‘Papiers Voisins’, Stories of Entangled Documentations

The following pages are four out of the fifteen graphic pages ‘Papiers Voisins’, in my PhD thesis Reading in Performance, Lire en Spectacle: The solitude of reading merged with the collective nature of an audience (2021). Through my practices as a spectator, a participant of a performing arts works, a reader of performance documentation and a choreographer I collect visual elements that I then assemble. This process is my way of cultivating attention to what is active in documentations and attending to their contingencies. The texts on this page provide the title and some references for each graphic page.

THREE BREATHS IN A BOWL

I dissolve nine pages of edible paper on which I wrote the words ‘audience’, ‘reading’ and ‘documentation’. A bug landed on the page. It was drawn by Jamillah Sungkar for the edible book read by the audience in the real time of the performance Papier multiforme, Papier comestible (Gallier 2018).

BOOKWORM

The pleated paper Papier multiforme (Gallier 2018) crawls through this page. The text on the top of the page is from the book Landings (a.pass 2017): visual artist Sofia Caesar writes about The Breathing Archive (Llaurens 2016), poetic documentation practice by dance artist Anouk Llaurens. The vertical text is from the fanzine distributed in performance to spectator-readers of Chesterfield (Eynaudi 2017: 16).

PEBBLE STONE PELLET

The circles and the dots in the background form a grid like a re-reading of the score Anagram for Strings by Fluxus artist Yasuano Tone (1961). The word ‘stone’ is printed in capital letters; it appears twice in the printed booklet for the performance Black (Edvardsen 2011). A word is written in pebble stones in the drawing made by Laeticia Gendre from a photograph that presents the poetic documentation practice The Wave (Llaurens 2019). Stones and pellets press against each other. I drew after the photo of stones with moss used by Edvardsen for her piece Oslo (2017). There are hands and red dots from the edible book performing in Papier multiforme, Papier comestible (Gallier 2018).

HOLDING THE SPACE FOR

In the one-to-one performance Extended Hermeneutics (Lacey 2019), dancer and choreographer Jennifer Lacey places cards on a table for a reading session with her spectator. Graphic compositions designed with thick black traits, these cards ‘hold the space for an artwork’ (Lacey 2019). On this page I drew signs of Labanotation that choreographer Myriam Gourfink revisits (2009). I also drew hands of spectators holding The Roof (MOHA 2016) with artists Olivia Reschovsky and Alice Pons.