ABSTRACT
In this chapter, Joy Kristin Kalu addresses the artistic practice of choreographers Rebecca Davis and Abigail Levine. Both live and work in New York and were performers in the re-enactments of Marina Abramović’s and Ulay’s (Uwe Laysiepen’s) performances in the context of the exhibition The Artist is Present (2010) at the New York Museum of Modern Art. Kalu examines the effects that the incorporated appropriations of past performances had on the performers and how these have had influence on their own choreographic works to follow. She proceeds from the thesis that the experience of both performers, in the course of the Abramović re-enactments, led to a fundamental scepticism with respect to embodiment as archival technique. As a result, attempts to translate the ephemeral in the act of performance into artefactual materialities can be found – in very different ways – in the choreographies of both artists.
