Performance Documentation Disrupting Ontologies

DOCTORAL THESIS Performance/documentation disrupting ontologies Read, Claire Award date: 2018 General rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. • Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research. • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal ? Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 02. Oct. 2021 PerformanceDocumentation: Disrupting Ontologies by Claire Louise Read BA, MA A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of PhD Department of Drama, Theatre and Performance University of Roehampton 2017 1 ABSTRACT This thesis looks at live-streaming between 2006-2016, taking London’s National Theatre as its focus. Looking at the use of technology, specifically live- streaming, the thesis considers the effect of live-streaming both in and of performance in relation to ‘performance’ and ‘documentation’. I question the ontological nature of performance and documentation, conventionally considered to work in a causal, linear relationship, and identify a mutual, non-linear relationship between the two states enabled via live-streaming. I use the chemical term of ‘sublimation’ to express this relationship indicated by a double-headed arrow that speaks as a reimagined model to illustrate the oscillating, cyclical movement that I propose between performance and documentation. I further identify the theoretical area established between two states as a zone of ‘unmarked liveness’. I evidence the zone using productions as case studies throughout the thesis; and focus equally on the work of director Katie Mitchell’s use of streaming within performance, as well as the live-streaming project, NT Live, established by the National Theatre in 2009. The later chapters follow the work of Mitchell and NT Live to the Barbican Centre, demonstrating their significance as innovative outputs, and the influence of the National Theatre as a beacon venue. The increasing use of streaming within performances, as documented within this thesis, marks the ‘unmarked’ liveness: challenging and marking the enduring modernist models of theories that represent the relationship between ‘performance’ and ‘documentation’, despite postmodernist and poststructuralist thinking and practice demonstrated in the cases of live- streaming identified. 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION: Return – p7 National Theatre: Live Live to your local cinema The Director’s Craft Performance Documentation Sublimation Establishing Terms Disrupting Ontology The Field Performance and Documentation The media(tized) in performance and documentation Video (art) Performance Remains Chapter contents: Reconstruct, Redevelop, Regenerate RECONSTRUCT REFORM: From radio play to video relay – p54 Reform Radio play Video relay REWRITE: The Habit of Art – p81 Reconstruct 3 Rewrite Documenting the unspoken The lives of NT Live REDEVELOP REPEAT: Some traces of her – p111 Redeveloped roles Repeated ideas Some traces of her Inter-media REBORN: Doing ‘aNTi Live’ – p140 Redevelop ‘aNTi Live’ Reborn Redeveloped: from live streaming to live screening REGENERATE RELIVE: The war and Europe – p168 The Forbidden Zone: between Becoming through materiality Relive Regenerate 4 REVIVE: ‘To be or not to be’: Disrupting Ontologies – p193 To be or not to be Revive Regenerate Disrupting Ontologies CONCLUSION: Recycle and Resublimate – p220 Return Reconstruct: Reform and Rewrite Redevelop: Repeat and Reborn Regenerate: Relive and Revive Katie Mitchell: Reform, Repeat and Relive NT Live: Rewrite, Reborn and Revive The zone of ‘Unmarked Liveness’ Recycle and Resublimate APPENDICES – p243 Ethics statement Sample Consent Form Survey example BIBLIOGRAPHY – p247 5 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS With thanks to my supervisors Prof Jen Parker-Starbuck and Dr Sarah Gorman, as well as the departments at Roehampton, Queen Mary and Warwick Universities for inspiring the research (particularly Prof Ed Scheer for encouraging me to pursue postgraduate studies). With thanks also to the department at Surrey University, especially Dr Stuart Andrews, and Sarah Bates for her initial enthusiasm. The thesis benefitted greatly from contributor responses to surveys and interviews. I would like to thank Dr Toni Sant and Daisy Abbott for their contribution to the last chapter of the thesis, and am grateful to Dr Sant for allowing me to use material gathered for publication within my work. I am indebted to my parents and grandparents for their financial and emotional help with this thesis, as well as my siblings and friends both in and out of academia. I am very grateful to Isobelle Grant for her continued belief. This thesis is dedicated to Kirsty Pugh, without whom completion would not have been possible. You are my everything. 