Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Jess Allen
To cite this article: Jess Allen (2010) Depth‐charge in the archive: the documentation of
performance revisited in the digital age, Research in Dance Education, 11:1, 61-70, DOI:
10.1080/14647891003653401
DANCELINES
Depth-charge in the archive: the documentation of performance
revisited in the digital age
Jess Allen*
Introduction
Of all the contradictory acts and conundrums with which art presents us, there are few
so perfectly oxymoronic as that of documenting performance. Performance is, by its
very essence, a live, ephemeral act, while documentation, by its orthodox definition,
is a tangible, immutable object. Such is the sanctity with which the ephemerality of
performance is held by some, that the very notion of its being documented brings forth
the spectre of the lepidopterist’s killing jar – if performance is the butterfly, then docu-
mentation is its fatal dose of chloroform. For others, documentation is the elixir of life
– a vital process for ensuring the immortality of performance. This conundrum,
central to the performance documentation debate, has been fractured and intensified
in recent years by the advent of digital technology, which is radically transforming the
topography of the performance landscape. This in turn has seismic repercussions for
its documentation because such technology complexifies live performance through
*Email: jess_k_allen@yahoo.co.uk
exploding its dimensionality, but also offers a medium for its documentation which
may accommodate or even transcend that complexity. What follows is an exploration
of how our perceptions of both performance and documentation have been challenged
and expanded by digital technology. It attempts to bring to light the ways in which it
is used by dance and performance artists (and their collaborators) as a tool for creating
and performing but also recording, sharing and disseminating their work, broadening
their practice, and exposing creative process.
It is well to begin by returning to the deeply mined vein of what technology truly
is and the means by which it does or can engage with performance. In its purest form,
we find Heidegger’s stripped-down definition of technology as letting ‘what is not yet
present arrive into presence’ (1977, 318). This notion of technology as a tool for
revealing truth through expanding our own innate capacities for exploration has been
seized upon (Kozel 1995; Kolcio 2005) as a means of reconciling what could be
perceived as the dichotomy between technology (logical, mechanical) and the
performing body (intuitive, organic). As technology has continued its inexorable
march into and through the digital age, ever more ingenious ways have been found for
employing it to alter our perception of reality. This includes the immersive technolo-
gies that generate wholly virtual environments. These are predominantly mediated
through interfaces which privilege mind/speech/vision over embodied experience,
reinforcing the dualism that dance, in particular, has sought to reject. Digital technol-
ogy is, after all, programmed in binary and this has led to a similar binary in our atti-
tude to it: it excites us with the promise of superhuman capabilities while it frightens
us in its threat to replace embodied human experience, a spectre ably raised in The
Matrix trilogy (Kolcio 2005).1 To open the channels for fruitful association of
dance(rs) and technology, Kolcio argues, we must let go of this fear and embrace the
complication of the experience of self that technology represents: ‘the relationship
between dance and technology is better conceived as a collaboration in the investiga-
tion of time and space, and of alternate engagements of time/space that might lead to
as-yet unrealized, potentially liberating realities’ (Kolcio 2005, 121). It is just such
yet-to-be realised realities that present an added complication to the already vexed
question of how/if one can document performance. But why might one even try?
us closer to the essence of a live event, in the manner of a religious artefact giving us
proxy access to a holy figure (Reason 2003: Wyman 2007).
In considering what we are documenting from and of performance, we must reject
the notion of there being one single truth to emerge for preservation, and likewise that
it will be possible to communicate any specific facet without some degree of ambigu-
ity. Several layers of subjectivity – what the artist/documenter chooses to document,
how it is framed and presented, how it is disseminated and in what context it is seen
– may ultimately surround the document by the time it reaches its intended audience,
who will then add an additional layer of their own interpretation. There is plenty of
opportunity for ‘error’ and misrepresentation of the artist’s intentions in this game of
Chinese Whispers (Wyman 2007). Nevertheless, Jones (1997) and others (Varney
and Fensham 2000; Auslander 2006; Wyman 2007) still argue convincingly that
documentation is a sufficiently reliable medium through which to experience perfor-
mance. Indeed, it could be asked whether the misinterpretation associated with read-
ing of documentation is in fact any different from or greater than that associated with
the witnessing of the live performance itself since ‘neither has a privileged relation-
ship to the historical “truth”’ (Jones 1997, 11). This is especially so if one considers
that it is often harder to place oneself within the social/political/cultural context one is
actually engaged in living, in order to reflect efficiently and objectively on a live
performance (12).
