Performing in Between Times

Abstract

In current performance and theatre practices, the term ›preenactment‹ has increasingly attracted attention. Performance collectives such as Hofmann&Lindholm, Friendly Fire, Interrobang or Public Movement use the term in different spellings and different contexts to highlight and reflect on imagined futures in the light of current experiences of (political) crisis. Their preenactments for example deal with the status and expectations of European citizens towards their governments, with urban archives of the future, or update political theatre forms such as Brecht’s Lehrstück from a future perspective.1 Thus, they invent hypothetical scenarios, speculate about possible futures and set out to experiment with fictitious time(s) and space(s) in order to gain insight into the present. As a concept, however, preenactment has only recently appeared in academic contexts (Czirak et al. 2019; Kaiser 2014; Marchart 2014), so that a theoretical elaboration is still pending. This is all the more surprising, since forms of reenactment in the arts have been subject of substantial discussion in theatre, performance and literary studies within the last decade (Heeg et al. 2014; Roselt/Otto 2012; Schneider 2011). The present volume addresses this research gap and aims at introducing an interdisciplinary perspective on the temporal entanglements and affective dimensions of reand pre-enactment. In a narrow sense, reenactments can be understood as repetitions of past events. The term derives from the field of historical didactics (Collingwood 1946/1993) and refers to performances that aim at faithfully reproducing historical events and