Introduction

Notes Introduction 1. In this context ‘discourse’ is used to describe the interconnected conversations, vocabularies and writings that group around any particular subject or thing. Indeed, such discourses go a long way to defining and delimiting a subject as a subject. Consequently it is possible to employ the conversations and exchanges that exist about a subject or experience as a forum through which to explore what is understood and valued about it, how it is perceived and what it is culturally constructed to be. This does not necessarily mean that what something ‘is’ is entirely socially constructed by discursive exchange (‘to be is to be perceived’), with the actual phenomenon irrelevant. Instead discourses shape perceptions drawn from the world rather than from nothing. Nonetheless, it is predominantly and significantly discourse that determines the meaning and value of a phenomenon as a cultural entity. It is this analysis that this book sets out to conduct, widening the concept of discourse to also consider non-linguistic representations of, on and about performance and considering the values, identities and meanings that they construct and communicate about their subject. 2. This is a description relevant not only to performances of the past but also to performances of today. For even after having seen a performance only yester- day, having been there in person, the performance itself is no longer available to us in and of itself but only through its various documentations or through our own doubtful memory and the mediating impacts of trying to externalise that memory through writing, talk, drawing and so forth. The consideration of memory as a distinct (and indeed ideologically loaded) site of performance representation is continued in Chapter 3. 3. See in particular the work, discussions and conferences centred around the Practice as Research in Performance (PARIP) project at the University of Bristol, www.bris.ac.uk/parip 4. Nonetheless, this use of the word ‘representation’ remains a little awkward. However, there is no satisfactory or agreed upon terminology that accounts for the range of media, notations, reflections and activities that allow us to know performance after, beyond and outside of the thing itself. Although also used in this book, the more familiar word ‘documentation’ is equally problematic, suggestive of a certain kind of intention, chronology and mimetic directness that is not always appropriate. Other possibilities – such as detritus, trace and afterlife – also suggest themselves, are used at various points here, but are often evocative rather than analytically sufficient. Similarly with Eugenio Barba’s suggestion of the Norwegian word ‘eftermaele’, which he extrapolates as ‘that which will be said afterwards’ (1992: 77). Amongst all these possibilities the phrase ‘representations of performance’ seems to most satisfactorily describe the mediating, transformative and interpretative relationship that is the interest of this investigation. The awkwardness of the terminology is itself 239 240 Notes an appropriate reminder of the ontological tangle – the contradictory documentation of the ephemeral – from which these extra-performance manifestations emerge. 1. Documentation and Disappearance 1. Although important differences exist in the nature and experience of dance, theatre, music, performance art and so on, this book is primarily interested in the similarities that they share as forms of live performance and within discourses of liveness. These similarities are demonstrated not least by the recurring prominence of ideas of transience. Consequently, the word ‘performance’ is used broadly to cover the whole range of live arts. 2. Auslander does not so much initiate debate about the relationship between the live and non-live as crystallise ongoing questions and conceptualisations, drawing together in particular ideas from Walter Benjamin (1970) and Jean Baudrillard (1983) and also Steven Connor (1989), Roger Copeland (1990) and Steve Wurtzler (1992). Areas of this discussion are pursued further in Chapters 5 and 6 in relation to video representations of live performance. 3. Indeed, in a slightly different context, Eugenio Barba explicitly states that the spectator ‘does not consume’ performances (1990: 97), which instead continue and evolve both in future performances and in the audience’s memory. 4. Such birthday celebrations are the exception, as we tend not to number performances of a production to differentiate them from each other, as occurs with Super Bowl finals or film sequels, which are manifestly different entities of a much more significant order. Moreover, the labelling of the first night or premiere as distinct from subsequent performances marks the concept of ‘firstness’ as evidently important even in the context of the ‘unrepeatable’ live performance. Complicating this issue, previews now often precede first nights, which are consequently no longer literally the first public performance of a production. 