'Reverse Hangman'

The post below is a literature review that I finished in November last year. It was used to document my current reading and ideas around my research topic.

The reason I have taken so long to post it, is because it doesn't function as a simple read-only document.

When you press a letter key on your keyboard (apologies mobile users, this won't work with you) the corresponding letter will disappear from the document. At least mostly. If it doesn't disappear completely then do it again. Sometimes it won't work at all to be honest. Sometimes it will freeze. But most of the time it completely removes that character from the page.

Go try.

I've attempted to make a programme that could delete itself in a particular way. Many thanks to my friends James Fawkes and Jack Anstey for helping me achieve it.

The process was driven by the question, 'how do we perform deletion?'

I wrote that question a while back, and still haven't answered it fully. I probably won't be able to.
The way the document below functions, is one attempt to explore it though.

Tangent: The way I used 'we' in the question troubled me. Who is 'we'? Was I hoping to speak on behalf of all civilisation? Western civilisation? British people? Plymouthians? My peers?
I could never assume to speak on behalf of anyone else, thus I saw it fit to make my programme interactive. I can't say how 'you' will interact with the document, but whilst exploring it yourself, you might observe how you delete it. 'How do we perform deletion?' became 'how can I facilitate an exploration of performing deletion?'.

The programme deletes in a (almost) precise and complete way. When a letter is pressed, it disappears. It can't be undone. You can't delete the deletion.
Except when you refresh the page. Which returns the document back to its original state and you must start again.

What does this mean? The ability to refresh everything and all of your deletion work is deleted, and all of my academic work is restored.

Does this mean that you are truly deleting? Or are you simply creating a different document, that looks very similar to my document, except without any W's? or S's? Or A's? And then when refresh is pressed, all of the hard work is deleted via restoration?

Is that the case with all digital documents perhaps? Once something is clicked or pressed or typed, can it ever be removed? If a code is typed in the internet but no one sees it does it ever exist. An impossible question I suppose.


The document used was chosen for a specific reason. It was my first piece written for my current degree and exists as a piece of work thats intention is to both let others know what I am attempting to store as my own knowledge as well as providing a handy reference point for myself, to look back on and remember what I know.
The document has only ever existed in a digital format. If that means anything. It also doesn't just exist on this blog. It's on www.jackanstey.co.uk/ConorMRes and my computer and my USB stick and on the university's sites. All roughly the same code. Aside from the deletion aspect of course.

This document was made for, and exists, in an academic context. Academia, by its nature, is about remembering.

Does this document, perchance, subvert that? Does it now (with the deletion aspect) function as more or less stable, or complete?

Food for thought. For me.


EDIT: I've figured out why pressing 'b' or 'r' makes it go a little haywire.
In order to input a break in between all of the paragraphs, there is a little bit of hidden code that looks like this: <br>
This stands for break.
When 'r' is pressed, that becomes <b> which makes everything bold!
When 'b' is pressed after that, it becomes <>, which then stops being a piece of invisible code, and is visible in the document.

Press a letter key. Then press another letter key. Repeat.

Performance and Documentation: A Literature Review

My practice-as-research project intends to investigate the role of live performance within the current cultural trend of contemporary society that is seemingly concerning itself with establishing a societal and professional legacy through a digitized medium. To do this, I will examine the critical debates around the concept of ephemerality in performance and the at times contradictory notions of documenting and archiving live art and performance forms. I intend to analyse and critique how performance and live art has attempted to have been documented in the past and what connotations this may have regarding performance works and its possible legacy/legacies. I am approaching this topic through the notion of ‘forgetting’, by focussing specifically on the ephemeral ontology of performance as well as the paradoxical nature of its role in remembrance and archiving. My final research project will analyse notions of online and digital documentation, in a social and cultural context and the contradictions and paradoxes that it holds with ephemeral art forms.

I would argue that certain critical academic discourses exist in order to analyse and record knowledge generated through creative practice in live performance. Thus, this literature review will focus on concepts and the politics of performance documentation. It will also touch upon strategies and case studies of performance documentation and archives. Due to the practical nature of my project, I will focus on how theories have been applied in practical terms, in particular through the use of digital technologies. The sources I have selected have all been published quite recently. These have been chosen in order to provide a contemporary understanding of my issue as well as being able to point towards the history of the relationship between performance and its documentation.

Performance academic Matthew Reason provides an in depth introduction and contextualisation of the role of the performance documentation in Documentation, Disappearance and The Representation of Performance (2006). He begins by outlining two distinct discourses of performance. I will begin by exploring Reason’s discussion of the first, that of its ‘disappearance and transience’ (Reason, 2006: 8) in order to understand its distinction from the second; its ‘documentation and retention’ (Reason, 2006: 8).

According to Reason a commonly held assumption of the ontology of live performance is that it exists in a specific temporal frame. He gives the writings of Rebecca Schneider and Gay McAuley as examples of this. Thus, due to its insistence on its own temporality, live performance ‘exists in a significant, special, performative and ephemeral time’ (Reason, 2006: 9).

