Archive or Memory?
The Detritus of Live Performance
In this article, Matthew Reason examines the importance of archives and analyses the
connection between the archives and human memory, by tracing comparisons between them.
Reason provides an array of examples of practitioners, one of whom is Eugenio
Barba. Barba believed that theatre is the “art of the present” and that the artists create
“ephemeral works”. Reason claims that this ephemerality has been valued greatly by many
others, such as George Balanchine. However, by quoting Bonnie Brooks, he observes that
while many practitioners were not interested in preserving their work, those who
“surrounded” them took over the task of conserving the work, which distances it
ideologically from Barba’s belief that live performance is “the art of the present”. The urge to
preserve the performance, even though it contradicts its “liveness”, is strong within the
artistic community because of the performance’s ephemerality and inevitable eventual
disappearance, after which only a few remnants will exist to serve as an indication that it ever
happened.
In addition, Reason, by quoting Gay McAuley, argues that the idea to preserve live
performance is compatible with its valuation as transitory. The artists may be more interested
in the present than the past or the future, but have responsibility towards their “legacy”,
which they must save. Other artists, though, as well as journalists, scholars and historians,
desire to preserve the live performance by recording it, so that they can have some tangible
trace.
Reason then claims that this desire is most evident in the live performance archive.
Such archives collect and conserve anything that is relevant to any stage of the performance’s
production. The archive is thought to be accurate and objective, containing and examining
historical objects, and after giving a few examples, Reason shows that different archives are
used for different purposes and document different parts of the creation of the performance.
According to Michelle Potter, one of the main reasons that people seek to document
performance is the fear that otherwise live performance will never be considered worthy of
serious research. Therefore, many organizations have created archives that aim to document
already existing art, instead of assisting in the creation of new art, especially in the world of
dance.
Furthermore, Reason maintains that the documentation should be done simultaneously
with the performance. This shifts the value from the performance’s ephemerality to its
documentation, and introduces a moral aspect in the debate about whether performance
should be recorded, as it suggests that it should be “rescued” and “saved”, because it is a
“legacy”.
Another view that Reason supports, by quoting Irvin Velody, is that the archive is a
repository of a “true record of the past”. Its appeal, as Helen Freshwater suggests, lies in the
fact that it is possible for research to lead back to original and tangible documents and
objects, and that it gives access to original material. In contrast, though, modern theories,
which examine the role of the archive in the shaping of one’s understanding of the
performance, support that the archive does not hold the ultimate truth, but rather fragmented
and manipulated pieces of information that highlight the constructed, biased and subjective
nature of the archive.
Reason then begins to examine the subject of archive and memory, and how they
relate or differ. He proposes that the study of the archive is perceived as “proper research”, as
it is official and surpasses anecdotes and speculations, thus becoming an aid to human
memory and interpretation. In contemporary theories, he mentions, it is common to compare
the archive to human memory, which has been observed by many other scholars, who explore
the role of the archive in the shaping of national memory and consciousness. However, some
believe that only the biased memory of the performance in the audience’s mind can be
preserved from the performance. To suggest that the archive can offer an accurate and
accessible memory of the performance leads to it becoming one’s memory and heritage and
to the disregard of the audience’s memory as subjective and inaccessible.
The value of the archive in regards to memory becomes evident I Denise Varney’s
and Rachel Fensham’s article, in which they claim that the need to video-record performance
stems from the transience of human memory. As a result, the archive becomes one’s “proper”
memory of a performance, precisely because it can withstand the passing of time. However,
Reason then proceeds to make a distinction between past performances for which there is no
living memory and performances for which the archive competes with human memory. For
the latter, he claims that the effort to replace living memory with the archive does not take
into consideration the “full extent of memorial representation”. By quoting Barba, he states
that live performance is preserved not by being “frozen in recording” but by transforming
itself within the audience’s memory. Therefore, the liveness of performance, which is one of
its key aspects, survives in this transformation, rather than in the archive.
In relation to the above, Reason mentions Barba’s opinion that, while the archive
seems to show the performance as it really happened, the actual performance is not what is
acted on stage, but rather what happens in the audience’s mind and, therefore, memory.
Others, though, such as Varney and Fensham, claim that the inaccessibility and biased nature
of human memory is responsible for the lack of research in the field of live performance.
While they acknowledge Barba’s point on placing value on human memory, they disagree
with it. On the other hand, Reason disagrees with Varney and Fensham, as he believes that
some memories, those which are written, become more privileged than others and the
performances that are not recorded have a disadvantage.
By mentioning the metaphorical relationship between the archive and memory,
Reason argues that perhaps the archive is transformed each time it is revisited, just like
human memory. Therefore, the instability and fluidity of the archive is not an accident, but its
central aspect.
An example of recording that would create a fluid archive is that of Tim Etchells and
Richard Lowdown. Their archive does not contain any scientific documentation of the
performance and they do not attempt to evaluate the performance. Instead, it contains traces
through which it would be impossible to recreate it, but which can recreate the feeling rather
than the performance itself. This is in complete contrast to the idea that the archive should be
a clear and accurate recreation of the performance and focuses on the archive’s own
incompleteness and fabricated nature.
Concluding, Reason suggests an alternate version of an archive, a theoretical archive
of detritus. Such an archive, he states, would attempt to recreate positive characteristics of
both the audience’s memory and the liveness of the performance. He illustrates the example
of Forced Entertainment’s work, during whose productions the props from ach act remain on
the stage and eventually leave a pile of remnants behind. This “accumulation of performance
detritus” is evident in many other productions, as well. Stage detritus becomes an archive
which has the ability to recreate “the multiple appearance of the performance” and displays
its own “randomness and selectiveness”. Ultimately, the archive of detritus is not very
different from already existing archives, but unlike them it embraces its own fluidity and
randomness.