Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment by Rebecca Schneider (review)

As an epigraph to the first chapter of her dazzling—and sometimes dizzying— book, Rebecca Schneider takes the motto of the Association of Lincoln Presenters: “Now he belongs to the stages” (32). It’s the kind of pun that Schneider delights in, not only because it collapses into a clever quip on one of the book’s main claims—that the goal of history, like the goal of performance, should not be to recover some pure past but rather to understand an event through reen-acting it as part of a continuous present—but also because it plays on the coincidental and yet uncannily appropriate conjunctions between ideas that seem worlds apart in space and time.

This is a book that makes much of seemingly impossible juxtapositions: medieval tableaux vivants with Abu Ghraib, John Wilkes Booth with Gertrude Stein, Civil War reenactment with feminist performance art. As disparate as these subjects seem, Schneider’s wide-ranging analyses and perceptive close-readings expose their striking similarities. Yet the real point of Schneider’s book is to dismantle the binaries on which performance studies has come to depend: live versus archive, authentic versus mimetic, present versus past. Performing Remains promises not only to rewrite where performance studies is going but also to rethink what it’s been.

But this book is not for the faint of heart, and readers hoping to peruse a chapter or two will balk at its theoretical density and deliberately circular prose. Illustrating her nonlinear approach to history, Schneider often drops names only to loop back, pages later, making her point less through articulation than through accretion. Characteristic is a foreword “which is not one” (1), in that it does less to explain than to touch upon the pairings that the book will develop and dissolve. Focusing on Marina Abramović’s 2010 installation The Artist Is Present, queer artist-activist Allison Smith’s 2005 performance The Muster, and interviews with Civil War reenactors, Schneider argues that “elite” artists and Civil War hobbyists share the assumption that history gains more in the reen-acting—that the errors and revisions that reenactment entails have as much to teach us about the past as an exacting examination of its archive.

Chapter 1 develops this assertion by pairing Civil War reenactments with the queer performance art of Miranda July. These performances share the assumption that all present events or performances are citations of the past. Thus the idea of the theater as mimesis—the imitation of an action—is both false (because it depends on an impossible distinction between imitation and action, citation and original) and antitheatrical (because it regards the imitation as an always-imperfect attempt to recover the original). If there is no such thing as an original act—no such thing as an unsullied present—perhaps the best way to practice history is to reenact it.

Reenactment therefore becomes a critical act and its errors productive differences that prevent history from repeating itself uncritically, an assertion Schneider takes up in chapter 2. She focuses on Suzan-Lori Parks’s The America Play, in which an African American character impersonates Lincoln in a theme park, and Linda Mussman’s Cross Way Cross, in which a blond woman impersonates Lincoln on a solo road trip. Parks’s commentary on race and Mussman’s on gender, Schneider observes, depend on their characters’ deviation from the exact replication of a past event or person. In this way, it is the error of historical reenactment that “does things” (69). Conversely, it is the reenactment that makes us aware of the error: “If the ‘familiar’ was not in some way induced, it could not be essentially disturbed” (78).

Chapter 3 is the heart of Performing Remains, and the moment (which we’ve all been waiting for) when Schneider wrestles most articulately with the ghosts of performance theorists past. In addition to continuing the dismantling of “liveness” that she began in chapter...