5. Actor Sîan Phillips neatly elucidates the complexities of the performative now in her autobiography, where she writes of how she loves being in a production run and steering a performance through the different circumstances that occur each night. As Phillips writes, ‘Each night is different and not different’ (2001: 197). Elsewhere, Douglas Rosenberg talks about live dance as ‘corporeal reproduction’ writing that ‘the “liveness” of a dance is in the resurrection of the original […] Each performance brings the dance back to live’ (2001). 6. The recent release on CD of British Library Sound Archive recordings of live performances at the Royal Shakespeare Company provides another illustration of this mutual entangling of discourses (and valuations) of documentation and disappearance – this time from within the cultural sector and arts media. For example, actor Antony Sher comments that ‘They say that part of the magic of theatre is that it is transitory, it exists in the present, and then it is gone forever. But there is also magic in discovering that we can retrieve some of it.’ Similarly, David Oyelowo observes that ‘There is joy and sadness in the fact that, as a theatre actor, your toil on that stage will live on only in the people’s hearts and minds’ (Royal Shakespeare Company, 2005). Notes 241 7. These issues crystallise when requirements of copyright law confront the prob- lems of dance documentation. Until the second half of the twentieth century, dance’s status as non-‘literate’ performance was embodied in its almost total non-existence in copyright. Instead, the law considered dance under regula- tions existing for theatre, effectively protecting only the dramatic content of narrative ballets. The law provided no protection for the actual choreography. To copyright something, it had to exist on paper: one had to ‘fix’ it, as the script was seen as fixing spoken drama or the score as fixing music. This problem was not addressed until the emergence of the Laban and Benesh notation systems, as a result of the recognition of which American law changed in 1978 to give specific recognition to choreography (Guest, 1984: 181–3; Johnson and Snyder, 1999 and Van Camp, 1994). 8. Indeed, Auslander suggests that our contemporary cultural experience dictates that the live is always perceived in relation to the non-live, and that histori- cally the very idea of live performance has been constructed by the concept of the mediatized and is a usage dating back only as far as the 1930s and the development of relatively high quality recording and producing techniques in various media (1999: 52–3). 2. Archives 1. The central accounts in this challenge to archival authority and historical singularity include Roland Barthes’ ‘The Discourse of History’ (1981), Michel de Certeau’s The Writing of History (1988), Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever (1995) and Michel Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972). A recent and at times polemical champion of the postmodern approach to history has been Keith Jenkins (1999). 2. Also significant is the emphasis on the active and political selectiveness involved in any act of archival collation. Michel de Certeau, for example, describes an archive as a place that is produced by an identifiable group sharing a specifiable practice of organising materials (1988: 76), something often resulting from distinct national remits and narrative (see Brown and Davis-Brown, 1998). Jacques Derrida similarly affirms the centrality of questions of politics and power of archives, writing that ‘There is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory’ (1995: 4). 3. As a direct result of this perception, many organisations have been established to directly counter the problem of the disappearance of dance, such as the National Initiative to Preserve America’s Dance, which operated from 1993 to 2001 with goal to ‘foster America’s dance legacy by supporting dance documentation and preservation as an integral and ongoing part of the creation, transmission and performance of dance’ (NIPAD, 2001). 4. Of course all documents and objects can also be thought of as only point- ing towards the historical event, which itself is always absent. As Barthes suggests, history is a discourse that operates in the context of a subject accessible only through the discourse (1981) – a similar argument is also applicable to performance. 242 Notes 3. Proper Research, Improper Memory 1. As Helen Freshwater observes, the academy ‘thrives on the allure of new material’ with the requirement to conduct original research boosted by the ability to point to previously unexamined archival documents (2003: 731). 2. Indeed, such is the frequency with which debates surrounding practice-based research in the academy have returned to questions of documentation that Franc Chamberlain has suggested that PaR (Practice as Research) has been in danger of becoming a synonym for DaR (Documentation as Research) (in Thomson 2003: 162). Time and again within this community there is manifest a prominent discourse maintaining the mutual existence and valuation of apparently polar positions of documentation and disappearance (see, for example, Rye 2003 and Thomson 2003 among many others).

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