ABSTRACT
This chapter re-enactments is treated as a will for a critical augmentation of difference, as a critical differentiator operating on and through choreographic works and carrying them into their afterlives. With this question of returning as experimentation of choreographically experimenting whether by turning back or in turning back dance may nevertheless still escape Orpheu's curse of being frozen in time current dance re-enactments become privileged sites for exploring the theoretical and choreographic relations between experimental dance and its will to archive. It addresses Foucault's proposals on archive in depth later in this essay, when discussing the work of Martin Nachbar and of Xavier Le Roy. In this light, recent dance re-enactments could be seen not as paranoid-melancholic compulsions to repeat but as singular modes of politicizing time and economies of authorship via the choreographic activation of the dancer's body as an endlessly creative, transformational archive.
