Watching Dances from the Past: Considering Performance Analysis in the Realm of Reenactments

"In Watching Dances from the Past: Considering Performance Analysis in the Realm of Reenactments, Foellmer focuses on New, a dance piece by the Berlin-based collective Lupita Pulpo, which consists exclusively of multilayered references to contemporary dance deriving from the performance memories of its three interpreters. The dense web of references of the reenacted piece complicates the relationship with the audience, who does not always have the necessary knowledge to immediately recognize and make sense of the layers of gestures that the performers’ bodies reevoke. Raising both methodological and interpretative questions and discussing the limits of an analysis based on semiotics and phenomenology, Foellmer proposes a different approach in which performance methodology should take a cue from reenactment and its questioning of diachronic historical relations."
In: C. Baldacci/S. Franco 2022. "Represencing Performance, Dance, and Visual Art." In: Baldacci/Franco (eds.), On Reenactment: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools. Torino: Accademia University Press, pp. IX-XIV, here XI-XII.