Aftermath, reenactment and re-membering

Ill 2.2.1.4c: Performative bundling of restored behaviour

Rehearsal as a performative bundling: from ‘me’ to ‘not me’ to ‘not-not me’ (redrawn from Schechner 1985)

Another of Schechner’s illustrations: 2.2.1.4c depicts the performative bundle as the processual model of ‘restoration of behavior’. It describes emergent performances from the point of view of rehearsal and from the centre of the model indicating ‘me rehearsing’. The figure is read from the center and shows restored behaviour as either a projection of ‘my particular self’ (1

—> 2) towards ‘someone else’. Or me rehearsing a restoration of a historically verifiable past a nonevent (1 —> 3 —> 4), or—most often—a restoration of a past that never was (1 —> 5a —

>5b), me rehearsing a restored nonevent. In chapter four, Rehearsing, I will describe Schechner’s models of rehearsal and the performative bundling of restored behaviour, when rehearsing for different roles with props, acting as Grotowski’s score, like the riverbank is scaffolding the flow of the river stream.

I will now present the last section referencing Schechner’s theatre approach and the performative processes of aftermath.

2.2.1.5 Aftermath, reenactment and re-membering

This concluding part describes some cool-down processes and reflections of the aftermath of performance, based on an inquiry I made of whether co-designers are cautious enough when dealing with the later phases of dispersing the process of co-design. After having

PAST FUTURE

SUBJUNCTIVE virtual mythic

INDICATIVE actual

5a. Nonevent

3. Event

1. Me rehearsing

2. Someone else

4. Restored event 5b. Restored nonevent

carefully crafted the invitations for engagements, the processes of rehearsals and staged performances–what then? Do co-designers also remember to stage for dispersion? Design for collective aftermath? And what is the afterlife or ‘completion’ of performing co-design at all? I will return to these questions in chapter six as responses to Schechner’s twiceness of restored behaviour or twice behaved behaviour.

The last terms in the theoretical landscape of aftermath and the reiterations specifying the againness, repetition, or backward motion is not specifically Schechner’s terms but related to the re- of restored, rehearsed and reactualization as responses questioning ‘what remain(s)’? In the performative light of trying to describe the aftermath of performance I further introduce consociates as Myerhoff’s term ‘re-membering’ (1982) and Schneider’s notions of reenactment and how performing remain(s)(2011).

Re-membering with a hyphen marks a difference from remembering as a simple recalling of history. Re-membering draws our attention to the notion of membership and how the active process of membering oneself or others once again. Turner states that “Re-membering is not merely the restoration of some past intact, but setting it in some living relationship to the present”

(Turner 1982: 86). Turner’s emphasis on re-membering – describing the act of setting the past in a living relationship to the present – is similar to the effects (or affects) provided by Schechner’s actuals as deriving from Eliade’s reactualization, in the sense that Turner point to how cultural performances and ceremonial event as rituals restore and re-member its practitioners in a liminal creative space that restructures order and membership within the community. Turner also points out that symbolic action is part of re-membering, where several formative pasts are set in a living relationship that leads to the experience of the present living now. And how the process of dismembering, as we know from traditional rituals as rites of passage, are preludes to the creative re-membering: “At any rate the dismemberment of traditional religious ritual may be a prelude to its creative re-membering, which is not merely the restoration of some past intact, but setting several formative "pasts" in living relationship, through symbolic action, to our fullest experience of the present” (Turner 1985: 244).

Barbara Myerhoff, who was an anthropologist working with a community of elderly Jews in LA, defined the term re-membering when outlining ‘definitional ceremony’ to describe the process by which communities of people actively construct their identities. Myerhoff explains re-membering as a special type of recollection: “To signify this special type of recollection, the term

‘re-membering’ may be used, calling attention to the reaggregation of members, the figures who belong to one’s life story, one's prior selves, as well as significant others who are part of the story.

