Repetition in Performance: Returns and Invisible Forces by Eirini Kartsaki (review)

Repetition has become, it seems, an indispensable device for the contemporary choreographer. From the Judson circle's recursive invocations of pedestrian movement to Pina Bausch's incessant recapitulations, repetition is now an almost reassuringly familiar presence on the dance stage. In this new volume, Eirini Kartsaki immerses us in the processes and purposes of repetition in performance. Repeated gestures and sequences, Kartsaki tells us, induce us to look again, to revisit our initial interpretation of the movement, and to involve ourselves more deeply with the work on display. Indeed, this act of seeing again can equate seeing anew. Repetition thus demands to be noticed, and the inherent ephemerality of the live event can arguably be renegotiated through the act of repetition: a movement is not necessarily "lost" if we are permitted to see it again and again.

Kartsaki takes on a difficult task here as she seeks to verbalize the subtle and largely unconscious effects of repetition upon the theatrical spectator. This includes the potential for repetition to alienate as well as to stoke pleasure in the viewer, with Kartsaki suggesting in her introduction that this can be an "erotic force" (7). She illustrates her discussion with a diverse array of case studies, drawn not solely from dance and theater but also delving into the realms of literature and visual art. Repetition in Performance thus broadens and blurs the boundaries of the notion of performance, encompassing analysis of Francis Bacon's paintings, the writings of Gertrude Stein, and the theatrical "choreography" of Samuel Beckett as well as the more familiar terrain of Yvonne Rainer, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, and Pina Bausch (whose near-relentless use of repetition divided critical opinion over the course of her career). Kartsaki's is thus a resolutely postmodern analysis of performance practice, one that does not clearly delineate between forms, but deliberately blurs the terminology of "performance" and "theater." In this respect, I would suggest that important methodological precedents lie in Hans-Thies Lehmann's seminal framing of postdramatic theatre (2006) though curiously Kartsaki does not engage with his theorization.

Repetition tends to replace linear narrative with patterns of circularity and recursion. It seems appropriate, then, that in terms of its thematic structure, Repetition in Performance traces an equally nonlinear thread through its exploration of various facets of performance practice. Kartsaki opens her text with Gertrude Stein's 1925 novel The Making of Americans,an unexpected starting point for a book that purports to center upon performance. However, as Kartsaki begins to explain her method for making sense of this difficult (or, as she terms it, "unreadable") novel, it becomes clear that the act of reading can be transformed into a performative gesture; by reading Stein's work aloud, Kartsaki argues that she becomes an active participant, and the static text is enlivened by this performative engagement with it. This becomes a recurring motif of Kartsaki's writing: Repetition in Performance sits somewhere between analytical and personal writing, with the presence of the writer never far from her discussion of case study works.

Kartsaki frames repetition as "a methodology that reveals the mechanism of the work and its structure," and this provides the reader with an interesting key for unlocking aspects of seemingly abstracted performance practice (25–26). Her thoroughly interdisciplinary approach results in some innovative readings of well-known works. Regarding Yvonne Rainer's use of repetition, for example, Kartsaki suggests that here the device effectively solidifies or concretizes choreography, transmuting movement into something more akin to sculpture, thus making it "easier to see" (33–34). Her notion of the objectness of movement suggests an almost art historical approach to the subject matter, rereading dance as capable of assuming a static form; this is an ability conferred on it through the use of repetition, which stills the movement, encapsulates it for the audience to observe, and seems to negate or at least temporarily pause its inherent ephemerality. Accordingly, repetition not only narrows the gap...