Description
Performance is widely regarded as that which cannot be archived – its presentness at odds with the archive’s quest for permanence, its disappearing acts resisting the desire to label, stack and store. Yet, at the same time as performance has asserted its radical ephemerality, the demand for documenting and archiving its practices on behalf of performance research and historiography has grown. What then is performance’s relationship with the archive? The issue contains contributions that explore this relationship in all its facets, including the role of performance in the culture of the archive and the role of the archive in conceptualizations of performance; the cultural histories and ideologies of archival practices; the future of performance and the archive in the digital age; performance as an archive of its own history; performative interventions into archival culture; the role of forgeries, rumours and lies in the development of performance history; the role of the document in performance research; the practices of performance archives; and performers’ archives. On Archives and Archiving will continue the discussion on archiving and performance begun in earlier issues of Performance Research (On Memory and On Maps and Mapping). Responses to previous contributions on the theme are especially welcome.
Editorial
Heike Roms, Richard Gough
pp. 1 – 2
Historical Archives, Events and Facts: History writing as fragmentary performance
Michal Kobialka
pp. 3 – 11
Questionnaire 1
Richard Foreman
pp. 12 – 13
Gina Pane’s Witnesses: The audience and photography
Jennifer Blessing
pp. 14 – 26
Foot-notes [artist’s pages]
Nicolas Whybrow
pp. 27 – 37
The Lorentzweiler Archive [artist’s pages]
Jerome Fletcher
pp. 38 – 41
Two Parrots and an Answering Machine: Some problems with knowledge and memory
Nicholas Ridout
pp. 42 – 47
Questionnaire 2
Arnold Dreyblatt
pp. 48 – 49
Anti-theatrical Prejudice and the Persistence of Performance: Some problems with knowledge and memory
Nicholas Ridout
pp. 50 – 58
Dusting Ourselves Down
Helen Iball
pp. 59 – 63
Performing the Archive: Following in the footsteps [artist’s pages]
Deirdre (Dee) Heddon
pp. 64 – 77
Feminist Performance as Archive: Bobby Baker’s ‘Daily Life’ and Box Story
Elaine Aston
pp. 78 – 85
Questionnaire 3
Kirsten Dehlholm
pp. 86 – 87
uncertain bodies: fragments
Fiona Wright
pp. 88 – 91
Unwinding Kindergarten
Matthew Goulish
pp. 92 – 107
Stilling Bodies/Animating Texts: Isadora Duncan and the archive
Joanne Pearson
pp. 108 – 115
They Never Raided Minsky’s: Popular memory and the performance of history
Kirsten Pullen
pp. 116 – 120
The Academic Laboratory of Fake – a Proposal
Sibylle Peters
pp. 121 – 125
Questionnaire 4
Hans-Peter Litscher
pp. 126 – 127
Archive Review: Learning Performance by Doing Archiving Performance
Linda Cassens Stoian
pp. 128 – 134
Performance Review: An Organism on the Run
Joe Kelleher
pp. 135 – 140
Notes on Contributors
pp. 141 – 142
