History Trouble

Reenactment and Pseudoperformativity at the Witch Festival of Nieuwpoort

Bibliographic Data

ID4550061
AuthorsJody Enders (0000-0003-1835-3587, corresponding author)
Year2013
Volume65
Issue2
Pages235-251
Publication date2013-05-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueTheatre Journal (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0192-2882 • E-ISSN: 1086-332X
PublisherProject MUSE (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/tj.2013.0061
OpenAlexW1970709139
LanguageEN
References cited17

A contemporary Flemish festival raises the stakes of ongoing critical conversations about reenactments, theatre historiography, and performativity in the service of social change. The Witch Festival of Nieuwpoort, or Heksenfeest , reenacts (as medieval) the trial and unjust conviction of Jeanne Panne, who was burned at the stake for witchcraft in 1650. In 2012, prior to a theatrical representation of the unlikely heroine's life and death, the town's mayor proclaimed that he was pardoning Jeanne Panne, along with sixteen other executed witches. In addition to rehearsing complex questions about anachronism, linguistic and cultural translation, gallows humor, and the appropriation or rejection of the past, the Heksenfeest places front and center theatre's capacity for true Austinian performativity as it seeks to make history. To theorize such unusual events, the essay proposes two terms, pseudoperformativity and paraperformativity , the better to underscore the common ground among medieval studies, reenactment studies, and the history of rhetoric

Art · Art history · Biology · Visual arts · Witch · Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies · Philippine History and Culture · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies · Ecology

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