these performances and the underlying histories that Fabián Barba’s (biographical) performances and histories themselves must consider.38 Such a “discursive archaeology” is exactly what Jan Lazardzig, Victora Tkaczyk, and Matthias Warstat, for instance, propose in their overview of theatre historiography.39 Such an approach would need to consider not least media differences between performance, on the one hand, and media products such as photography, film, or even dance criticism, on the other hand. If we follow Balme, however, all three formats must be included if performance analysis is to be understood as an analysis of staging. We would then have to focus on an extensive study of sources in order to better understand Barba’s historiographical methods and emphases, in the sense that I mentioned above – we would have a kind of extended theatrical text.
24But is the study of these historical materials, assuming they are readily available at all, an extended kind of performance analysis? Or should it rather be understood as work of historiography that superimposes itself over the analysis of what has just been performed?
- 40 Lazardzig, et al.,Theaterhistoriografie, 87-123.
- 41 Ibid., 91.
25If we take, for instance, a comparative approach between Wigman’s and Barba’s dances, my view is that investigations of reenactments should be situated in a conglomeration of approaches from performance analysis and historiography. The two methods are by no means mutually exclusive: they can in fact create fruitful connections. The introduction to methods in theatre historiography provided by Lazardzig, Tkaczyk, and Warstat, for example, shows that these methods include performance analyses – but in the sense elucidated by Balme, as an analysis that considers a staging by examining its contexts, conventions, and respective specific features as sources to be studied, since the event itself is no longer available for analysis.40 Such an approach is capable of providing valuable insight, in particular, for critically engaging with the reconstruction of past theatrical events and the underlying aporia of retrieving a past event in the context of reenactment – for example, with regard to examinations of “historical events”41 that would consequently attempt to make arguments on the basis of individual cases, such as Mary Wigman. However, these findings would be about both Wigman’s past and Fabián Barba’s present.
- 42 Lazardzig, Tkacyzk, and Warstat refer here to Stephen Greenblatt’s method of New Historicism. See (...)
- 43 Balme, Einführung in die Theaterwissenschaft, 44. Balme accordingly pleads for a “methodological p (...)
- 44 Mark Franko positions Barba’s reenactment in the register of the affective, describing it as a “ti (...)
- 45 I would like to thank Christina Thurner for this idea.
26Reenactments can thus be understood as a network of references that links performance analysis and historiography. This network highlights in particular the “transfer processes”42 between these two moments in time, on the one hand, and the evening’s forms of expression, on the other – just as a focus on these processes relies on the analytical back and forth between past and recent events that also rejects any “unreflected chronology” of historiographic work.43 However, the very stance reenactments are taking lies in the complication of the past and present moment(s) as Schneider and Franko pinpoint. Thus, apart from comparative examinations, we would have to further address the historiographic approach that Barba undertakes himself, dancing and choreographing in the interstice of “then and now” and working on the possible impossibility of retrieving what has been done before by way of “affective[ly] […] channelling” the persona Mary Wigman.44 Hence, do we need a performance analysis that would work on a “meta-level”?45 And how would this look like?
Pose(s) of Referencing
- 46 In this sense, De Laet suggests “[a]lternative forms of historiography […] able to combine thinkin (...)
27Projects like those by Lupita Pulpo and Fabián Barba are not only to be seen in a network of references that essentially continues through every performance. Rather, New and reenactments such as A Mary Wigman Dance Evening emphasize performances as veritable zones of reference. Moreover, apart from the possible methodologies of investigating referential performances such as the ones discussed here, the performers are actually taking methodological approaches themselves, that is, in the mode of historiography.46 I would like to restate this argument by concluding with the figure of the pose as a methodological modality.
- 47 Schneider, Performing Remains, 2.
- 48 Ibid., 156.
- 49 Gabriele Brandstetter, “Pose – Posa – Posing: Zwischen Bild und Bewegung”, in Hold It! Zur Pose zw (...)
- 50 Bettina Brandl-Risi, Gabriele Brandstetter, and Stefanie Diekmann, “Posing Problems: Eine Einleitu (...)
- 51 Brandl-Risi, et al., Hold It!, 14. On the déjà-vu as a quotation-like experience in contemporary d (...)
