Maska - Volume 30, Issue 172-174, 2015

The present issue of Maska focuses on complex connections among performative practices, documenting and archiving, and the questions arising from these connections. The contributors are researchers in the field of documenting and archiving performative practices, as well as artists who approach this issue from different angles: the archive and document as performance material; the manipulation of documentary material as part of the creative process; the reconstruction of performances; documentary theatre; problems with documenting and archiving live art; documents as witnesses to past artistic events that then, over time, assume the place of the original...

I talked with dance pedagogue Andrew Morrish about his beginnings as a teacher and his understanding of education, his motivation to do solo improvisation as a performative practice, and about what his work brings to his colleagues and to this world. He told me about some of the different layers of his work during improvisation that became his methodology, about what it means to be a dancer (and it’s not about how high your legs can go), and what it means to be an artist. He spoke about differences between therapy and solo improvisation, between professional and non-professional artists, and about the transparency one should work with on stage. He also told me that his work is his political response to the current situation in society.

How do documents matter in theatre performances? Do documents perform? How do ‘events’ become documents? What can be known about those events through documents? And what are the political and economic implications of acts and regimes of documentation? – By taking up these questions, this issue investigates performative practices of collecting, displaying, reconstructing and disseminating documents in order to reconsider the relationship between performance and documents as well as to examine the role documents play in shaping artistic modes of writing history. The contributions by scholars, artists, and curators assembled in this issue manifest that exploring documents in and through performance as well as exploring performance in and through documents is not primarily about reconnecting to and preserving a past that is irretrievably lost or displaced. Instead, they advance an epistemological understanding of the relations between performance and documents – characterised by constant translations and shifting constellations – as the basis for outlining a contemporary theater of documents and for bringing into view the processes of historicisation within the performing arts.

The relation between the live and the recorded is crucial for tackling the question of how performance and document are intertwined, but at the same time for the approach to how recordings of performances are used as a means to write performance history. Instead of re-tracing the frequently discussed relationship between the original performance and its documentation, this interview focuses on the experience of performance from the document and the implications these omnipresent encounters with performance documents have for the ways in which we access the past.

The article discusses film documentations that record and represent artists’ live performance work. Documents are understood as aesthetic artefacts, and the text explores in detail the modes of documentation, that use the time-based medium of film to engage with performance art’s negotiation of duration and impermanence. Taking the example of Being and Doing, an experimental documentation of live art practices by Stuart Brisley and Ken McMullen from 1984, I address the question of how to account for the afterlife of performance art’s material remains when they are reframed and restaged in and as moving images.

I am showing two examples of artistic re-enactment from Eastern Europe. The first one is Fake It! (2007) by Slovenian artist Janez Janša; the second one is the RE//MIX project (2010–2013) organised by Komuna Warszawa from Poland. The two projects are based on the idea of reconstruction, repetition, or re-mix of important artistic practices that defined a whole generation of artists from Eastern communist bloc. But the starting point is the reflection that they have often never seen it live. It turns out that on the peripheries, not infrequently, we only have access to the archive. Against this background, I would like to ask about the relation between body and archive. From the peripheral perspective, it is not only the body that escapes the rule of the archive, but the archive, too, escapes into the body and transforms into an emancipatory performance.

In the summer of 2007, three artists from Slovenia legally changed their names to “Janez Janša”. This life event introduced a break in their artistic practice, which evolved into one of the most radical explorations of life in the age of biopolitics. This essay discusses their recent work, a continuum that is sometimes produced by companies and institutions as a reaction to their life, sometimes by isolating and documenting specific moments in their life. ID cards, passports, and bank cards become the means of a research that undermines the very concepts of “art” and “artwork”, and that challenges the economic system, the legal system, and the art system while actively seeking for their complicity in order to exist.

FORMER WEST (2008–2016) is a long-term contemporary art research, education, publishing, exhibition and discursive project that aims at developing a critical understanding of the legacy of the radical resistance to power in 1989, in order to both imaginatively reevaluate the present and speculate about global futures. It employs the “retroperspective” method – allowing for imaginative thinking and acting through both global pasts and future prospects simultaneously. The work of art plays a critical role in this context and is understood as a “document” through which to re-read the recent course of history otherwise than the way in which we’ve gotten to know it, demonstrating thus the imaginative potential of artistic practice in shaping and transforming the world.

“History is not given. Please help to construct it.” Shortly after the turn of the millennium, this speech act performed the onset of the East Art Map project by the Slovenian artist collective IRWIN. Instead of just documenting the realities of (art) history, the project also set out to construct them anew by deconstructing binary configurations, such as West and East, being inside or outside the map(s), as well as by investigating the preconditions for producing art and (art) history. By offering a constellation of artistic documents – respectively, documentary artifacts – EAM explored a specific “scenario of discovery”, yet also aimed at subverting and reversing its hegemonic strategies.