6 INTRODUCTION RETURN The National Theatre has gone ‘live’. Since 2009 it has broadcast, live, many of its plays to audiences sitting in cinemas in the United Kingdom, and to other participating countries around the world. An inspiration for this thesis, presenter Emma Freud, standing onstage at the Olivier Theatre, introduced the screening of She Stoops to Conquer (2012) for those sitting in their local cinema. She spoke on the concept of ‘NT Live’ to its viewers, before halting and rethinking; ‘it’s live, or almost live’.1 As live showings are customarily viewed as co-temporal and co-spatial, the delayed Australian showings for example, are more easily identified as documented versions of the performance rather than live, akin to the videos held in the NT Archive collection2. I would propose that the extended concept of the live, developed from this case, demonstrates a crucial between regarding ‘document’ and live ‘performance’, between (NT) Live and Archive. Freud’s qualifying of the apparently simple notion of the ‘live’ demonstrates its complexity in this context. Given the time delay, it would be logical to term the Australian showings as documents, as an article that follows an event. Scholar Jon Erickson writes that ‘documentation is really only a supplement to performance’ (Erickson, 1999); and I relate Erickson’s theory to the cause and effect linear relationship as suggested by David Hume3. That the 1 She Stoops To Conquer, By Goldsmith, O., (Dir.) Lloyd, J., (Perf.) National Theatre, London: Olivier, date of performance: 28/2/2012. 2Australia see their ‘live’ screening a minimum of two weeks after the broadcasts in the United Kingdom, due to technical issues which make simultaneous screening too problematic. Private interview, D. Sabel, 15/2/2012. 3 Hume considers what he terms as a ‘connexion’ of ideas, a cause and effect relationship, and writes that ‘our imagination runs easily from one idea to another .. as they lie contagious to each other … [original emphasis] (Hume, 1978: 11). Performances explore and enable the imagination to connect with elements around conjoined themes. Hume’s consideration of the contiguous 7 Australian showings are nevertheless termed as ‘live’ troubles both the theoretical nature of live, instantaneous performance, and the nature of documentation. I will argue that documentation does not necessarily occur only once a performance has ceased, following Philip Auslander in arguing ‘against intrinsic opposition… and challenge the traditional assumption that the live precedes the mediatized’ (Auslander, 2008: 11). Many contemporary performances, including work presented at the National Theatre such as the media works of Katie Mitchell, consist of or include elements that might previously be considered ‘documents’, such as photographs or video recordings.4 This forces a theoretical meeting of performance and documentation, and demands a reviewing of their status when set against each other: a video of a piece of work may stand in and become the performance, though in reality, the videotaped version was a recorded document of a live, initial event, chronologically speaking. Under these conditions, ‘documentation’ could arguably precede ‘performance’ and this thesis will consist of a post-structuralist analysis of the terms and their relationship. I will demonstrate how media can work, such as in the case of NT Live, to disrupt the ‘ontology’ of performance, confuse the apparent binary of ‘performance’ and ‘documentation’, and create the need for a new term for a new phenomenon. allows a connection to be made between the causal relationship of performance and documentation. That performance occurs within one space and time, which elapses before an audiences’ eyes, the memory of the event becomes the effect of the performance. Thus it can be argued that the relationship between performance and documentation is causal and therefore linear, as presented by Hume. 4 As Rebecca Schneider notes, ‘It is fascinating that photography, not generally considered a medium of liveness, has become a vertiable hotbed for re-staging, re-playing, reenacting for the camera in work that mixes theatricality and documentality in tantalizing ways (Schneider, 2011: 29). I argue that Mitchell’s

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