28Schneider places the pose in the centre of reenactments’ temporal encounters, as a mode of “cross-temporality”.47 She explores the complicated relationship to an alleged original by way of the “reenactive poses” in Cindy Sherman’s works, emphasizing the pose, with Derrida, as an ‘“interval’ that puts the still ‘in play’”, navigating in the “cracks of time […] between theatre, film, painting, and photography”.48 However, Gabriele Brandstetter situates such shifts between still and motion notably within the realm of dance and outlines the pose as a “transition zone ... between image and corporality, between picture and performance” located in the interplay between movement and stillness.49 In this sense, poses have always been constituted between media, for example, between “image and text”, and have thus always represented a “medium of translation”.50 In New, such poses are explicitly acted out and played through – for example, the pose held by Felix Marchand as he bends forward in a movement pattern immediately reminiscent of Xavier Le Roy’s Self Unfinished (assuming one has seen the piece). Lupita Pulpo’s play with references is explicitly based on such distinctive poses, which are a kind of movement pictograms of the repertoire from the recent history of contemporary dance. What is remarkable here is that those poses do not even need to be meticulously reproduced. Just hinting at them is enough to produce a déjà-vu effect: as Bettina Brandl-Risi, Gabriele Brandstetter, and Stefanie Diekmann write, the pose “produces an image and a figure that only vaguely reminds one of a model being imitated”.51 Yet I am suggesting here that the pose itself is already enough for us to recognize what is being alluded to, or rather: in New, the very fact of posing is essentially enough for us to identify what is being represented as part of a complex programme of citation, even if I have not myself seen what is being referenced, or even if I misrecognize it, that is, read it “incorrectly”. In their poses, Lupita Pulpo presents us with a striking example of this dynamic: distinctive moments of cultural patterns expressed in recent years in the aesthetic of stage dance, which they take both from their own and shared memory.
- 52 Brandstetter “Pose – Posa – Posing”, 43.
- 53 Martin Nachbar’s piece Urheben Aufheben (2008) could also be understood as such a pose. In his rec (...)
29This process happens in New in the signalling connection of embodied pictograms and linguistic phrases, while A Mary Wigman Dance Evening essentially represents a deictic pose in total. Brandstetter emphasizes the cut-out nature of the pose, using the example of Jérôme Bel’s Véronique Doisneau: here, the dancer stands for the “whole body” of the ballet.52 Following this idea, I am suggesting that the pose-like nature of individual scenes can be transferred to the “whole body” of a specific piece, both in the example of Bel and in Barba’s work. Through a combined approach that interweaves performance analysis and historiography, we can understand Barba’s reenactment as a pose of transfer – precisely in his meticulous retracing of Wigman’s aesthetic, which, as I already noted, tries to capture every detail down to the very tips of Wigman’s hair. In this way, Barba performs a pose of the process of approximation: The Mary Wigman Dance Evening is then to be understood less as a (possibly failed) attempt to “repeat” or “retrieve” Wigman and rather as an example of how reenactments are acting as poses of transfer that question diachronic historical relations and emphasize historiographical methods – once again, and distinctly in the context of current discourses. Reenactments emphatically demand a permanent interplay between now and before – not in order to enable comparison, but rather to elucidate the procedures of transferring and referring themselves, just as they emphasize the procedures of memory in New.53
Notes
1 This is a slightly reworked version of a chapter that appeared under the title “Aufführungsanalyse in Zeiten der Wiederholung (Performance Analysis in the Age of Repetition)”, in Benjamin Wihstutz and Benjamin Hoesch, eds., Neue Methoden der Theaterwissenschaft (Bielefeld: transcript, 2020): 87-105. Thanks to the editors for the permission to translate and to publish via open-access.
2 In dance, for example, these are supported by programmes such as Tanzfonds Erbe, which are committed to increasing the visibility of dance in the twentieth century. See https://tanzfonds.de/home/ [accessed 12 May 2022].
3 Christopher B. Balme, Einführung in die Theaterwissenschaft [1995] (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 2014): 45.
4 However, Mark Franko addresses the issue of how the “audience receives historic material” in the reworkings of Baroque dances he undertook in the 1980s, using “quotation” and “citation” as a method as well. For the spectators, this is then “work to be done”, also in the Freudian sense of “working through”. See further in this volume: Mark Franco and Lucia Ruprecht, “Duet: Witnessing Versus Belatedness: Representation, Reconstruction, and Reenactment”, 125-136.
