Re-enactment / re-performance

The term re-enactment denotes projects or theatrical productions which take place outside the context of performance art before an audience, e.g. factually faithful historical reconstructions of past social or military events for the sake of their critical incorporation. These performances follow a practice of replicating past events as closely as possible in order to enable them to be relived. In performance art, the re-enactment is regarded as an autonomous reproduction taking the performance of another artist or artists or a previous performance by the same artist as its model. This can include autonomous actions and appropriations which diverge sharply from the original performances (see Marina Abramovic, “Seven Easy Pieces”). The re-enactment, as an independent performance in front of an audience, can however also result in the reactivation of a performance idea. Since the re-enactment is an artistic method of transmission, strongly oriented towards the concepts of the live experience and authenticity, it shares complicity in the current authenticity hype in which we, with our project, are also implicated. We therefore recommend avoiding an inflationary use of the term re-enactment, using it only in the case of recollections of past live events. We suggest speaking of re-performance in the case of appropriation strategies such as citation and camouflage and when a previous performance is consciously interpreted, contextualised and transcribed.