Consequently live performance must also be defined by its subsequent disappearance, due to it being an ‘inevitable product of transience’ (Reason, 2006: 12). Reason examines the writing of Peggy Phelan on this topic, which states that performances disappearance is an ideologically and politically loaded act which affords performance ‘a unique worth, purpose and even moral value’ (Reason, 2006: 12).

The political and ideological value placed on the disappearance of performance is explored in performance academic Adrian Heathfield’s chapter, Then Again (2012). Heathfield concerns himself with the history of performance art, specifically that of the 1950’s onwards, and states that the artists who were exploring the notion of live performance often had ‘anti-textual, anti-materialist, anti-commercial, and passionately presentist’ (Heathfield, 2012; 28) inclinations. These inclinations were seemingly, in part, a resistant reaction to capitalism, which explained by Heathfield, ‘seeks to regulate, homogenize, and accelerate time in the interests of productivity’ (2012: 28). Through live performance, artists were able to resist commodification and capitalist tendencies and ‘return art value to the agency of the artist’ (Heathfield, 2012: 28) by situating its importance in the temporal and embodied practice of the artist, as opposed to a material, exteriorised and commercialised object (Heathfield, 2012: 28).

However Heathfield explains that this was actually quite contradictory, as performance art did inherently concern itself with the ‘materiality of the body’ (2012: 29, emphasis added), commonly generated material objects and was often circulated through its re-presentation (2012: 29). This brings us back to Reason’s second discourse of performance, which is that of its documentation and retention.

Reason argues that there is a strong cultural desire to save performance from its disappearance, through documentation, recordation and also re-performance (2006: 21). This ‘expression of documentary need’ (Reason, 2006: 21) is contradictory in nature, as it aims to remove the ephemeral aspect of performance whilst inherently being driven by a positive valuation of its transience. Thus, the creation of documents, such as images, texts and other material traces, actively compromise the specific quality of liveness in performance, possibly acting to ‘erode the definition’ (Reason, 2006: 24) of the ephemeral performance.

Reason continues by theorising that documentation is always ‘constant and incomplete’ (2006: 27). For if a performance was to be documented perfectly and completely, it would cease being documentation and instead become the performance itself. Thus, records and documents consequently ‘[re-inscribe] the continuing absence of the ephemeral performance’ (Reason, 2006: 27). The paradox exists in that the ephemeral quality of performance invites a desire to document, and that the subsequent document, whilst possibly negating that certain ephemerality will always be inherently referring towards it.

In regards to this, Heathfield offers that, perhaps through its documentation and remembrance, performance generates ‘multiple lives’ (2012: 32), suggesting that ‘one of performance’s most consistent and recurring conditions is transformation’ (2012: 32, emphasis added in original). Thus, he argues that instead of concerning oneself with the ontology of performance, one must concern itself with ‘its ontogeneses’ (Heathfield, 2012: 32). Every product of performance, through whichever form it takes, still offers a unique and different event, due to its ‘complex intersubjective and inter-sensorial co-minglings of its participant-spectators/readers’ (Heathfield, 2012: 32). Heathfield adds that each event is inherently social and generates multiple perspectives and subjectivities ‘at the event of reading’ (2012: 32), itself.

An alternative concept of the remembrance of performance is formed by Diana Taylor in The Archive and The Repetoire (2003). Taylor, situated in a performance and cultural studies discipline, theorises that performance is able to provide two distinct strategies of remembrance, that of the archive and the repertoire, which are able to provide an alternative conceptual framework in order to interrogate the relationship between performance and documentation.

For Taylor, the archive is a system of remembering that exists through material objects which are ‘supposedly resistant to change’ (2003: 19), such as photographs, video and literary texts. Conversely, but not contradictorily, Taylor introduces the repertoire, which exists as an embodied form of remembrance, through acts that are thought as ‘ephemeral, nonreproducible knowledge’ (2003: 20) such as live performances and embodied actions. These acts, through their non-reproducibility, are commonly opposed to the ‘supposedly stable’ (Taylor, 2003: 20) objects located in the archive. This is a concept of remembrance that cannot be explicitly or externally stored or saved due to its embodied and live aspect. As Taylor suggests, ‘the live performance can never be captured or transmitted’ (2003: 20) and any attempts at documenting simply become representation.

Unlike the theory put forward by Reason, Taylor argues that, despite its inability to be archived, performance does not disappear (2003: 20). The repertoire, through its embodied memorisation and transmission, functions in ‘specific systems of re-presentation’ (Taylor, 2003: 21). Thus, acts that are embodied and performed ‘generate, record, and transmit knowledge’ (Taylor, 2003: 21). Taylor illustrates this concept through the concept of communal memories transmitted in cultures such as the Aztecs, Mayas and Incas, in which written documents ‘never replaced the performed utterance’ (2003: 17) and in fact ‘was primarily a prompt for performance’ (2003: 21) .

