Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>In this chapter, Lucia Ruprecht examines the reenactments of Alexander Sakharoff’s Pavane royale, an impersonation of Louis XIV considered the dancer’s signature piece, first performed in 1919 and remaining in his repertoire until old age. She engages with several artists over more than 200 years, beginning in the seventeenth century, pausing at the start of the twentieth century, and continuing into the twenty-first century to explore both living and archival memory. Ruprecht focuses on the gaps and slippages of these forms of memory, drawing on the psychoanalytic concepts of deferral and distortion, which have shaped our understanding of memory since Sigmund Freud. These fragmentary archives are at work in reenactment as performers engage affectively with distortions caused by historical distance. Rather than seeing these figures as failures of memory, Ruprecht considers them tools for recovering past gestures and acknowledging their inherent irretrievability. More specifically, she explores how the embodied archive of dance revises and reevaluates the Freudian concept of (mis)memory. Whether related to dance or otherwise, memory always carries with it the possibility of inaccuracy or even failure. In reenactment, such (mis)memory—when acknowledged—becomes a source of creative potential allowing performers (and scholars) to bring nuances of the past to life with humility, urgency, subtlety, and empathy.</jats:p>