The contribution takes the form of a self-interview to tackle the analysis of the historicization of contemporary performing arts on the illustrative example of the Temporary Slovenian Dance Archive, founded by the author, a “precarious cultural worker”, as his personal cultural-activist project. The contribution offers basic information on the scale of the material, its systematization and the archive’s operating principle, which for now runs with no promise of adequate public infrastructure. The self-interview auto-reflexively unfolds the complex issue of the Temporary Slovenian Dance Archive, which stems from a wider issue of historicizing elusive, procedural and performative contemporary performing arts; at the same time, the self-interview begins to tackle deeper reasons for the lack of institutional background, which discourages the Temporary Slovenian Dance Archive from hoping to ever have any stable and continuous function. Most of all, the self-interview on the Temporary Slovenian Dance Archive opens up a question that exceeds contemporary performing arts, namely, in what way can the “impossible history” of non-territorial and transnational character be historicized at all.

Focusing on issues of memory, representation and performativity, this paper will discuss three facets of representing and remembering the Romanian Revolution of December 1989. Firstly, it will tackle the televisual representations of the event, the story of the “live revolution” and the depiction of the revolutionary narrative through filmic devices. Secondly, this paper will look at theatrical representations of the Revolution and its aftermath, both in Romania (through playwrights such as Saviana Stanescu) and in the UK (Caryl Churchill’s Mad Forest). Last but not least, it will look at the varied ways in which the Romanian Revolution is remembered today, discussing the issue of revolutionary heroes and the process of “forgetting”, which has determined the 21st century relationship between Romania and its revolution.

In Russia, documentary theatre can be seen as a challenge to a bureaucratic logic that was famously summarized in Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita: “If there are no papers, there is no person.” Teatr.doc, the first documentary theatre to open in Moscow, has recorded a “human document” for undocumented immigrants by staging plays about the lives of ethnic minorities in Moscow. Recently threatened with the loss of its 12-year-old basement space, Teatr.doc must be studied as an institution that created space for public discussion despite increasing state supervision of culture. This paper describes Teatr.doc’s efforts to document the everyday lives of undocumented labourers living amidst ethnic stensions in Moscow.

While the conversation with Philip Auslander – printed in this issue – mainly revolved around the theoretical and medial conditions of the relationship between performance and document with regard to performance documentation, this interview with the Lebanese artist Rabih Mroué sheds light on his artistic approach to documents and archives, related to historical and current political events in the Middle East. Departing from one of his latest pieces The Pixelated Revolution (2012), the question is raised of how theatre and performance have the potential to engender a reflection on the mediation and mediality of memory and on how we engage with images of war and death, their use and misuse for political and ideological purposes and create possible counter-narratives.

Between 2011 and 2013, the theatre ensemble Elevator Repair Service collaborated with media artist Ben Rubin on two projects: Shuffle (2011) and Arguendo (2013). Each of these productions uses new media to explore a range of different roles for text and documents within both literary and documentary theatre performances. Both of these productions challenge conventions of recent documentary theatre and introduce fruitful possibilities for how artists may continue to explore the genre.

This article sets out to untangle the workings of the past in a performance by Danish-Swedish-Dutch artist Olof Olsson. Leaving behind the official documents of the Danmarks Radio (DR) Archive, Olsson explores the byroads of radio history through a miscellaneous assortment of nugatory documents and objects. The article proceeds as a close reading of aspects of Olsson’s performance using three figures described by Walter Benjamin – the collector, the storyteller and the historian – as points of reference. By tracing out the contours of these figures in Olsson’s performance, I am able to elucidate the subversive potentiality of his digressive narrative.

The 2014 Mladi levi international festival directed its overall programme scheme towards documentary and participatory performances, and it also offered a workshop on documentary theatre. The formats of documentary and participatory theatre (with all their variants) don’t just trace the artistic maturity of a certain environment in itself but are always also indices showing the broader picture of the social (political, cultural, etc.) and thereby mental situation of a certain space and time. This contribution combines theory and practice; it considers documentary theatre in various theoretical frameworks, compares its various staging approaches (personal memory, collective memory, simulations, reconstructions) and offers a brief insight into the creation and the procedures of this genre.

The Live Art Almanac Volume 3 brings together various genres of texts written on live art in 2011 and 2012. The systematisation of chapters is telling since we are introduced into the book by a selection of contributions on the relation between live art and institutions which, based on works by artists such as Marina Abramović, Tino Sehgal and La Ribot, show the ambivalence of the modern age torn between the tendency to preserve and materialise the transient and the tendency towards constant continued movement. The Almanac continues with a chapter on performance art in mass media and pop culture. It thus raises the question of the influence of capitalism on performance art since the constant attempts at objectivizing disappearing events coincide with the predominating consumerist mentality of the West. This chapter is followed by a series of discussions on politically engaged art that trace the difference between performance in the West and performance in former colonies. The Almanac concludes its dramaturgical arch with essays on death rituals, thus opening the question of the “survival” of the live in the age of consumer products. The Live Art Almanac 3 is a sort of an archive of live art that offers the reader material for further research and thus, in accordance with the Western archive fever, builds the foundations for new beginnings.

In early August 2015, a serious illness robbed us of Andrej Inkret, theatre critic and professor emeritus at the Ljubljana Academy of Theatre, Radio, Film, and Television. In his nearly 40-year-long career, he established himself as one of the most important witnesses of Slovenian theatre in the second half of the 20th century.