Therefore the repertoire is able to offer a resistance to the ‘preponderance of writing in Western epistemologies’ (Taylor, 2003: 16) and instead promote an alternative discourse in generating knowledge, through the process of embodiment that performance enables. In Taylor’s contextualisation of Latin American studies, this methodological shift provides particularly significant as it could partially ‘decentre’ (Taylor, 2003: 17) the privileged historical status of written knowledge introduced by the Spanish colonisation of the Americas (Taylor, 2003: 17). Outside of this context however, the knowledge generated by the repertoire is still potentially significant due to its ability to extend, analyse and critique traditional textual based epistemologies.

This sentiment is shared with performance academic Baz Kershaw, who offers an in depth perspective as to how live performance might be able to generate and store knowledge in an academic context. Kershaw situates this through the recently established discipline of practice-as-research, and furthermore through that of performance practice-as-research, in his chapter titled Practice as Research through Performance (2009).

Practice-as-research has, since the late 2000’s, become recognised as a method of generating research through creative processes (Kershaw, 2009: 105). Kershaw articulates that, as well as the ability to de-stabilise knowledge, practical research methods can undo ‘established ontologies and epistemologies of research in arts-related disciplines’ (2009: 105). Kershaw suggests that the prominence of practice-as-research was due to a reaction against ‘abstract theorising and scientific rationality’ (2009: 107). He states practice-as-research looked towards a more ‘practical engagement in the world’ (2009: 107) that stemmed from ‘poststructural theory, postmodern capitalism and perhaps even post-ecological activism’ (2009: 107).

In a reaction to the theory that documentation may act to embody the performance, Kershaw outlines that documentation could instead ‘create new aesthetic qualities to establish emergent synergies with the events that egged it on’ (2009: 121). Kershaw articulates that digital technologies, through their multi-faceted potentials of engagement, are able to offer a way of engaging with performance through its documentation. Kershaw offers an example of his own interaction with a DVD document of a performance; this offered multiple perspectives and multiple recordings of the performance, as well as providing extras such as recordings of rehearsals and commentaries. The DVD was designed to offer a more interactive document that could possibly relay ‘a sense of the live’ (Kershaw, 2009: 122) existing between performance and its documentation.

Kershaw concedes however, that when approached in reference to performances supposed ontology of ephemerality, digital technologies are ideologically doomed to fail, as due to its documented nature ‘even the most super-sophisticated representation could not reactivate a quality or condition that by definition was absent from the event in the first place’ (2009: 121, emphasis added in original).

Introducing the notion of ‘degrees of ephemerality’ (2009: 122), Kershaw concludes that the paradox inherent in performance, when considering the ‘absolutism in the doctrine/theology of the ephemeral/”liveness”’ (2009: 122) opens up certain levels of engagement between a live event and its documents. This is exemplified in his discussion around that of the DVD documentation. Furthermore this notion correlates with the multiple lives of performance suggested by Heathfield, demonstrating how documentation of performance may open up a different sense of engagement with the live event.

The relationship between performance and documentation is explored practically in the LiveArchives.org project that was undertaken by performance academic Paul Stapleton. Stapleton, in his paper Dialogic Evidence (2007), offers another potential way of archiving performance, that of a social and collaborative effort that can both remember and discuss live performance via the internet. Stapleton argues for a ‘productive co-existence’ (2007: 2) between a performance and its documentation, and towards a dialogical form where multiple perspectives are welcomed and encouraged. In order to develop this, Stapleton created the LiveArchives.org project, a wiki-based, socially constructed website, that aimed to act as a means of moving documentation’s role away from ‘repressive and monological forms of authority’ (2007: 4), arguing that those can restrict multiple perspectives and interpretations of performance. This form is justified by Stapleton’s emphasis on the ‘crucial step’ (2007: 2) of interpretation in the role performance plays through its documentation.
I have noted that when attempting to access the LiveArchives.org website, whilst writing this review, it has, since its creation in 2007, been removed and the domain appropriated by a Japanese credit card comparison company. Here, the apparent stability of digital forms of documentation is directly called into question. Digitisation promises permanence due to its apparent lack of decay, however, the speed of which digital technologies develop means once contemporary and pioneering ideas have now become outdated or obsolete. For instance, the multiple perspectives and recordings, offered to Kershaw by the DVD, is now a familiar aspect of many popular Blu-ray feature film releases. As Heathfield notes, there is a ‘temporality of all historical record’ (2012: 30), and this seems particularly relatable to that of digitised records.

As such, I am interested in exploring the ephemerality of both performance and its documentation. Through practice, I will aim to both resist the current trend of digital legacy-generation as well as the supposed stability of the archive. Thus my reading of Kershaw around the discipline of practice-as-research offers a way of situating myself in my project. Taylor’s writing on the archive and the repertoire too offers an alternative conceptual framework, providing a possible structure through which to theoretically ground my work, as well as possibly interrogate cultural implications of my research.

Conor Clarke MRes Theatre and Performance