Exceptional in demonstrating the political engagement emerging in twenty-first-century performance is the corpus of the writer and director Milo Rau, whose practice is distinguished by its (re)meditation of the real. With detailed reference to Mitleid (2016) and La Reprise (2018), this article examines Rau’s self-reflexive strategies in (re)presenting testimony or an event as a means not of depicting the real, but of making the theatrical representation itself real in order to change the world rather than merely to portray it. The article focuses in particular on strategies relating to the actor-character and spectatorship. Rau’s interest in the positions of the actor and spectator illuminates issues that have arisen in the discourse of theatre witnessing and in recent scholarship on dramaturgical approaches and spectatorship in contemporary political performance. Essentially, Rau makes the performer’s habitus transparent, and challenges the spectator’s reflexivity, effectively rebutting the largely unchallenged assumption that characters who perform witnesses necessarily leave little room for the spectator to be a performing witness. Stuart Young is Professor of Theatre Studies at the University of Otago. His recent publications include the co-edited Ethical Exchanges: Translation, Adaptation, Dramaturgy (Brill Rodopi, 2017), while his practice-led research into Theatre of the Real includes The Keys are in the Margarine: A Verbatim Play about Dementia (2014).

In August 2015 the municipality of Sinj, located in the Dalmatian hinterland, celebrated the 300-year anniversary of a historic victory against the troops of the Ottoman Empire, one that is legendarily attributed to the divine intervention of the Virgin Mary. The Sinj Tourist Board launched an unprecedented campaign in organizing and advertising the various events - ranging from historical re-enactments, film and music productions, folkloristic performances, sports events, exhibitions, and fashion shows, to religious processions and conferences. Using a variety of media formats, these efforts were aimed at creating a new national epic, expanding the meaning of the miraculous battle of 1715 from a local narrative to a nation-wide symbol, representing Croatia in a European and global context. This article focuses on various theatrical re-enactments of the historic battle and the alleged Marian apparition, assessing the role of nostalgia and authenticity in contemporary living history performances. While one of the underlying motifs in the case of Sinj is to enhance the region’s attraction as a tourist destination, the article also theorizes the re-enactment’s epistemological and political claims by proposing that these interactive engagements with history take an active stance in promoting and/or re-inventing heroic olden times to advance socio-political conditions in the present (Gegenwartsbewaltigung).

This paper addresses the role of archaeologists in informing the public about a fundamental component of contemporary Romanian identity: the Dacian heritage. I start by exploring how the Dacians and Romanians came to be connected, a process that resulted from a combination of nationalistic zeal on behalf of archaeologists and the nationalist propaganda of the Ceauşescu regime during the 1970s and 1980s. I then move to the present-day situation, where I argue that archaeologists have reduced themselves to having a minor role in the public sphere, while discussions about the Dacians are dominated by two main players: pseudoarchaeologists and re-enactors. This state of affairs delegitimizes Romanian archaeology and places self-declared specialists and enthusiasts in the position of experts. Some of the Dacian narratives produced in this environment are infused with strong nationalist messages and have the potential to fuel extreme right-wing and even xenophobic movements. Consequently, in the final part of the paper, I recommend that Romanian archaeologists should challenge the representations and interpretations of pseudoarchaeologists and re-enactors. Moreover, academics should make it a priority to re-engage with the public and disseminate their work to a broad audience in a convincing manner.

In this article Daphna Ben-Shaul explores politically engaged Israeli and Palestinian site-specific re-enactments that pursue what she terms a ‘performative return’. This includes performed aesthetic and political re-enactments of real-life events, which bring about a re-conceptualization of reality. Three contemporary cases of return are discussed with regard to the historical precedent of Evreinov’s 1920 The Storming of the Winter Palace. The first is an activist, unauthorized return to the village of Iqrit in northern Israel by a group of young Palestinians, whose families were required to leave their homes temporarily in the 1948 war, and have since not been allowed to return. The second is Kibbutz, a project by the Empty House Group, which involved an unauthorized temporary settlement on an abandoned site in Jerusalem. The third is Civil Fast, a twenty-four-hour action by Public Movement, which was hosted mainly on a central public square in Jerusalem, integrated into the urban flow. The article draws attention to the fine line these actions straddle between political activism and aesthetic order, and explores their critical and performative effectiveness. Daphna Ben-Shaul is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Theatre Arts, Tel Aviv University. Her current research on site-specific performance in Israel is funded by a grant from the Israeli Science Foundation. She is the editor of a book on the Israeli art and performance group Zik (Keter, 2005), and has published articles in major journals.

This paper introduces simulation-based re-enactment (SBR) as a novel method of documenting and studying the recent history of surgical practice. SBR aims to capture ways of surgical working that remain within living memory but have been superseded due to technical advances and changes in working patterns. Inspired by broader efforts in historical re-enactment and the use of simulation within surgical education, SBR seeks to overcome some of the weaknesses associated with text-based, surgeon-centred approaches to the history of surgery. The paper describes how we applied SBR to a previously common operation that is now rarely performed due to the introduction of keyhole surgery: open cholecystectomy or removal of the gall bladder. Key aspects of a 1980s operating theatre were recreated, and retired surgical teams (comprising surgeon, anaesthetist and theatre nurse) invited to re-enact, and educate surgical trainees in this procedure. Video recording, supplemented by pre- and post-re-enactment interviews, enabled the teams’ conduct of this operation to be placed on the historical record. These recordings were then used to derive insights into the social and technical nature of surgical expertise, its distribution throughout the surgical team, and the members’ tacit and frequently sub-conscious ways of working. While acknowledging some of the limitations of SBR, we argue that its utility to historians – as well as surgeons – merits its more extensive application.