Documenting Performance: The Context and Processes of Digital Curation and Archiving

Description

Performance in the digital age has undergone a radical shift in which a once ephemeral art form can now be relived, replayed and repeated. Until now, much scholarship has been devoted to the nature of live performance in the digital age; Documenting Performance is the first book to provide a collection of key writings about the process of documenting performance, focused not on questions of liveness or the artistic qualities of documents, but rather on the professional approaches to recovering, preserving and disseminating knowledge of live performance. Through its four-part structure, the volume introduces readers to important writings by international practitioners and scholars on: In each, chapters examine the ways performance is documented and the issues arising out of the process of documenting performance. While theorists have argued that performance becomes something else whenever it is documented, the writings reveal how the documents themselves cannot be regarded simply as incomplete remains from live events. The methods for preserving and managing them over time, ensuring easy access of such materials in systematic archives and collections, requires professional attention in its own right. Through the process of documenting performance, artists acquire a different perspective on their own work, audiences can recall specific images and sounds for works they have witnessed in person, and others who did not see the original work can trace the memories of particular events, or use them to gain an understanding of something that would otherwise remain unknown to them and their peers. Cover page Halftitle page Title page Copyright page Dedication Contents List of Illustrations List of Tables List of Contributors Acknowledgements 1 Documenting Performance: An Introduction Common (back)ground How to document performance Structure Part One Contexts for Documenting Performance 2 Performance Arts and Their Memories The conceptual relationship between memory, performance arts and exhibition Practices of documenting memories of performance arts at museums Memories of the body and embodied memories 3 Description Models for Documenting Performance The performance event as a cultural object Performing arts digital information initiatives A new description paradigm: beyond resources types and domains FRBRoo: a domain ontology for performing arts A case study: Teatro Municipal Miguel de Cervantes Conclusion and future trends 4 Intellectual Property Matters for Documenting Performance: Challenges and Current Trends Copyright Fixity 4 in copyright The restrictions of copyright when applied to the performing arts Originality and authorship Performers’ rights Documenting performance Protecting the documenter’s work Conclusion 5 Expanding Documentation, and Making the Most of ‘the Cracks in the Wall’1 Problematizing the document When the artwork is the document: Lynn Hershman Leeson Unauthorized documents: Tino Sehgal Expanding documentation: JODI Conclusion Acknowledgements Part Two Ways of Documenting Performance 6 Remembering Performance Through the Practice of Oral History 7 Translating Performance: Desire, Intention and Interpretation in Photographic Documents How the subject intervenes How the photographer and the camera intervene The intervention of the spectator Photography and its intentional gaps The photograph as object of translation Photographic reception as translation Motion, flux and the need for consciousness 8 Documenting Audience Experience: Social Media as Lively Stratification Documenting ‘liveness’ Experiencing disappearance Experiential divergence and cultural legacy The stratification of social media Live tweeting and blogging: a #lively #resistance Conclusion 9 Web Archiving and Participation: The Future History of Performance? Web archiving and performance Mapping the fi eld: web archiving and performance Formal social memory Informal social memory Mixing formal and informal social memory: the Internet Archive Web archiving and big data – a participatory method? Conclusion 10 Documenting Digital Performance Artworks Live performance in the digital era Everything is data Conclusion Part Three From Documents to Documenting 11 Paradocumentation and NT Live’s ‘Cumber Hamlet' National Theatre Live The deposits of Hamlet Encores Pre-, post-, and con- text: framing the survey Engaging with pre-broadcast paradocumentation Engaging with paradocumentation during the broadcast Engaging with post-broadcast documentation Comparison of audience groups Conclusion 12 Thinking Virtually in a Distracted Globe: Archiving Shakespeare in Asia Hamlets’ ghosts on the video player Restaging Hamlet The archivist as Horatio Where is the virtual scene? 13 From Copper-plate Inscriptions to Interactive Websites: Documenting Javanese Wayang Theatre Copper-plate inscriptions Puppet collections Anthropological documents Audiovisual recordings 14 Archiving Western Australian New Music Performance 15 Participation and Presence: Propositional Frameworks for Engaging Users in the Design of the Circus Oz Living Archive The Circus Oz Living Archive Designing for/with liveness Designing for presence Designing with/for people Discovering the possibility of narrative Conclusion Part Four Documenting Bodies in Motion 16 What do we Document? Dense Video and the Epistemology of Practice Document, event, technique In praise of video Dense video and digital epistemology What do we document? 17 Pleasures of Writing about the Pleasures of the Practice: Documenting Psychophysical Performer Trainings Articulating pleasure The drive to write Urgency Tension and constriction ‘Knowing through pleasure’ 18 Dance Archival Futures: Embodied Knowledge and the Digital Archive of Dance Ephemerality and the archive The digital and the spatio-temporal The collective experience as preservation The future of the dance archive 19 Documenting Dance: Tools, Frameworks and Digital Transformation Historic practices: iconography, notation and scoring dance Documents and documentation Documenting dance: from analogue to digital methods Writing the dance: documenting the digital Contemporary strategies and methods for documenting dance Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index