Re-enactment is common in the theatre. Rimini Protokoll’s Deutschland 2 and Massimo Furlan’s Foot are two appealing projects from 2002 that use the same strategy. In the first, 200 spectators reproduce a parliamentary session in real time (at the same time that it is taking place in Berlin) and, in the second, Massimo Furlan reproduces all the goal-scoring moves in a football match in a real stadium but without a ball or any other players. The spectators sitting in part of the stand have small receivers to listen to the original radio broadcast of the game while they watch Furlan on the pitch.
These three projects do not interpret or criticise reality, but reproduce it as a copy on the surface of the event. The action reproduced a few seconds later or thirty years afterwards and the identity of the players mark out a distance, and it is precisely this shift that gives the projects meaning.
Top photos: the Orgreave battleground in the 1980s, photo from the Press Association found on The Guardian website. Bottom photos: Deutschland 2 and Foot.