5 See Frédéric Döhl and Renate Wöhrer and here especially Joy Kalu and Benjamin Wihstutz, who point to Gob Squad’s Kitchen (You’ve Never Had It So Good) (2007) as an example of referential procedures in which the performers themselves have not even seen the quoted Warhol film. Frédéric Döhl and Renate Wöhrer, eds., Zitieren, Appropriieren, Sampeln: Referentielle Verfahren in den Gegenwartskünsten (Bielefeld: transcript, 2014); Joy Kalu and Benjamin Wihstutz, “Memory Plays: Zum Reenactment von Filmen bei Gob Squad und der Wooster Group”, in Zitieren, Appropriieren, Sampeln, ed. Döhl and Wöhrer: 95-112.
6 Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (Abingdon-New York: Routledge, 2011): 2 (original emphasis).
7 Mark Franko, “Introduction: The Power of Recall in a Post-Ephemeral Era”, in The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Reeenactment, ed. Mark Franko (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017): 1-15.
8 Franko and Ruprecht, “Duet”, 125-136.
9 See Susanne Foellmer, Am Rand der Körper: Inventuren des Unabgeschlossenen im zeitgenössischen Tanz (Bielefeld: transcript, 2009): 12.
10 Erika Fischer-Lichte, The Semiotics of Theater [1983] (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992): 18-63.
11 Erika Fischer-Lichte, The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics [2004] (London: Routledge, 2008).
12 Fischer-Lichte chooses this example to illustrate the constructed nature of theatrical signs: seen thus, a table representing an elevation, a hollow, or something similar. Erika Fischer-Lichte, Theaterwissenschaft (Tübingen/Basel: Francke, 2010): 85.
13 Fischer-Lichte, The Semiotics of Theater, 39-58.
14 Upper-level seminar re.act.feminism, BA theatre studies, advanced modules “Theory and Aesthetics” and “Historiography”, Freie Universität Berlin, summer semester 2013.
15 Maria Katharina Schmidt, Getanzte Zitate: Vom choreografierten Déjà-vu (Berlin: Aisthesis, 2020): 145-156.
16 See Ayara Hernández Holz and Felix Marchand, New: Booklet zur Aufführung (Berlin: published by the authors, 2013): n.p.
17 Balme, Einführung in die Theaterwissenschaft, 80-88.
18 “[A] play in performance is made up of three discrete levels that in the act of perception are difficult to distinguish: the text, the staging of the text and the performance”. Balme uses the term “Inszenierung” to mark a clear distinction from Erika Fischer-Lichte’s concept of “Aufführungsanalyse”, claiming that there is more to the analysis than the performance as such. Christopher B. Balme, The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008): 132.
19 Ibid., 127.
20 Balme, Einführung in die Theaterwissenschaft, 89. In this sense, for instance, Balme emphasizes repertory theatre: the possibility of showing a performance multiple times makes the theatrical event appear to be something essentially “constant”, inasmuch as the pieces can basically be seen repeatedly over a longer period of time (sometimes even over several years). He ignores, however, the far more precarious situation faced by independent theatres, or the so-called Freie Szene in Germany, where a work most commonly can only be performed three or four times before it then often disappears into oblivion. Here, we need to take into account a certain transitoriness of the production bound to the opportunities it has to be performed in (in addition, more “permanent” extensions, for example in the form of theatre reviews, are often lacking. The question would also be how to situate singular happenings in performance art in this respect – apart from their subsequent dissemination via media or discourse).
21 Balme, Einführung in die Theaterwissenschaft, 114. Interestingly, Balme makes these claims in relation to dance theatre; for spoken theatre, he mentions no such need for contextualization.
22 Hernández Holz and Marchand, New: Booklet, n.p.
23 See Balme, Einführung in die Theaterwissenschaft, 90-91.
24 Ibid., 91.
25 Ibid., 121.
26 Ibid., 139-140.
27 Hernández Holz and Marchand, New: Booklet, n.p.
28 Patrice Pavis, Semiotik der Theaterrezeption (Tübingen: Narr, 1988): 43.
29 Ibid., 31-32.
30 Pavis nevertheless pleads for a hermeneutic openness: in contrast to Ingarden’s textual model, he understands the “site[s] of indeterminacy” more in the sense of “site[s] of questioning in the encounter between the text and its present reader, as site[s] of ambiguity and polysemy”. Pavis, Semiotik der Theaterrezeption, 29.
