Recuperating Loss? Reconstruction, Reenactment, and Work Performance
Chapter 12 explores the extent to which different practices of dance re-doing recuperate lost works, focusing on reconstruction, reworking, and reenactment. It explores what kind of relation obtains between such re-doings and the works they represent. None of these processes seems (simply or straightforwardly) to produce new performances of existing dance works and, in this, they disrupt what David Davies calls the “classical paradigm” of work-performance relations. This paradigm is explicated to highlight its limitations in the dance context. The chapter also explores whether and how reconstructions, reworkings, and reenactments can contribute to knowledge of the choreographic works they remake, and to dance history more generally, given that they are often not motivated by an objective of Werktreue. In this regard, the argument is developed that some reconstructions and reenactments are a species of historical fiction, allowing audiences to entertain while withholding belief about the dance historical representations they offer.
