My
proposed paper Re — (regarding, again and again) has
been accepted for the forthcoming Performing Documents Conference,
Bristol, 12-14 April 2013.
Re — (regarding, again and again)
(The) performance (is) already (a) reworking; things always come
from other things. (I)t is (easy) to forget what goes into the making of
the work; (the) things that came before. (T)he time it takes to make the
work (is) condensed into (the time) it takes to perform it […] (W)hat
should […] come after is often (what) comes before.
Re — is an ongoing, collaborative project between Emma Cocker and
Rachel Lois Clapham that presses on two practices to explore the process,
product and performance (of text). Re — takes the form of an iterative
performance reading that responds to and is reworked against the specificity of
each invitation to perform: sometimes existing as a live performance reading,
at other times as an installation of documents or score. Re — takes its
name from the event of ‘regarding’, ‘concerning’ or ‘being in reference to’ (as
an abbreviation followed by a colon). It also refers to ‘repetition’, the
prefix re- indicating an action repeated ‘again’ or ‘again and again’, a
‘backward’ turn or return to a previous condition. It carries with it a
sense of going ‘back to the original place, again,’ but with a sense also of
‘undoing’. Central to Re — is an interest in how thinking/making
processes can be articulated (the dilemma, struggle, endeavour); how this
process is recorded or archived, and in turn how that archive can be
reactivated, reworked, re-presented. Each performance stages the archive (save
as) of its own coming into being; each contains the trace or residue of
previous iterations. The work puts into question the divisions between
rehearsal, performance and documentation by blurring the line between these
phases of practice, declaring them unstable categories. Each Re —
reading enacts the making of its own documentation; the performance is already
the documentation of earlier dialogic thinking/making processes.
Performance
documentation archives the ‘becoming past’ of what is taking place
whilst functioning as a starting point or instructive score waiting to be
inhabited again (differently). Re — explores the impossibility of
singular, panoptic forms of documentation (and knowledge) that attempt to
capture/archive the totality of an event, focusing instead on performance
document as fallible fragment, where (analogous to memory) the
shattering or splintering of documentation into manifold parts resists
reassembly or recollection, remaining partial, incomplete.
Counter-intuitively, increasing ways of documenting/archiving performance
results in it being less known/knowable, less easy to grasp – evermore
contingent. Fragments of documentation fragment or disperse any coherent memory
of the originary event … losing … forgetting … editing something out in the
process. However, each fragment potentially operates as a germinal
ground, a graft from which new or unexpected lines of flight might materialize.
With reference to Re — this paper considers the performance
document/archive through the prism of ideas relating to the fragment and
inherent dilemma therein for as Hans Jost Frey asserts, “One understands the
fragment at the expense of its fragmentary nature … the fragment that has been
understood is not a fragment anymore”, (Frey, Interruptions, 1996).
Background to conference
In
recent years, 'the archive', 'the document', and other forms of preserving,
recording and revisiting performance have become near-ubiquitous themes for
international exhibitions, festivals and academic symposia. What does this
pre-occupation say about the state of performance making and its institutions?
Has there been a shift in the way performance is seen, understood and
historicized? In what ways should we celebrate the creative potentials for the
re-use of performance documentation and archival materials, and in what ways
might we be critical of it?
Highlights
of the conference will include a keynote speech by renowned scholar Rebecca
Schneider; commissioned artists Every House Has a Door, Blast Theory, Bodies in
Flight and Performance Re-enactment Society; tours of the Version Control
exhibition at Arnolfini, and performances from Version Control artists Felix
Gmelin and Tim Etchells; and a special exhibition at the University of Bristol’s
Live Art Archive of the newly acquired Franko B archive.