31 Boris Groys, On the New [1992] (London/New York: Verso, 2014): 43-44.
32 Here, my knowledge refers to archival research that I undertook in 1998 as part of my diploma thesis on Valeska Gert and partly on Mary Wigman, at the Berlin Akademie der Künste, where I came across numerous such programme notes for dance evenings from 1918 onward.
33 For an assessment of the performance at the London festival Dance Umbrella (8 October 2012) that exemplifies positive reactions, see the review of Lise Smith. Ulrich Völker provided a critical view of the performance, in the context of the 2009 Dance Congress. Writing about the performance in the New York Museum of Modern Art (February 2013), Brian Seibert criticizes a lack of “authentic” proximity to Wigman: “While Mr. Barba’s performance was true to the subjugation of ego of which Wigman wrote, it lacked the intensity and charisma that so impressed those who wrote about her”. Lise Smith, “Review: Dance Umbrella, Fabian Barba/Jonathan Burrows & Matteo Fargion” (2012) http://londondance.com/articles/reviews/dance-umbrella-barba-burrows-fargion/ [accessed 17 Februrary 2021]. Ulrich Völker, “Rückblicke: Jérôme Bels ‘Lutz Förster’ und Fabian Barbas ‘A Mary Wigman Dance Evening’ im Rahmen des Tanzkongresses auf Kampnagel” (2009) http://www.tanznetz.de/blog/16095/ruckblicke [accessed 17 February 2021]. Brian Seibert, “Kicking Yourself for Missing That Wigman Tour Back in ’30? Fabián Barba in Mary Wigman Works at MoMa”, The New York Times (4 February 2013).
Elsewhere, I examined the problem of references to past dance events in reconstructions and reenactments, and retraced the scholarly debate about a concept of the original that has become problematic, especially in dance: Susanne Foellmer, “Re-enactment und andere Wieder-Holungen in Tanz und Performance”, in Zitieren, Appropriieren, Sampeln, ed. Döhl and Wöhrer: 69-92. While Claudia Jeschke conceives of reconstructions of past dance events as a reflective endeavor, Nicole Haitzinger describes reconstructions as detailed attempts to get as close to a bygone event as possible. In contrast to this, reenactments would reflect the critical distance to its subject. Claudia Jeschke, “‘Updating the Updates’: Zum Problem der ‘Identität’ in der Geschichts-Vermittlung vom Tanz(en)”, in Original und Revival: Geschichts-Schreibung im Tanz, ed. Christina Thurner and Julia Wehren (Zurich: Chronos, 2010): 69-79; Nicole Haitzinger, “Re-enacting Pavlova. Re-enacting Wiesenthal. Zu Erinnerungskultur(en) und künstlerischen ‘Selbst’-Inszenierungen”, in Original und Revival, ed. Thurner and Wehren: 181-192.
34 On Barba’s re-enactment of Wigman, see Timmy De Laet. In his view, Barba’s attempts to come closer to Wigman through formal and physical imitation had the precise effect of increasing the historical distance between them. He argues that Barba’s use of a dance style that almost appears to be anachronistic – as though it were something from another time but presented to a contemporary audience – generates oscillating figures between Mary Wigman’s “historical image” and Barba’s own contemporary body. Timmy De Laet, “Giving Sense to the Past: Historical D(ist)ance and the Chiasmatic Interlacing of Affect and Knowledge”, in The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Reeenactment, ed. Franko: 33-56. For an examination of the discourse in (German) dance studies about theories and methods of reconstruction and reenactment, see also Thurner and Wehren and, here, especially Giersdorf on the relationship between practical dance reconstruction and academic historiography. Jens Giersdorf, “Unpopulärer Tanz als Krise universeller Geschichtsschreibung oder Wie Yutian und ich lang anhaltenden Spass mit unseriöser Historiografie hatten”, in Original und Revival, eds. Thurner and Wehren: 91-100. On reenactment in theatre contexts, see Jens Roselt and Ulf Otto, eds., Theater als Zeitmaschine: Zur performativen Praxis des Reenactments (Bielefeld: transcript, 2012).
