As with any performance, but especially with Site Specific Performance, how and if you document your piece is extremely important. It is certainly a difficult issue especially when you consider this quote from Angela Piccini “performance exists through only one space and time with no possibility of object repetition” (2002) Whilst you could argue that to document a performance is to destroy it’s liveness, documentation can help preserve performances for people who didnt have the opportunity to witness it themselves. That way it is inclusive and means a working class person from a totally different country with no access to the live performance can witness some of it via the internet. “While there may be tensions between the live nature of a practise and the recording of a work, documentation can be seen as a potentially dynamic and interactive process between practise, it’s audience and more traditional written critiques” (Kershaw and Nicholson, 2011)

A large amount of Site-Specific and Performance Art companies use a variety of documentation which is available via their websites. Wrights and Sites for example document their work in a variety of ways. For example, for their piece “Simultaneous Drift”, the website has a full transcript of the performance, along with screenshot of the video footage that was shown during the piece. From reading the transcript you do get a good feel for the performance, and it’s easier to imagine how it would have been. They must have made the conscious decision to record a transcript instead of using video footage.

Lone Twin for example, use a lot of photography to document their process and performance. On their website you can access a number of high quality photographs for almost all of their productions. Obviously there is issues with photography as it cannot capture movement and only takes snapshots of moments! Obviously with photography, sound is lost also, so which senses you want to preserve need to be considered.

For our performance piece, as it is very much about the visuals, photography is something that we want to utilise. We need to experiment with even more different kinds of documentation in order to decide which is best. In the gallery space, we also come up against issues of photographing other artwork, as the majority of the pieces shown in the Usher Gallery cannot be photographed due to ownership issues. This can make our lives difficult when working in these spaces. Experimentation and play can help to solve these problems.

 

Work Cited

Kershaw, B. and Nicholson, H. (2011). Research methods in theatre and performance. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

http://www.mis-guide.com/index.html

http://www.lonetwin.com/