French Literature Reviews - 2026
A. Bénichou, Rejouer le vivant. Les reenactments, des pratiques culturelles et artistiques (in)actuelles
Art and Visual Culture
Anne Bénichou,
Rejouer le vivant. Les reenactments, des pratiques culturelles et artistiques (in)actuelles,
Dijon, Presses du réel, 2020., Presses du réel, collection "Français", 2021.
EAN13 : 9782378961541 - 420 p. - 30 €.
The book Rejouer le vivant explores how the past is re-enacted in response to contemporary challenges through living "re-enactments."
Since the beginning of the millennium, re-enactment practices have been generating immense enthusiasm across fields and disciplines as diverse as the arts, living history, television, virtual worlds, and more. This penchant for redoing signals the emergence of new sensibilities toward the past. Whether practiced by amateurs, professionals, or artists; whether recreating historical events, cultural phenomena, or past performance works; and whether their aims are recreational, artistic, historiographical, or heritage-related, re-enactments manifest a desire to reintegrate the body, affect, and the performative into historical representations. They reinvent the ways in which living memories, archives, and media representations are articulated. Anachronistic by nature, they bring plural and heterogeneous historicities into dialogue with our present, enabling us to better understand today's world and act upon it. Their success is a sign of a certain democratization of history.
"Re-enacted" history is negotiated among various actors. It has the capacity to provoke debates and controversies essential to democratic life, and to foster forms of agency. But what happens to the political and emancipatory significance of these re-enactments once cultural and artistic institutions and industries take them up, initiate them, and produce them? Does this appropriation risk defusing their critical charge, or does it instead contribute to a dialogical turn in certain institutional practices?
Table of Contents
Introduction
Semantic drift and new sensibilities toward the past
Part One
(In)actual Practices and Theoretical Objects
I. From pageants to Second Life: the play of immersion and distancing
1. The construction, contestation, and requalification of national narratives
2. Museums and living history parks
3. A dialectic of immersion and distancing (authenticity and identification, anachronism and make-believe, double meaning and simulacrum)
4. New media and the intermedial condition
II. Restored behavior, agency, and the affective turn in history
1. Re-enactment and performativity
2. An instrument of agency
3. Re-enactment right up against the archive
4. Forms of affective history
III. Historical reality TV: the unexplored potential of re-enactment (Le Lot du diable)
1. A dual reception
2. Missed encounters
3. How to "overcome the present"?
IV. Artistic re-enactments: repertoires under an intermedial regime
1. Pursuing an intuition: the repertoire and intermediality
2. Negotiating intermedial narratives through misunderstanding (Jeremy Deller, Peter Watkins, Raed and Rania Rafei)
3. Incorporating/excorporating the images of a conflict (Arkadi Zaides)
4. "Representance": a challenge for artistic re-enactments
Part Two
Theatricalizing Today's Conflicts
I. Representing or re-performing gender: the ethics and politics of aesthetic choices (Jennie Livingston, Trajal Harrell)
1. Ball culture and voguing
2. Filming: the traps of the ethnographic gaze
3. Performing film, or the unexpected encounter of voguing and postmodern dance
4. Dance history as repertoire: between aesthetics and politics
II. The re-enactment of the colonial exhibition: risks of the performative, cinematic lines of flight (Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña)
1. Exhibitions of human beings from elsewhere
2. Re-enacting the subjugated subject: the risks of misunderstanding
3. Deconstructing the colonial gaze through the cinematic apparatus
4. Cultural hybridization, "the psychology of colonialism," and a decolonial future
III. Is there such a thing as the "non-re-enactable"? An inevitably polemical question (Brett Bailey)
1. Tableaux vivants, exchanges of gazes, and museum displays: an art of presence
2. Chronicle of a confrontation: the media, the street, the courts
3. The "human zoo": a polemical formula
4. Organizing dissensus: aesthetics versus politics, freedom of creation versus human rights
5. "Coexisting in dissensus"
Part Three
Repertoires to Be Re-enacted on the Museum's Horizon
I. Recreating to make (art) history (Françoise Sullivan, Luis Jacob)
1. Decentering: dancing, traveling, opening up to others
2. Myths of origin, remediations, re-takes
3. Mythical narratives in search of authors
4. Decentering further: the drag queen, the dog, the Deaf person
5. Returning home as a métis and a nomad
6. Work in progress
II. Re-performing in the museum and inscribing oneself in art history (Marina Abramović)
1. Re-performing the works of others: from documentary sources to re-enactments
2. Interdocumentary creation and a "will to archive"
3. A "machine for actualizing the present" and reinterpreting icons
4. Having others re-perform one's works: tableaux vivants and photographic scripts
5. Remediation or the paradoxical manufacture of presence and authenticity
6. New uses of re-enactment images and institutional transformations
III. Museums put to the test of the live: from collection to repertoire? (Moments: A History of Performance in 10 Acts)
1. Renewed encounters between dance and the museum
2. Neither museum nor theater: a dispersed and evolving exhibition
3. An intergenerational and dissensual community
4. The repertoire: interdocumentary creation, score-based practice, and the body
5. The limits of the museum
IV. The geopolitical stakes of repertoires (Re.Act. Feminism)
1. "A critical cartography" as history
2. A mobile and dialogical apparatus
3. A parallactic vision?
4. Adopting the genealogist's attitude
Conclusion
The emergence of a field of study, or the culmination of institutionalization
Bibliography
List of illustrations
Index
Acknowledgements and note
Anne Bénichou teaches art theory and museum studies at the Université du Québec à Montréal. Her research focuses on archives, forms of memory, and historical narratives arising from contemporary artistic practices and the institutions responsible for preserving and disseminating them. With Les Presses du réel, she has edited Recréer / scripter – Mémoires et transmissions des œuvres performatives et chorégraphiques contemporaines (2015) and Ouvrir le document – Enjeux et pratiques de la documentation dans les arts visuels contemporains (2010).
This study sits at the intersection of performance studies, contemporary art history, and museum studies, addressing the "affective turn" in how we engage with history. By examining how physical bodies, archives, and media representations interact, Anne Bénichou contextualizes the rise of re-enactment as both an artistic strategy and a broader cultural phenomenon. The book explores how ephemeral works—such as the performance art of Marina Abramović or historical choreographies—are preserved, transmitted, and reinterpreted. Through these examples, the author investigates how the traditional museum, historically built around stable objects, adapts to the fluid and living nature of performance repertoires.
Rejouer le vivant helps readers navigate crucial questions about the ethics, politics, and democratic potential of restaging the past. It asks how artistic institutions might defuse or, conversely, amplify the critical and decolonial charge of controversial historical events when they choose to restage them. Scholars and students of art theory, museology, theater, and cultural studies will find this work highly valuable. It offers a rich theoretical framework for understanding how contemporary society negotiates collective memory, identity, and political agency through the physical act of repetition.