Performing a departmental archive: half a century of performance

ABSTRACT

Performance practitioners curate collections of artifacts from aesthetic performances they direct and stage, which serve as evidence of past performances and is a practice that functions as a method of performance. This paper presents a performance of a discovery of a 50-year-old archive of staged performances within the Department of Communication at a public university in the Southeastern United States. This written performance presents the records documented by this archive. This performance imagines the generative act of creating this archive as a method of performance research, and an invitation for staging a collaged interpretation of this performance and departmental history.

KEYWORDS:

• Archive
• aesthetic performance
• oral interpretation
• performance studies
• collage

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Kimberlee Perez, Aubrey Huber, and the anonymous reviewers for their insights and feedback.

Notes

1 In this essay I engage with this archive using collage as method; however, these archives invite other performance methods which are part of larger projects I am developing. I want to acknowledge and thank the anonymous reviewers whose comments encourage me to continue this work to engage and extend the performance methods of these archives.

2 Throughout this essay I present imagined commentary from the perspective of the persona of the binders. This is a performance choice used to consider and present the context of the binders in terms of location and time. This choice is also informed by my position that the creation of the archives is a performance and that the archives themselves perform.

3 Lesa Lockford also attributes her performance as archvisit of fragments of her family members’ performance history to “curiosity” (2).

4 This act of surface reading plays with the explanation offered by Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus of surface reading as a critical practice that differs from symptomatic criticism that seeks to uncover “symptoms” in texts and instead works to engage texts as instructive at the surface. They explain:

… we take surface to mean what is evident, perceptible, appre- hensible in texts; what is neither hidden nor hiding; what, in the geometri-cal sense, has length and breadth but no thickness, and therefore covers no depth. A surface is what insists on being looked at rather than what we must train ourselves to see through. (9)

Rather than work to create and uncover an interpretation of the meaningfulness of the text, a surface reading works to engage with a text in ways that acknowledge the subjective, material, and affective qualities of reading. As an example, Best and Marcus point to Susan Sontag’s essay, “Against Interpretation,” as a call for a kind of surface reading that emphasizes the sensory experience (9). Throughout this essay I strive to articulate my sensory experience of encountering this particular institutional archive.

5 For me the finding of this binder is evidence of the aesthetic body in performance (Shaffer et al. 187–188). The collection of pages in the binder present documentation verifying the kinds of performances of Readers Theatre and Chamber Theatre detailed in “A Critical History of the ‘Live’ Body in Performance within the National Communication Association” (193). The binder also affirms my experience as a performance scholar where the “live body” is central to my approach as teacher and researcher. As Shaffer et al explain, “For performance scholars, the live body in performance has always been a fertile liminal site between art and science, theory and practice, teaching and research, artistry and scholarship, and the aesthetic and the everyday” (198).

6 Digitizing the binders changes the format of these archives in a way that is not unlike my account of these documents. Lyndsay Gratch and Ariel Gratch remind me that “Performance practitioners have long and idiosyncratic histories of making their media of choice do a wide array of things the media was never intended to do” (5).

7 The performance ethnographer in me wonders if this impulse to narrow my consideration of this material is perhaps a fall into the selfish ethical pitfall Dwight Conquergood names “the Custodian’s Rip-Off?” Am I guilty of only trying to find “some good performance material?” (6). My intent wasn’t to ever find this material at all, and now that I have found it I am interested in “genuine inquiry” about the material (5). Maybe I’m falling into the trap of the “Enthusiast’s Infatuation” where a superficial attraction and enthusiasm leads me to trivialize my findings (6). Or maybe I’m tracking towards the “Curator’s Exhibitionism” where I treat this material as culturally remote (7). The possibility of creating a digital display of this material raises questions for me about my intentions and the implications of my desire to publicly emphasize this collection.

8 These questions mirror and are informed by Ruth Bowman’s questions in her consideration of the enactment of performance genealogies (166).

9 As Soyini Madison explains “Performance helps me see. It illumines like good theory. It orders the world and it lets the world loose. It is a top spun out of control that spins its way back to its beginning. Like good theory, performance is a blur of meaning, language, and a bit of pain” (108).

10 The use of juxtaposition here as a compositional strategy resonates with Huber and McRae’s use of the cabinet of curiosities as a way of organizing and presenting the end of year performance showcase that emphasizes the process and excess of creating and staging performance (288).

11 The show posters and the binders full of evidence of past performances are a part of what Pineau describes as the performance-based research insights that might be translated into published articles (44).

12 Ruth Bowman emphasizes W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn as an example of the ways performative writing might perform and enact a genealogical history. This analysis serves as an opening and invitation for a performance of a genealogical history that implicates the reader in producing history (173). Of Sebald’s work and techniques of writing Bowman explains, “He also reminds us that the praxis of defamiliarization need not only be evaluative, as in deconstructing reproductive origins; it can also urge us to look afresh, in unfamiliar ways, at things we take for granted, such as how we write our histories” (187). Bowman underscores the generative possibilities of writing and performing a genealogical history that moves beyond critique of origins and toward a creative site of recognition and reflexivity.