Muñoz 1 Pablo Muñoz Professor Claire Bishop ART 70000, Methods of Research 19 December 2018 Critical analysis of André Lepecki “The Body as Archive: Will to Re-Enact and the Afterlives of Dances” (2010) by Note: Lepecki’s article has had two different publication instances in English (2010, 2016). My analysis will focus on the 2010 version, in order to contextualize the author with a specific moment of discussion about dance and archive, but I will consider modifications for the 2016’s version. Introduction Traditionally the challenge of reenacting dance and performance art has been a problem not only for dance and performance art making but also for academic disciplines such as art history and performance studies, which have approached the reenactment with various terminologies that suggest different actions. According to Mark Franko, “the term reenactment itself was first used by R.G. Collingwood in 1928,” as one of many other terms that suggest ideas of “reperformance, remake, citation, the distributed body, alternative histories, acheiropoietics, restructuring touch, re- actualization, the derivative, cover, and so on” (Franko, 2017:5). Some concepts in art history have been useful for the theorization of reenactment in dance and performance art; for instance, Mieke Bal’s idea of overwriting, 1 and Rosalind Krauss’s analysis of the grid in modernist art. 2 Dance studies in the United States and Europe have addressed the problem of reenacting dance performance, its 1 Mieke Bal has used the term “overwriting”, a term borrowed from literary studies, not specifically in studying performance art but to explain the recontextualization and re-appropriation of European art history from US painters Ken Aptekar and Dotty Attie. “One of Aptekar’s and Attie’s tools is language. In overwriting their paintings, they make the point that in addition to visually “being there”, images also “speak”; at the same time, the discrepancies between the words and the images emphasize the irreducible gap between the two media” (Bal 2011: 4). 2 According to Franko “reenactment in dance resembles Krauss’s analysis of the grid in modernist art” (Krauss 1985, 9- 22), explaining that “Intertemporal relationality of gesture is the spatial grid that militates against progressive changes, characterized by modernism; it is thus not by chance that modernist themselves are frequently the subjects of reenactment” (Franko 2017: 8).