Finally, returning to how it might be possible to document performance, the oft-
cited conflicts are largely derived from an almost theological reverence for its very
liveness – performance only becoming ‘itself through disappearance’ (Phelan 1993,
146) – and for the intangible ‘energy’ that supposedly (Auslander 1999, 2) exists
between spectator and performer in a shared space (Fenemore 2007). Those who
define performance according to these attributes, perceive them to be irreconcilable
with the static desiccation that (traditional forms of) documentation present(s), for
how could such qualities ever be recorded yet remain faithful to their fundamentally
mutable essence? (Human) memory itself was once cited as the only means of achiev-
ing this (Barba 1990), through its inherently transformative potential, that might
prevent performance becoming fixed in time because it is ‘recreated every time we
visit it’ (Reason 2003, 87). (Of course, memory-as-document has considerable impli-
cations for situations arising from the use of digital technology in performance and/or
installation art. This is particularly the case in immersive/interactive environments,
where viewers become performers/participants themselves and thus have person-
alised, intimate experiences that may legitimately only reside and be documented in
their individual memory. This is something that will be further explored below.)
However, more recent thinking (Schneider 2001; Reason 2003; Auslander 2006;
Wyman 2007) has allowed us to arrive at an uneasy truce by acknowledging that if
one accepts that there can be no single, objective truth to emerge from performance
and that the archive itself is unstable and incomplete, then documents can become
‘indexical access points to past events’ (Auslander 2006, 9). Thus the document
becomes the site of performance in itself, which we render dynamic through our own
engagement with it, much as we might have engaged with the performance itself.
stage mechanisms to circus rigging to Trisha Brown’s Man Walking Down the Side of
a Building (1970) and other more overtly technological experimentations of her
contemporaries, including Alwin Nikolais and Merce Cunningham. Taking this
association forward into the digital era, Cunningham’s much later Biped (1999)
became one of the first large-scale mainstream productions to employ ‘virtual bodies’.
These were dancing avatars, pre-recorded from motion capture experiments and
projected onto a translucent screen, where they could appear to interface directly with
the ‘real’ dancers (Broadhurst 2006, 139). While projection into/onto/within the
performance space has become one of the most common, least complex, and perhaps
least imaginative means by which technology is incorporated into performance, it
does provoke one of the most significant discussions of the digital performance and
documentation debate. This is primarily a concern with space, architecture and dimen-
sionality: in projecting a digital image into the performance environment alongside
flesh-and-blood bodies, we are creating a new space that ‘hovers on the borders of
“liveness”’ (Harrington and Moon 2005). This space has bewitched many practitio-
ners and goes by many names: ‘the Thirdspace’ (Soja 2000), the ‘ambiguous zone’
(Santana 2006), ‘smooth space’ or ‘nomad space’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, 474–
81 cited in Fenemore 2007, 43), ‘phantomspace’ (Brown 2005, 2) or the ‘tension filled
(liminal) spaces of physical and virtual interface’ (Broadhurst 2006, 145). It is a place
ripe for exploration, full of tension and interplay with ‘complex geometries’:
To which one might add, how then can it be documented, if, as Soja says of his
Thirdspace, ‘it can be mapped but never captured in conventional cartographies’ (Soja
2000)? The key to this problem is revealed in the question – it is the ‘conventional’
that proves a barrier, both in terms of conventional expectations of what we can
document (a narrative/the ‘steps’/what actually happened from some kind of objective
reality) and the conventional modes and methods of documentation (text/photogra-
phy/film/objects/stage detritus [Reason 2003; Wyman 2007]).
Before attempting to answer this, we can continue to intensify the conundrum by
considering the increasingly complex ways that technology is being integrated into
live performance practice, as our digital capability continues to grow exponentially.
This includes the use of interactive digital animation and text constructed alongside
live choreography (e.g. Ersatz Dance’s 24 Acts of Arson, 2003 [Bailey 2007] or more
recently DV8’s To Be Straight With You, 2008 [DV8 2009]) and the utilisation of
wearable computing, such as the Isadora or MidiDancer apparatus that covers the
dancers’ bodies in wireless sensors enabling their movement to manipulate digital
media – including the accompanying sound score – in real time (e.g. numerous
productions by Troika Ranch [Coniglio 2004]). It also embraces the field of telemat-
ics,2 which literally takes performance into a different realm altogether by bringing
geographically distant performers and audience together in a shared virtual environ-
ment using blue-screen space, projections and videoconferencing technology (e.g.
The Chameleons Group’s Unheimlich [Dixon 2006; Fenemore 2007]). And it can also
involve the application of motion-sensing software such as the EyeCon system,
which uses an infrared light source and sensitive camera to project the performer’s
Research in Dance Education 65
shadow alongside the performer herself, with varying degrees of orientation shifts and
time-delay (e.g. productions by Palindrome Intermedia Performance Group [Broad-
hurst 2006, 141]).
before form, and form before motion (Zeki 1999, 66). These cannot be processed in
real time however, so there is an inevitable delay in unifying them. This is the point
at which the subversive, fracturing strategies of digital technology can dramatically
reconfigure our own unique perception of what we are experiencing, perhaps
considerably more so than in a conventional engagement with (‘analogue’) live
performance.
the digital era, where it is recognised that the creative process may have greater
resource value and certainly greater long-term stability than the performance itself
(deLahunta and Shaw 2006). It also gives artists and performers greater agency in the
documentation of their work and gives credence to the tangible validity of choreo-
graphic knowledge, which tends to get overlooked in view of the ‘ever-vanishing’
nature of dance (deLahunta and Shaw 2006). One novel means of illustrating how
process and product are inextricably entwined in dance creation is exemplified by the
BALLECTRO website, the live document of an experimental project between media
and dance students in Oslo. On this site, video and audio fragments of the choreo-
graphic devising process, the technological experimentation and the final performance
footage are imbricated into a sliding system that the user can navigate in multiple
directions, either mining between layers or skating over the surface to track progres-
sion (BALLECTRO 2009).
