‘We need repetition in order to know who we are’ (p. 216). This simple but evocative sentence summarizes Eirini Kartsaki's engaging book well. As noted in Clare Foster's afterword, Kartsaki's collection of theoretical musing on repetition offers the reader a wide and sometimes contradictory range of perspectives such that one may find oneself (as I did) rereading and repeating essays of the book in light of other essays. More than a collection of essays on a theme, On Repetition presents authors’ analyses of ‘works that use repetitive structures and methodologies’ (p. 5) across live art, cinema, music, poetry and painting, and in doing so the book reflects both on the commonality of the technique and on its varied functions in performance and art.
The technique of repetition throughout the collection emerges as both a concept within works studied, and a method of analysis. In Alan Read's essay, for instance, he transparently repeats verbatim (i.e. plagiarizes) text from another author (simultaneously citing that author's own plagiarism) as a demonstration of the uncanny and haunting practices that linger over shared texts and repeated performances. His prose circles back on itself through the language of sampling and echo, such that the clarity between the original and copy are, like the performance of Die Familie Schneider (2004) he studies, no longer self-evident categories. Emma Bennett's analysis of Stewart Lee's extended joke ‘The Rap Singers’ similarly integrates the techniques of repetition into her analysis by continually working and reworking the repetitions from the comedy act through her text. It's an effective strategy of humour built exclusively through repetition. Lauren Barri Holstein's essay details not how a performance was made, but how a refusal to repeat expected elements could effectively dismantle a performance in progress. Or, as she puts it, ‘“The show”, as we expect it, has momentarily failed itself. But then the show returns – only to die again’ (p. 130). Reading this, one is struck by how many other performances can be described as such. Don't all performances return just to fade away? Or as Herbert Blau once remarked, in theatre we often are watching actors in the process of dying, only to witness the same characters return again and again.
Not all of the chapters engage performance directly. Alice Baraby's study of nineteenth-century pinprick imagery examines the aesthetic and gendered contexts for this visual art form as ‘a minutely textured surface of absences’ (p. 135). The repetition here is both formal and conceptual; using a technique of precise, repeated gestures, pin-prick images are themselves copies of other pictures. Yet, even here, one becomes aware of the fundamental act of repetition, whether in poetry, theatre or visual art. To encounter a repeated image, object, gesture or sound is to become aware of time and, thus, to understand repetition as ontologically a time-based art regardless of medium. This revelation is re-emphasized in Eirini Kartsaki's concluding chapter, ‘Farewell to Farewell: Impossible Endings and Unfinished Finitudes’. Kartsaki presents the challenge of ever fully concluding repetitions that, ‘like performance itself, escape from us, forming an experience that is not quite yet’ (p. 208, original emphasis). The juxtaposition of T. J. Clark's Sight of Death (2006), Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape (1958) and Pina Bausch's Bluebeard (1977) offers an original and surprisingly moving account of works that resist their own endings.
Despite its many unique pleasures, the book does not clearly address a primary audience. It's difficult to imagine teaching it in a seminar not specifically focused on repetition and it does not readily connect to other books in this rather narrow band. Bruce Kerwin's Telling It Again and Again: Repetition in Literature and Film (1972, reprint 2015) is surprisingly absent, although Derrida, Lacan and Kierkegaard are (repeatedly) cited. Gertrude Stein also receives scant mention, despite her provocative claim that there was no such thing as true repetition. (Stein's negotiation of accessibility and difficulty in poetry also aligns with Andrea Brady's work as presented in a chapter by Gareth Farmer, who observes Brady's ambivalence towards poetry's aim of communication while resisting easy cultural commodification.)
Ultimately, the book defies a utilitarian impulse. Kartsaki elegantly assembles a group of essays that deepen our engagement with the most fundamental aspects of performance and open up new methodologies: a rigorous and thoughtful book that one can read for the sheer pleasure of the ideas. It's an experience of scholarship that does not repeat often enough.
