Abstract
This essay addresses appropriation and re-enactment in contemporary choreography by discussing a repertory workshop led by Xavier Le Roy and Ma° rten Spa°ngberg on The Rite of Spring and Powered by Emotion respectively (Vienna, 2010). As these pieces do not offer themselves to the strategies usually involved in the teaching/learning of dance repertory, this study addresses the implications of work that already constitutes an act of appropriation becoming repertoire, i.e. offering itself for re-visitings, re-constructions, re-stagings. In light of recent writings by André Lepecki and Ramsay Burt on reconstruction and re-enactment, the issue of faithfulness or disrespect towards the original is discussed, alongside the idea that, while these contemporary experimental dance works are appropriations, they seem to resist the possibility of becoming themselves repertoire in the sense of dance works to be circulated in the performance market by being packaged, taught and reproduced by future artists.