Drawing upon the theatre as a metaphor, this Hales group launches its inquiry through Rebecca Schneider’s Performing Remains, which “questions the importance of representations through history and today, while boldly reassessing the ritual value of failure to recapture the past and recreate the ‘original.’” Schneider’s work asks us to investigate social and cultural re-membering, how memory is (re)scripted through archives, the housing/selling of remains, the staging of remains, and, as a result, the power of remains based on how we invest in them and verify their validity.