Obliquely, this versatility of navigation between different media sheds light on
another little-discussed aspect of documentation, that is its accessibility. There are two
aspects to this: not only the basic logistics of gaining access to it (though fortunately
open-access protocols for resource-sharing in academia and the pervasiveness of the
internet are rendering such issues less significant) but also the question of who is able
to ‘view’/interact with it given their level of (dis)ability. It seems possible that digital
documentation, in combining audio streaming with video and text/pictorial represen-
tation, could potentially open up performance documentation to a wider audience by
moving away from the conventional and solely visual/text-based representations of
live events. This would seem more appropriate to the ethos of performance which,
given its reputation for disappearance, has already been said to present a challenge to
‘ocular hegemony’ (Mercer 1996, 165), and digital technology might thus provide an
opportunity for its documentation to do the same. Of course, contemplating accessi-
bility brings back into focus the multiple sensory inputs that we receive from live
performance. This should remind us to acknowledge that, no matter how sophisticated
the documentation strategies that digital technology currently offers, they still privi-
lege that which can be documented over the less tangible information gained from live
interaction (Dixon 2007), reinforcing Schneider’s classic argument for embodied
transmission (Schneider 2001).
The production of documentation with such a high degree of interactivity ulti-
mately returns us to the concept of fear and control surrounding digital technology. In
navigating our way through a menu system of digital performance documentation,
taking a pathway of our own choosing, are we reclaiming agency over a medium
whose potency and potential we fear? Or are we are seeking to gain greater ownership
of the material, making it more meaningful for ourselves? As Kolcio has commented,
‘the higher level of interactivity [with digital media] implies a higher level of engage-
ment, greater individual control, and subsequently a higher level of legitimacy as an
authentic experience’ (2005, 110). This not only supports but also renders even more
tangible the existing premise in the ongoing documentation debate, that the best
means of remaining true to the mutable, ephemeral qualities of performance, is for us
to perform the documentation, that is, to be active as individuals in re-animating the
event every we time we visit or revisit its documentary remains. Anna Fenemore
argues that this is not exclusive to performance but is essentially true of all art, which
is ‘not a thing in the world, but a response to that thing’ (2007, 41). Digital technology
allows us to respond to (digital) performance and its documentation in an ever more
interactive way. When Bogosian said: ‘Theatre is ritual. It is something we make
68 J. Allen
together every time it happens’ (1994, xii), he was rallying against the rampant
advance of electronic media in favour of the live. In view of what has been termed the
‘theatricality’ of our interaction with computers (Laurel 1991), the ways that digital
technology is increasing our engagement and interaction with live performance, and
the attendant rituals of internet communication, it would now seem more of a rallying
cry for electronic performance documentation in the digital age.
Notes
1. This is not a dichotomy or threat that is perceived by all authors or practitioners, however.
The recent work of Thecla Schiphorst, for example, has sought to make a tangible, indeed
visible bridge from embodied experience to ‘Human–Computer Interaction’. Her live
installation piece exhale uses ‘wearable computing’ – a ‘breathband’ which measures a
dancer’s breath through monitoring chest expansion – to control the light levels and pattern
of an LED array embedded in a skirt, thus displaying ‘variable light levels depending on
the ebb and flow of breath’ (Schiphorst 2006, 177).
2. Telematics is simply a term that describes the merging of computing capacity (informatics)
with telecommunications (Dixon 2007).
3. LiveArchives.org is a web-based live art documentation platform that attempts to do just
this, allowing users to post comments/reports on live art according to event, artists, organ-
isations, all of which is interlinked using tags. It text based at present, and has yet to incor-
porate other media.
Notes on contributor
Originally a biologist, Jess Allen gained a degree and PhD at Aberystwyth University before
training in contemporary dance in Cardiff and Bristol. She now combines work as landscape
officer for Worcestershire County Council with her MA in Dance Making and Performance at
Coventry University and dance lecturing in Bristol, where she is also pursuing further training
in aerial dance and circus. She has danced for Blue Eyed Soul Dance Company, APE-Tan
Artists and the Invisible Circus. She has a particular interest in exploring the possibilities that
aerial dance presents for disabled performers and also in the potential cross-fertilisation of
dance and contemporary circus.
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