Hi Crumb list

Thanks to Ben for his introduction; I'm hoping the other respondents  
this month will introduce themselves too and we can stop re-enacting  
the behaviour of list-lurkers ;-)

I spent the weekend at the Radiator festival in Nottingham, with Karen  
Guthrie and Tom McCarthy and others - participating in the symposium  
about performance, dance and technology at the University. Following  
our panel about re-enactment
(http://radiator-festival.org/newradiator/content/subheader.php? 
id_header=1&id_subheader=44&typename=4&id_artisttype=2)
we were asked some interesting questions about the impetus towards  
re-enactment and whether artists not trained in performance or theatre  
find the props of re-enactment work, such as costumes, empowering or  
camouflaging, allowing trespass across disciplines (or perhaps, in the  
example of Abramovic's performances mentioned earlier on this list,  
permitting interpretation rather than enforcing verisimilitude). The  
idea of trauma -- of re-enacting for the sake of 'getting over' the  
original event/disaster came up often too.

Both Simon Pope in his new project Charade (www.charade.org.uk) and  
Nina Pope and Karen Guthrie in their project Sometime Later  
(www.sometime.org.uk) are using blogs / web forums for the development  
of the network of participants in their re-enacted works. Perhaps they  
could say a little about those media of both production and  
dissemination.

As Rod Dickinson suggested in an email to me, many artists working with  
re-enactment have particular relationships with new media technology  
("i think i 'use it' more than i 'do it' - if you see what i mean" he  
wrote). I think a discussion of the form of the experience of the work  
- the encounter - could be one way to proceed. As many of our invited  
respondents have either commissioned, created, been present at, or  
written about re-enactment work, perhaps they can share their thoughts  
on how the encounter works.

As for feedback from Radiator, there was an interesting split, between  
those artists (many of whom had works in the Radiator festival) who  
live and work in the network as it were, and whose talks were about  
explaining the platform for engagement with the work itself (such as  
the project sub/merg/ency http://www.submergency.com/ , where you had  
to help the artists determine the nature of public space by creating  
objects in Angel's Row Gallery which were then used to populate the  
underwater landscape at the Surface gallery) and those artists from  
live/performance/theatre backgrounds whose talks were either  
theory-heavy or consisted of video documentation of elaborate staged  
events with passive audiences. The closing session of the conference  
went some way to put into question the assumptions of the different  
spaces of presentation -- the web, the theatre, the stage, the gallery.

Sarah

P.S. In my introduction I got the website url for the Once More... With  
Feeling show incorrect. It is actually www.regvardygallery.org
Check it out, as it is full of links to re-enactment based projects.