Re-membering then is a purposive, significant unification, quite different from the passive, continuous fragmentary flickering of images and feelings that accompany other activities in the normal flow of consciousness” (Myerhoff 1982: 111).

Myerhoff describes re-membering as this special type of recollection, where people (in her case elderly Jews) construct or often reconstruct their identity by iterating past practices (such as blessing the candles or reciting ancient prayers) and re-aggregate both their prior selves and other members who are part of the story. Myerhoff states, “The focused unification provided by re-membering is requisite to sense and ordering. A life is given a shape that extends back in the past and forward into the future” (ibid: 111). For co-designers Rehearsing, Performing and Reenacting, membering might be closer to a practice where participants recollect and re-member themselves and other witnesses in the recent past of their shared project encounters, and not necessarily their entire life story.

Now we have been introduced to three variations of iterative and cyclic aspects of reenactment: reenacting as (re)actualizing as a future-oriented ritualistic behaviour actualizing the past subjunctive as a present actual once again. Reenacting as restoration of behaviours as a bodily way of iterating behaviours into “strips” that can be worked on, and finally reenacting as re-membering as a special type of recollection and practice membering participants into past encounters again.

Simply put ‘to embody again’. And now the time has come to look a bit closer at the term

‘reenactment’ itself, with one of Schechner’s associates, Rebecca Schneider⁵⁶ who provides us with some definitions of reenactment. “In art contexts, the term “reenactment” is contested and in flux.(…) The Oxford English Dictionary gives us the verb form “reenact”: to “reproduce, recreate, or perform again” (…) Princeton's database Wordnet offers reenactment as “performing a role in an event that occurred at an earlier time,” replacing Oxford's reference to “again” with the phrase

“earlier time” – underscoring the temporal play at the base of reenactment” (Schneider 2011: 29).

According to Schneider reenactment is a restaging or recreation of an earlier event, often associated with historical reenactments of war battles or re-performances as restaged art events.

To enact is to do or make something, and to reenact is to do it again. A reenactment is the action of performing a present version of a past event. Schneider is making a great contribution to Performance Studies of reenactments by stating that ‘performing remains’, thus challenging the long-standing attention to presence, liveness and an ontology of performance as disappearing.

The disappearance of performance is especially known from Peggy Phelan’s famous quote:

“Performance’s only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance. To the degree that performance attempts to enter the economy of reproduction it betrays and lessens the promise of its own ontology” (Phelan

56 Former from the NYU’s Performance Studies department, now a professor of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies at Brown University

1993: 146). Schneider disagrees with Phelan and insists that the past is neither dead nor irretrievable and that performance, especially reenactments, is a way to encounter past

performances. Schneider counters the notion that reenactment is merely an imitation without a referent, insisting rather that there is a past that remains to disrupt the present, just as the present disrupts the past, as “when a Civil War reenactor claims that a war is not over” (ibid: 15).

Schneider states that “‘Reenactment’ is a term that has entered into increased circulation in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century art, theatre, and performance circles. The practice of re-playing or re-doing a precedent event, artwork, or act has exploded in performance-based art alongside the burgeoning of historical reenactment and “living history” in various history museums, theme parks, and preservation societies. In many ways, reenactment has become the popular and practice-based wing of what has been called the twentieth-century academic ‘memory industry’. In the syncopated time of reenactment, where then and now punctuate each other, reenactors (…) battle an ‘other’ time and try to bring that time – that prior moment – to the very fingertips of the present” (ibid: 2).

