Mimesis and Remembrance: Daedalus's A Place at the Table and the performance of testimony.In the theatrical encounter with difficult histories --the witnessed atrocity, the traumatic memory, the intolerable image --distance between the testimonial and the aesthetic is valued. This is for several reasons, firstly concern regarding the potential conflation of genuine experience with artistic expression, which in turn necessitates a need to distinguish between the assumed authenticity of testimony and the fiction of theatre. Secondly, the ethics of making performable that which is arguably impossible to recall, let alone represent. In the various forms of the 'emergent testimonial genre' (Forsyth 2011: 154), much attention is paid to appropriate languages and dramaturgies of testimony as distinct from performance.However, recent efforts have embraced the latter, for instance Anna Harpin's attention to the artist's translation of 'extreme experience into the materiality of the theatre' (2011: 108) in order to examine the spectatorship of aporia, and Alison Forsyth's proposition that the plasticity of testimony not only requires but necessitates performance. Thus the case for performance as a function of the act of remembrance emerges and, as such, the theatricality of the testimonial genre, the aesthetics of staging and the performing of this, become a current concern.The acting of witness is a risky endeavour, with worrying connotations of the therapeutic (even the solipsistic). It requires a re-embodiment of testimony which has the appearance of correlation between self and the testifying Other and it is this proximity between performance and testimony that causes anxieties as to whether theatre is an appropriate form for revelation of the witnessed. Whereas I would argue that the re-playing, re-presenting, re-showing; the theatrical simulating or mimesis[{note}]1 of difficult histories, is more integral to the act of aesthetic remembrance, and might be a means of encountering that most difficult of memories, the intolerable, perhaps disrupting that which Rancière has considered is 'a matter of dispositif of visibility' (2009: 102). The creation of the intolerable image --and the intolerability in its recreation --is essential to its disruption; it is a construction of mimesis that tackles the positioning of 'the victim as an element in a certain distribution of the visible' (2009, 99). This article explores the function of mimesis in the performance of the remembered, one which addresses the material relation between performer and the space of the re-enactment. This analysis, based on Roger Caillois' thesis on mimicry and the similar, and Michael Taussig's re-reading of this, implies a theatrical, more
