A discussion of

Performance Remains: Art and War in times of theatrical reenactment

(Rebecca Schneider, 2001)

Keywords: performance, reenactment, syncopated time, inter(in)animation

The cover image of Rebecca Schneider’s Performing

Remains offers a photo of an artificial, presumably
plastic, severed finger Schneider found in the Rhode
Island grasses of a US Civil War reenactment field, a
prop she speculates was used in the specifically
military theatre of surgical reenactment.

Watch:
Rebecca Schneider: (P)re-enactment and Gesture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sr17cJEc6qY
Little Round Top- Battle of Gettysburg Reenactment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BOxycSp4S8&feature=youtu.be

Preliminaries:
1. Rebecca Schneider argues that performance can be engaged as what remains, rather than what disappears.
2. Reenactment of Civil War becomes necessary around 1950s because the last people who could remember the war were
passing away.
3. Live performance initially posits presentism, immediacy, linear time.

reenact:
a. to reproduce, recreate, or perform again (Oxford)
b. performing a role in an event that occurred at an earlier time (Princeton)
Reenactment
1. Reenactment is temporal.
2. Schneider focuses on reenactment as: a) replayed art; and, b) replayed war.
3. It is a re-playing or re-doing a precendent event, artwork, or act.
4. It has become popular and practice-based wing of academic ‘memory industry’
5. It is the act of trying to bring that time—that prior moment—to the very fingertips of the present.
6. Reenactment is performance’s critical mode of remaining, as well as a mode of remaining critical: passing on,
staying alive in order to pass on the past not as present alone.
7. Reenactment is not the thing itself and not not the thing as it passes across their bodies in again-time.
“putting themselves ‘in the place of’ the past. re-enacting that past by ‘posing as if’ they were indeed, soldiers and civilians of the 1860s”
8. Reenactment as return of time (incomplete, leak)
-gives live experience to what archive misses
-places one time in another time

History proper vs forgotten all are flesh memory

error
unreliability
-Toni Morrison’s ‘rememory’; Adrienne Rich’s ‘revision’ (the act of looking back, seeing with fresh eyes, of catering an
old from a new critical direction; it is an act of survival); Judith Butler’s ‘sedimented acts’

Reeanacting from critical direction, a different temporal angle, of keeping it alive as passing on is what performances do
9. Reenactment as mimesis
“…mimesis is what we do. To ask how to do things with mimesis might be to ask how to engage with historical process—with history—with the
antecedent and subsequent real at/on any given stage of time.” (18)
10. Reenactment as regeneration
“Here the historical investment is not as much about preservation as it is about regeneration. History is not remembered as it was but experienced
as it will become. It must be acquired, purchased, begun again and again. A nation of futurity is here, still, a nation without reminiscences—unless
reminiscence is relieved as NOW, acquired as affective “present time” experience, beginning again.”
11. Reenactment troubles linear temporality: recurrence—time may be touched, crossed, visited or revisited; time is
transitive and flexible; that time may recur in time, that time is not one—never only one…

Performance │ Archive Can performance itself be an archive?

1. Archive is a way of saving a performance. But performance is ephemeral.
2. Archives are linked with power, dominance, strength and control.
3. Performance can be an archive in itself but like memory, is subject to revisionism and changes.

Chapter 1: Reenactment and relative pain

1. nature of re-enactment: “affect can circulate, bearing atmosphere-altering tendencies… shifting in and through
 bodies in encounter” (36)
2. Time is engaged in time: “the past is given to remain, but in each case that remaining is incomplete, fractured,
partial—in the sense both fragmentary and on-going.” (37)
3. Investigates, if not questions, Santayana’s 1905 aphorism, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned
to repeat it”--> When is difference failure?
“A conundrum presents itself: if repetition is what we’re condemned to do if we do not remember adequately, repetition is also, a mode of
remembering—a remembering that, somehow, might place history’s mistakes at hand, as if through repeated enactment we could avoid…
repetition.” (40)

“Wouldn’t remembering history’s mistakes necessitate wrestling with mistakes in the remembering? and what does remembering mistake. like
mistaken memory, get right about history in the replaying?”

4. The difference between faux and real is not necessarily a failure or threat to remembering of the past.

Chapter 2: Finding faux fathers

1. Theatricality has no access to things, acts, or events in themselves, but only to holes—hollow copies, void versions,
ineffectual errors of acts: there is a great hole in both theatre and history
2. (re)turns of history

Chapter 3: In the meantime: performance remains

1. meantime: the meaning is double, both between times and simultaneous; two times at the same time, between;
across and in time; for the duration of one time in another time
2. theatre as a temporal medium in the fold of its own condition
3. liveness, or in real time, of performance--> ephemerality

Since the 1980s, the notion of performance as anti-archive has been central in performance studies, evident in the
work of many theorists who have argued that the most constitutive trait of performance is its ephemerality. (Blau 1982; Sayre
1989; Phelan 1993; Blocker 1999; Goldberg 2004; Heathfield 2004) Peggy Phelan’s Unmarked: The Politics of Performance
constitutes the most extended example of this theorization; in it, she sketches out an ontological relation between the event of
performance and its subsequent disappearance. According to Phelan, “performance’s only life is in the present. Performance
cannot be saved, recorded, documented… Performance’s being… becomes itself through disappearance” (1993, 146).