Schneider describes how reenactments produce a nervousness “syncopated time,” where then and now punctuate each other, and reenactors ‘battle another time’ trying to bring that time to the present. This nervousness state of syncopated time builds on Gertrude Stein’s description of syncopated time as relating to the audience’s emotional relations to the scene depicted on the stage in theatre plays. Stein describes how the audience’s emotions are always either behind or ahead of the play performed, before the audience’s sensations, and how this syncopation in time is one of the fundamental aspects of theatre plays. (Stein 1935: xxix)

Whether the syncopations are punctuating past times, emotional moods or againness, theatre scholars like Schechner believe that the term ‘reenactment’ is linked to a historical heritage practice. Schechner sees the reenactments as both political and cultural debates of historical events, where everybody is welcomed into the reenactment. Schechner states that re-enactment is a mimesis of a “thing,” whereas re-performances of art events are a “mimesis of a mimesis of a mimesis” that have a certain artistic exclusivity (video link 3.30).

How do performances end? Or how do they remain rather? Remember Turner’s etymological definition of performance deriving from parfournir meaning to complete or to carry out thoroughly as the processual sense of “bringing to completion” or “accomplishing” (1982).

Moving beyond completion and after the point of accomplishment to post performance, performance scholars such as Schechner suggest a phase of aftermath that takes over where the performance sequence end with a ‘cool down’. Aftermath is a process embracing a phase of responses, archiving and memories that Schechner does not describe in much detail himself. But as the last part of the sequence of performance he describes how the part of ‘cool-down’ requires

that professional actors exit to their changing rooms and backstage area detaching themselves of the character and the fresh experiences from the performance by sharing the process of aftermath and getting ready to return to their everyday lives. Similar processes occur for the audiences.

As we have come to know Schechner’s description of the processual duration of a whole performance sequence, the last sequence of aftermath consists of some critical responses, archives and memories. Schechner explains that patterns of the performance sequence are similar to ritual processes such as the three phases of separation, transition and (re)incorporation in initiation rites, where aftermath relates to the post-liminal rites of incorporation. Schechner also describes how performance is similar to initiation rites in the way it “makes” one person into another. But unlike initiation, performances usually make sure that the performer gets his “own self” back.

(Schechner 1985: 20-21)

Schechner recommends that the cool-down activities be closely studied as part of performance or as “after-the-performance ceremonies.” Schechner further describes the cross-cultural processes of cool-down: “In theaters around the world, performers after a show eat, drink, talk, and celebrate. A newcomer to actors wonders how so much energy is left for these after-the-theater bouts. But truly these activities don't come "after" but are “part of” the performance and should be studied as such. In many cultures, taking food and drink, sharing memories of what happened is either a concluding part of the performance or part of after-the-performance ceremonies. It appears that a wholehearted after-the-performance literally “empties” the performers, and one way they restore themselves (or are restored) to ordinary life is by being refilled with food and drink, sacred or profane. Or, conversely, the performance so fills performers with energy and excitement that they need time to let it all out in exuberant sociality”

(ibid: 19).

Schechner describes cool down as: “The ways people cool off and the sometimes extended aftermath of performances are less studied but very important. Cooling off includes getting performers and spectators out of, or down from, the performance; putting the performance space and implements to rest; the aftermath includes spreading the news about performances, evaluating them – even writing books about them – and in many ways determining how specific performances feed into ongoing systems of social and aesthetic life” (Schechner 2003: xviii).

Schechner briefly describes the sequence of aftermath: “Aftermath is even less

systematically discussed than cool-down. The aftermath is the long-term consequences or follow-through of a performance. Aftermath includes the changes in status or being that result from an initiatory performance; or the slow merging of performer with a role he plays for decades (…) or the reviews and criticism that so deeply influence some performances and performers; or

theorizing and scholarship – such as this book. At the distance of reviews, criticism, theory, and scholarship careers are built not in the arts and rituals of performing but in commenting on performances. Of course, aftermath feeds back into performing – and the theories of

practitioners such as Brecht, Stanislavsky, and Zeami for examples are especially instrumental”

(Schechner 1985: 19).

With this final section on Schechner’s performance sequence of aftermath and the concepts of reenactment and re-membering we will leave the American Performance Studies and traditions of poetics of performance process for a while and shift our attention to a European theatre historian who has taken a closer look at the transformative aesthetics of performance.