Giving Sense to the Past

Abstract

One of the most common assertion about reenactment is that it installs a form of “affective historiography.” Because reenactment engages the body in relating to the past, it adds corporeal, sensorial, emotional, or psychological dimensions to history in ways that books or documents allegedly cannot offer. This tendency, however, to regard reenactment as an alternative to traditional modes of historiography has led to an overemphasis on its immersive effects, at the expense of its epistemological potential. This chapter argues that even while dance reenactment might share with its more popular counterparts the appeal to sensory immediacy, it turns the format into an artistic strategy that exploits, rather than covers up, historical distance, which incites critical reflection on what it means to restage the past in terms of time and affect.

A Contested Corporeality: Solidarity, Self-Fulfillment, and Transformation through African-Derived Dancing

“…Instead of seeing embodied transformation and cultural appropriation as an impossible contradiction, the juxtaposition could exemplify both Cooper Albright's educational example and Sklar's two ways of understanding the dancing: the discursive culture-specific and the body-specific, and how they must work in tandem with one another. This thought bears a resemblance to a more recent discussion on what could be called “affect-as-inquiry,” which has mainly addressed issues of reenactment in performance theory, that is, how to acquire knowledge of the past through engaging affectively with it in the present (Landsberg 2015; de Laet 2017). According to Landsberg, the notion of an “affective engagement” combines thinking and feeling, the embodied as well as the discursive dimension (Landsberg 2015, 20).…”

“…According to Landsberg, the notion of an “affective engagement” combines thinking and feeling, the embodied as well as the discursive dimension (Landsberg 2015, 20). The embodied experiences existing in the present are different from a total identification with the past, but they nevertheless help in making sense of the experience (de Laet 2017, 17). Referring back to the context of my examples, the problem is not how to bridge over proximity and distance in performance history, but how to come to terms with ideas of, for example, origin and appropriation.…”