What is re-enacting?
Re-enacting is the same as living history or reconstitution.
What is re-enacting or living history?
One way to describe it is the playing of a historical role in a historical environment.
Others say (certainly about military re-enacting) it is playing soldier for grown up people, that is certainly not what we want!
My favorite defiinition is an interactive way to teach people about history, the past times and the life then.
We live in a time of TV, computers, images... So we give people a life image of a certain period of our history. People can taste, smell, see and touch the history!
What we call "Living History" is a relatively recent development in the interpretation of history.
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History of re-enacting (by IR 459):
"The concept of an "open air museum" dates to Skansen in Sweden in 1891, the idea being to preserve the material culture, especially the buildings, of a pre-industrial era -- a folk culture, in a rapidly industrializing world.
A similar idea was at work in 1929 in the United States; the year work began on the privately funded development of both Greenfield Village, in Michigan, USA: http://users.crocker.com/greenfield/ogv.html,
and Colonial Williamsburg, in Virginia, USA: http://www.history.org/
A new twist that developed in the American scene, however, was the effort put into placing the houses and objects collected into an appropriate context and in using them as educational resources in public programs meant to capture the imagination of visitors.
Attempting to breathe life into static exhibits, staff were put to work recreating the work and the daily life of the people who populated these historic environs".
We had a simular project in Belgium in 1953 with the founding of Bokrijk, in Limburg: http://www.bokrijk.be/bokrijk.html
What about us?
Within SRD, re-enacting is filled in like this, doing the best efforts to live ourselves into the lives of the common everyday soldier and his enviroment.
We do this for our own experience, to understand the terror of war. But we also like to show outsiders how it was.
This is accomplished by using historic objects, the environs and appropriate recreations to tell the stories of the people who used those objects.
In this sense we attempt to portray (mainly) Commonwealth soldiers during the Great War.
We wear historical correct uniforms, use correct equipment, study their drill, their food, their trouble, their joy,... and attempt to re-live their experiences. Offcourse we can't do this the full 100%.
We will never have the disease, the death and the constant fear of dying everyday by the devestating weapons of WW1.
We as historical interpreters can only tempt fate as we charge against a gun firing blanks or against a bomber throwing a simulator.
It's the sights and sounds (if possible) of battle and afterwards which truly makes "living history" successful.
Also we study a lot to find out about the real live in the trenches, in the CCS or wherever we come.
As we try to live ourself into a WW1 soldiers live, we also try to handle like one.
The Aussie's play two up, Irish complain, Scots swear,... We talk about home, Blighty. The nurses talk about some remarkable patients. Soldiers sing to forget... or not to be forgotten...
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them
