Performance Re-enactment Society
A Response to Darkside 03
"Before consciousness
Begin with the impossible - an infinitesimally small period of time in a performance, a half or quarter of a moment.
Examine it and see that in such an instant, between the action that is made and its reception by an audience, there is no subjective interpretation. In a time so short that even the performer themselves is not yet conscious of what they have done, there is the action and the action alone.
But by examining such moments we bring awareness to the performed action; we force ourselves onto the specific incident and insert our perspective into the event. We distort the original action into a performance unique to us and us alone.
Sometimes brutality is unavoidable.
So it is with the documentation of the most seminal performances, and so it is with the most memorable of our own experiences.
I have no idea if I was wearing brown shoes
When, as a member of Tom Marshman and Clare Thornton’s Performance Re-enactment Society, put on as a part of The Spaghetti Club’s Darkside series at the Arnolfini, my turn came to remember a moment from my own experience of performance, the ease with which I filled in the details and coloured in the blanks was staggering.
The atmosphere was relaxed, informal and non-judgmental; it was perfectly acceptable to admit ignorance in the interview that took place before and after the moment I chose to re-enact, and yet I felt the need to bring my memory more fully to life, to paint it more vividly than I actually remembered.
My performance memory was in the past.
In the past I owned a pair of brown trainers.
Does that mean it’s okay to overlap the two?
The Sound of Music within a Derek Jarman installation
Invading the stage at a heavy metal concert; removing Yoko Ono’s clothes with a pair of scissors; falling in love with a fellow actor; Charles Dickens delivering a reading 150 years previously; such were the layers of the palimpsest.
Each time a new person stepped forward the space was transformed. And with the next it transformed again. Each change was punctuated by an eagerly received Polaroid of the moment and, as a trace of the event just commemorated lingered within the space, the next memory would be installed.
A wig became Chris Burden’s hair, and for the rest of the afternoon, its presence would always be, in part, the top part of him.
* * *
The relationship of documentation to performance is of interest to many, perhaps a part of today’s artistic zeitgeist.
Rightly or wrongly it is here to stay. Performances will continue to be documented with cameras, video and words.
But in the Performance Re-enactment Society an offer was made; an offer not often extended. We were given the chance to remember and, by taking advantage of that, were allowed to attach significance again to the briefest of moments that we thought had long ago been lost." Tim Jeeves
The Performance Re-enactment Society
"Performance's only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so it becomes something other than performance. [Phelan, P. 1993: 146]
Peggy Phelan has written much about the temporality of performance. She enters into a discourse with Derrida who claimed ‘The theatre is born of its own disappearance.’ It was with this thought in mind and some trepidation that I entered the Arnolfini to attend The Performance Re-enactment Society. The aim was to reenact our performance memories and accession them to the Arnolfini’s Live Art Archive.
We sign away our memory with archivists at the doorway. We dress up to re-enact our performance memory for a photograph. We visit a Doctor on a chat show sofa who asks for more information about our memory. We walk away with a sticker and a polaroid of the performance re-enactment in a sealed envelope. We help ourselves to a cup of tea and a biscuit. The bureaucracy of performance re-enactment sits somewhere between donating blood and a REACTOR experience.
In Hill and Paris’s recent Performance and Place, Leslie Hill bemoans the fact that there is no ‘Live Art Louvre’ she can visit to see Carolee Schneeman’s Interior Scroll. And yet here I am watching Arnolfini Programmer, Helen Cole (who writes beautifully in the same publication about live art leaking from buildings) re-enacting Yoko Ono’s Cut piece with a man who had witnessed a restaging of the original. A re-enactment of a re-enactment. Here I am witnessing the recreation of a Derek Jarman installation at the National Review of Live Art in 1989 and leafing through the NRLA brochure from the same year with white gloves on. Here I am recreating Chris Burden’s Shoot with a man I’ve just met shooting me in the arm with a cardboard rifle and a blob of ketchup for the blood. I think I have found the Live Art Louvre. In the end we have our own Mona Lisa as a member of the audience disrobes to recreate a memory of Forced Entertainment nudity. Perhaps no Live Art Louvre would be complete without a naked woman – with or without her interior scroll.
The denouement of the event is Tom Marshman’s poetic text delivered from the aluminium surface of the Arnolfini bar. He has collated data from our memories – fusing his father's recollections of riots at a Little Richard gig with Lady Diana’s death. The Spaghetti Club has given us closure by opening an archive of words and images of which we are all the architects. If performance’s life is only in the present then perhaps we have re-presented this present to create new palimpsests of our memories. I think of our Shoot as Re-shoot and Cole’s Cut as Re-Cut. This event is the hyphen between re and enactment as we participate in the circulation of re-enactments of re-enactments taking place today.
In conclusion it is no coincidence that I slip from past to present tense. In order to capture the ghosts of performances being brought back to life I start this blog at the event. However, re-enactment is more interesting than documentation of re-enactment so I am compelled to engage more with the live than the blog. I have the experience of subjectivity Phelan cites in response to Derrida’s claim of performance's disappearance:
Writing towards preservation, must remember that the after-effect of disappearance is the experience of subjectivity itself [Phelan, P. 1993: 148]
Bibliography:
- DERRIDA, J., 2005, Writing and Difference, New York: Routledge
- HILL, L. and PARIS, H. eds., 2006, Performance and Place. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan
- PHELAN, P., 1993. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, Routledge: London and New York
- REACTOR, Nottingham-based artists collective. http://www.reactorweb.com/homepage.htm
Michael Pinchbeck, 2008
Text written by Michael Pinchbeck and commissioned by New Work Network as part of their ‘Go See’ Bursaries available to artists/promoters to attend The Darkside events.