4. positioning of performance in archival culture

In re-thinking performance not as ephemeral, but as that which “remains differently,” Schneider cleaves an opening for
what she calls “different ways of accessing history” (101). Through an analysis of the uncanny ability of an American Civil War
re-enactor to simulate a bloated corpse, Schneider demonstrates how performance disrupts a binary relationship between
appearance and disappearance. This strange incident of a live body simulating death is emblematic of how disappearance
effectively haunts remains, and vice versa: “Death appears to result in the paradoxical reproduction of both disappearance and
remains. Disappearance, that citational practice, that after-the-factness, clings to remains—absent flesh ghosts bones” (104).
In other words, remains and loss are mutually constitutive; thus, the ‘bones’ of the archive—historical documents—are
performative, producing the fleshy losses to which they testify: ‘The archive performs the institution of disappearance, with
object remains as indices of disappearance and with performance as given to disappear” (105).

Chapter 4: Poor poor theatre

1. reassesses ‘precision’
“…mimesis is not the antithesis of some discreet authenticity or pure truth, but a powerful tool for the cross- or intra-temporal negotiation,
even perhaps interaction of inter(in)animation of one time with another time”

Chapter 5: Still living

1. photography and cinema vs performance: record vs (a)live
2. photography in theatre: liveness and still
3. the delegation of live performance as vanishing in time and photography as capturing time has contributed to our
inability to read the two media as intimately related in the gesture of the still.” (149)
4. performance in photography

Other Critical Points:

1. liveness <-----inter(in)animate----> deadness: Performance makes liveness and deadness “neither decidable nor relevant”.
monumental <-----inter(in)animate----> passing live
(commemorating) (forgetting)
2. The improvisation of live art and media of mechanical and technological production (photography) is interinanimation.
3. Audience, bystander, passerby are reminded that it was not, or not ‘entirely’ 1861-65 through not cross-temporal dressing.
4. “it’s not over”-continuously fought through commemoration
5. Authenticity: “Indeed, performance art and theatre reenactments in an art context can sometimes sit in an uneasy
relationship, esp. regarding the stakes of auhenticity”(13)
Living history events and battle reenactments occur as “popular pastime” or “heritage activity” and not a debate neither in
trying to be authentic nor artistic.

“Here, the past can simultaneously be past (genuine) and ‘on the move’, co-present, not left behind.”

“Perpetual forgetting might ensure that “beginning” could be forever (re)played as “a new birth of freedom”—and this might
have been one way to cope with the belatedness of America’s future fathers to America’s founding fathers. Live recitation would
always begin again, memory would never be achieved as complete, re-enactment would insist upon re-beginning.“ (23)

US has no memory of battlefields.” (O’Sullivan)

Linear time is ruse. Reenactors take the past in multiple directions

Reenactment: “it’s not over”

“There is, instead, a superabundance to re-enactment, like a run-on sentence, as if an event in time, refusing to be fully
or finally ‘over’ or ‘gone’ or ‘complete’ pulses with a kind of living afterlife…” (30)

Therefore the archive is not only the guardian of historical knowledge, but its enabling and legislating force. He who controls the
archive controls what we can know about the past. (Aldarondo, 2011)

To use Schneider’s metaphor, the archive is bone (that which remains) to performance’s flesh (that which slips away): “In the
archive, flesh is given to be that which slips away. Flesh can house no memory of bone. Only bone speaks memory of flesh.
Flesh is blindspot” (102).

For Schneider, is inaccurate to say that performance disappears and the archive remains; rather, performance remains, but
“remains differently.”

If the archive is not a space for saving, but rather a space of performance, what sorts of historiographical methodologies might
emerge from within the archive’s ruins?

If we reconsider the archive to be a performative space, constituted by loss and enactment as well as presence, how might such
a reconfiguration of the archive open up new ways of intervening in that space?

visualreader.pbworks.com/f/Aldarondo–Ephemeral.doc

Performative Capacity:

What happens to linear history if nothing is ever fully completed nor discretely begun? When does a call to action, cast into the
future, fully take place? Only in the moment of the call? Or can a call to action be resonant in the varied and reverberant cross-
temporal spaces where an echo might encounter response—even years and years later? Can we call back in time? Across time?
What kind of response might we elicit? [...] What are the limits of the future? What are the limits of this now? (180-1)