When the performance has ended many people would agree that the event is over, disappeared forever. Although what about documentation? Surely if a performance is saved, recorded or documented the piece will last forever? Rebecca Schneider discusses the use of archives and how useful they are in Performance remains again. In Western culture archives performances are highly documented. Again, the issue can be raised that with ‘performance [being]… so radically in time…that it can’t reside in its material traces and therefore disappears’ (Schneider, 2012, cited in Kaye et al, 2012, 66). The performance is almost like a death, with the performance disappearing whilst the documentation remains. The archives act as the everlasting trace of the performance. Archives can be extremely useful, they enable us to study events in history that we have not been present for. Although we looking through the archives will not have the same experience as those who were present, we will still be able to experience the performance but differently.

However when we are looking through archives ‘are we…limiting ourselves to an understanding of performance predetermined by…the logic of the archive?’ (Schneider, 2012, cited in Kaye et al, 2012, 66). By looking at someone’s information are we truly able to experience performance, perhaps it doesn’t matter as long as we have the ‘traces’ of the performance. That then begs the question about the authenticity, with the performance being the original that then makes the documentation just a copy. A copy of part of the performance, so we may really never fully understand what the piece was like as we didn’t experience the original. Though every performance will never be the original as once it is re-performed it becomes just a copy, the audience will never experience that performance in that moment again. So surely with that in mind archives are beneficial as at least they give us an insight of what the performance was like, rather that than no trace of the performance at all and then it really has disappeared.

Work Cited:

Kaye, N., Giannachi, G. and Shanks, M. (eds) (2012) Archaeologies of Presence: Art Performance and the Persistence of being. London: Routledge.

Image from: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-2286483/As-world-waits-new-Pope-explore-Vaticans-Secret-Archives.html [Accessed 18 March 2015].