Reperformance and Transhistoricity

Abstract

This article analyses the regimes of transhistoricity that underlie re-creations, reconstructions, replays and reactivations of past performances. Approaching chains of transmission of performances as forms of transhistoricity makes it possible to remount them with the attitude of a genealogist (Foucault 2001). This means grasping the conflicts and the power relations that are inscribed within them in order to reveal ruptures, interruptions, discontinuities and dispersions. What reinterpretations of history do re-performances allow? What genealogies and counter-memories may emerge from the plays of repetition and difference that they present? What effects do the re-performers’ bodies – their states, their affects, and their singular corporealities – have?

I conduct this reflection based on Françoise Sullivan’s Danse dans la neige, an emblematic choreographic work marking the advent of artistic modernity in Quebec. Improvised outdoors during the winter of 1948, this performance has come down to us through twenty photographs. I look at three specific moments: the reproduction of a first image in the automatist artists’ manifesto Refus global (1948); the publication of the entire corpus and its multiple re-mediations between 1977 and 2007; Luis Jacob’s installation A Dance for Those of Us Whose Hearts Have Turned to Ice (2007), in which a reinterpretation of Sullivan’s dance by a queer performance artist was screened.

The transmission of Danse dans la neige falls under two contradictory transhistorical regimes. On the one hand, it is about negotiating one’s place in the narratives and institutions of Quebec art history, according to an authorial affirmation and a centripetal movement of the minority toward the majority system. On the other hand, it is a vector of deterritorialization and disentanglement by minority figures: the drag queen, the dog, the Deaf.

A CKNOWLEDGEMENT

The author would like to thank Steve Giasson and AnneMarie St-Jean Aubre for their aid in research.

Notes

1 The exhibition Marina Abramović. The Artist Is Present (MoMA, New York, 14 March – 31 May 2010) is an excellent example.

2 This term designates the social, cultural and political changes in Quebec during the 1960s.

3 Political party whose platform includes Quebec independence and promotion of the French language.

4 A friend of the automatists, Perron photographed their exhibitions and art events without ever considering his images to be artworks.

5 In the same year, the Centre Chorégraphique National–Ballet de Lorraine in France remounted Black and Tan and Dédale, two of Sullivan’s pieces contemporaneous with Danse dans la neige.

6 Cole is well known in Toronto as an activist, provocateur, drag queen, and member of the queer theatre company Buddies in Bad Times Theatre.

7 Email exchange with the artist, 2015.

8 This second tape was not presented at documenta. Jacob integrated it during the Canadian tour of the installation; spectators could experience both versions in the same space.

9 In the education statute only.

10 Translator’s note: Nouss (2007b: 245, unnumbered note) explains his use of the term métissage as follows: ‘The French term “métissage” [refers] to the interweaving … of different linguistic and cultural strands within the same text.’

11 Since the late 1990s, Jacob has been involved with the Toronto anarchist community. In 1998, he co-founded the Anarchist Free School collective, which he led during its two years of existence.