Transgressing the witness at three sites of knowledge

Abstract

This article examines a performance event, Life is Perfect, by Paul+a (Paul Jeff and Sarah Dowling), which took place on 2 October 2004 over a period of 24 hours at The Peterstone Court Hotel in mid-Wales. The site of this work was then revisited by TRAWS (The Inter-University research group for Performance in Wales) as part of an exploration of performance sites across Wales. These findings were themselves then represented at the Centre for Performance Research's conference Towards Tomorrow? as both a record of research conducted and as an exploration of the potential of collaborative engagement with site-specific work and its documentation as event within the context of academic research.

The article traces the performance across three sites: hotel, hotel revisited, conference, and questions the knowledge developed at each site, how it challenges the original work, betrays, misrepresents, obscures and ultimately entirely restages it, according to very different criteria than may have originally been intended. Using Maurice Blanchot's fiction ‘The instant of my death’ and Jacques Derrida's essay ‘Demeure’ (both conceptual influences on Life is Perfect) the paper turns towards a consideration of the ‘death’ of performance events and the nature of ‘survival’ that place offers in opposition to the archive. Finally, it considers the potential new epistemologies that emerge from research exercises focused on the recovery of a relation to knowledge that is not based on evidence, testimony and truth, but rather admits that loss, forgetfulness and uncertainty are integral to any ‘return’ to the site of performance.

Notes

1. TRAWS is a research group with no central institution. They meet at various sites across Wales to investigate site-specific work. Members of the group are Professor Richard Gough, Jill Greenhalgh, Richard Huw Morgan, Paul Jeff, Dr Lisa Lewis, Dr Roger Owen, Professor Mike Pearson, Steve Robins, Dr Heike Roms, Nic Ros and Dr Daniel Watt.

2. See Chapter One, ‘Tod Browning's America’, in Skal (2001) which details the live burial trick performed by Tod Browning as ‘The Hypnotic Living Corpse’.

3. ‘6.4311 Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. … Our life has no end in just the way in which our visual field has no limits’ (Wittgenstein, 1995, p. 72).