Tracy McMullen

Event as Monument: When Performance Turns Solid

The reenactment of past events through living history museums, battle reenactments, and even performance art, has become an increasingly popular cultural practice. Perhaps the most popular form of live reenactment, however, is found in musical performance. Popular tribute bands that reenact complete live rock concerts of yore, flood local and even national venues, but musical reenactments have also been staged as performance art. The performance duo of Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, for example, has reenacted Ziggy Stardust, The Who, and The Cramps to much acclaim in both Britain and the United States. I situate reenactment in relation to cultural desires for permanence, unified identity, and the real in an increasingly mediated and fragmented world. Reenactment can present past events as frozen hunks of time, where the ephemeral and bygone are re-vivified, reified, and commodified. Through specific examples of musical reenactments, I discuss how this practice performs a type of modern-day public ritual that addresses the dislocation, instability, and sense of loss and inadequacy experienced by the postmodern subject. These reenactments can perform a desired eternal return of archetypal events and identities retrieved and conjured from the past. They can also offer an enactment of stability and the known in a world that feels increasingly unstable and unreliable.