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  • (Un)Covering Artistic Thought Unfolding
  • Maaike A. Bleeker (bio)

“What does it mean to reconstruct a dance?” wonders Martin Nachbar in his text “Training Remembering.” Following Henri Bergson, he proposes an explanation in terms of images that are actualized in ways that involve not only the visual sense, but also hearing, touch, and proprioception. Remembering something is actualizing it through the senses. Such sensory actualization is instrumental not only to literally remember moments from our own past, but also to our modes of engaging with the thoughts, ideas, experiences, and creations of others. In this process, Nachbar observes, our own body, with its movement knowledge and experiences, becomes the frame through which remembering takes shape, while at the same time this frame may be questioned and trained anew within the process.

The following is an elaboration of the idea that sharing thought takes place through such embodied thinking-through of the ideas of others, starting from the artistic practice of re-enactment. The term re-enactment is used to name a diversity of practices of redoing the past, both in the arts and outside of the arts—from the careful restaging of historical battles by thousands of often deeply involved amateurs, to living history projects, to historical reality television, to artistic works that redo performances from the past. What these practices share is that, in them, the past is actualized through the bodies of those involved in the redoing. What exactly is remembered in the process is a subject of discussion. To some, re-enactment promises an understanding of historical events that is more “in the flesh,” thus allowing for insight into what it meant to actually be within the historical situation. There is certainly a lot to be learned from trying to work with historical materials and techniques, and exploring the implications of the material conditions of the past. For example, reconstructing a sixteenth-century ship, and trying to sail it and live on it, may indeed confront researchers with aspects of the past that are absent from the material found in archives and history books. The same goes for performing music on historical instruments or performing Shakespeare in the reconstructed Globe theater rather than on a proscenium stage. However, there are, as many [End Page 13] have pointed out, also reasons to be careful with re-enactment as a method of investigating the past. Re-enactment all too easily promotes a conflation of past and present, as well as a mixing up of positions within—and with regard to—past and present situations. Usually, visitors to historical villages and participants in re-enactments of historical battles are invited to experience the re-enactment not as the past experienced from the present, but as if being the past, thus suggesting that the re-enactment would provide direct access to past events and experiences. Re-enactment thus seems to promise an embodied understanding of the past, while in fact what is experienced is one’s own embodied experiences in the here and now, and not those of a historical agent.

Reflecting on the pros and cons of re-enactment as a method of historical research, Alexander Cook observes that actually:

. . . projects of reenactment are not in any direct sense about the period or the events being reenacted. Rather they are about a modern set of activities that are inspired by an interest in the past. They are about placing modern individuals in dialogue with a historical imaginary.

(Cook 2004, 494)

The major novelty and potential of re-enactment as an investigative practice therefore, Cook argues, lies in the inevitable foregrounding of the present—that is, not in showing us a spectacle from the past but in showing the spectacle of people attempting to explore the past (Cook 2004, 494). This, Cook argues, should be highlighted in the practice of re-enactment as well as the documentation of these practices.

Cook is writing about re-enactments of historical situations outside the arts. What he is arguing for is actually already a prominent feature of many re-enactments taking place within the arts. Many re-enactments of artistic work explicitly include traces of, and reflection on, the attempts to relate to the...

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