Gloriously Inept and Satisfyingly True: Reenactment and the Practice of Spectating

TY - CHAP

T1 - Gloriously Inept and Satisfyingly True: Reenactment and the Practice of Spectating

AU - Skantze, P A

PY - 2017/12/13

Y1 - 2017/12/13

N2 - Invoking the methodology of the act of spectating as a practice, an idea developed from Skantze’s Itinerant Spectator/Itinerant Spectacle, this chapter examines reenactment from the perspective of the active spectator. The archive and the document common to reenactment present the spectator as practitioner with interpretive tools, and yet often the reception of reenactments becomes stronger by way of the mix of spectator memory with the not quite accurate or faithful in the representation. Wim Vandekeybus’s Booty Looting, a dance performance that not only stages a reenactment, but also confronts the spectator with the material of memory, forms the basis for thinking through the paradox of the truth in approximations and flawed enactments.

AB - Invoking the methodology of the act of spectating as a practice, an idea developed from Skantze’s Itinerant Spectator/Itinerant Spectacle, this chapter examines reenactment from the perspective of the active spectator. The archive and the document common to reenactment present the spectator as practitioner with interpretive tools, and yet often the reception of reenactments becomes stronger by way of the mix of spectator memory with the not quite accurate or faithful in the representation. Wim Vandekeybus’s Booty Looting, a dance performance that not only stages a reenactment, but also confronts the spectator with the material of memory, forms the basis for thinking through the paradox of the truth in approximations and flawed enactments.

KW - Spectating, practice, archive, reception, methodology, Wim Vandekeybus, Booty Looting, approximation

M3 - Chapter

SP - 327

EP - 338

BT - The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Reenactment

ER -