35 If, for example, the focus was on analyzing performed reenactments dealing with Mary Wigman, Barba’s project could be compared with the reconstruction of Wigman’s Le Sacre du Printemps (1957; Theater Osnabrück 2013) or with Christoph Winkler’s approach to Mary Wigman (Abendliche Tänze 2013). These, however, cannot proceed without additional contextual material, which in this case, once again taking recourse to Balme, would have to include in particular the various staging texts in the sense of the respective artistic concepts and approaches to reperformance.
36 Claudia Jeschke, “‘Updating the Updates’”, 78. André Lepecki generally positions reenactments in the mode of “potentialities”. Hence, there is no such problem as to “failing to grasp” a (questionable) original. André Lepecki, “The Body as Archive: Will to Re-Enact and the Afterlives of Dances”, Dance Research Journal 42, no. 2 (2010): 28-48.
37 Fabián Barba, “Reconstruction in Progress: Working Notes, Wigman reconstruction, May 2009”, in Are 100 Objects Enough to Represent the Dance? Zur Archivierbarkeit von Tanz, ed. Janine Schulze (Munich: epodium, 2010): 116-121.
38 For example, Barba traces his motivation in turning to Mary Wigman to his own dance experience: the fact that the teaching of contemporary dance in Ecuador is still committed to a tradition of expressive modern dance. Yet Barba only noticed this when he subsequently became familiar with completely different notions of what is deemed to be contemporary, at the Brussels school P.A.R.T.S. Fabián Barba, “Reconstructing a Mary Wigman Dance Evening”, in Are 100 Objects Enough to Represent the Dance?, ed. Schulze: 100-115.
39 Jan Lazardzig, Viktoria Tkacyzk, and Matthias Warstat, Theaterhistoriografie: Eine Einführung (Tübingen/Basel: Francke, 2012): 104-107.
40 Lazardzig, et al.,Theaterhistoriografie, 87-123.
41 Ibid., 91.
42 Lazardzig, Tkacyzk, and Warstat refer here to Stephen Greenblatt’s method of New Historicism. See Lazardzig, et al., Theaterhistoriografie, 110.
43 Balme, Einführung in die Theaterwissenschaft, 44. Balme accordingly pleads for a “methodological pluralism” in historiography. Based on the “overlapping temporalities” in dance, Franko argues that the notion of “historical time as chronological time becomes destabilized”. Franko, “Introduction: The Power of Recall”, 2.
44 Mark Franko positions Barba’s reenactment in the register of the affective, describing it as a “time machine”. See Franko and Ruprecht, “Duet”, 125-136.
45 I would like to thank Christina Thurner for this idea.
46 In this sense, De Laet suggests “[a]lternative forms of historiography […] able to combine thinking and feeling”, and emphasizes “affect” as a motivator of “historiciz[ing] […] choreography”. De Laet, “Giving Sense to the Past”, 51-52.
47 Schneider, Performing Remains, 2.
48 Ibid., 156.
49 Gabriele Brandstetter, “Pose – Posa – Posing: Zwischen Bild und Bewegung”, in Hold It! Zur Pose zwischen Bild und Performance, ed. Bettina Brandl-Risi, Gabriele Brandstetter and Stefanie Diekmann (Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 2012): 41-51 (46; original emphasis).
50 Bettina Brandl-Risi, Gabriele Brandstetter, and Stefanie Diekmann, “Posing Problems: Eine Einleitung”, in Hold It!, ed. Brandl-Risi, Brandstetter, and Diekmann, 7-21.
51 Brandl-Risi, et al., Hold It!, 14. On the déjà-vu as a quotation-like experience in contemporary dance, see also Schmidt, Getanzte Zitate. Schneider discusses such referential poses and the blurring of original and copy following Homi Bhabha’s idea of the ‘“[a]lmost but not quite’” in order to delineate the temporal and medial differences in the works of Cindy Sherman and Yasumasa Morimura. Schneider, Performing Remains, 159-160.
52 Brandstetter “Pose – Posa – Posing”, 43.
53 Martin Nachbar’s piece Urheben Aufheben (2008) could also be understood as such a pose. In his reconstruction of Dore Hoyer’s Affectos Humanos (1962), Nachbar particularly emphasizes the difficulties of bringing out the past that is held in archives and the physical transfer of movement.
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