Convivencia (Pre-Symposium Information)
Convivencia: A one-day symposium on existing and potential relationships between documentation and live art practices
Saturday the 3rd of February 2007
University of Central Lancashire, Preston, UK
Presenters:
Robin Feeny, Concordia University, Canada
Dr. Simon Ellis, University of Northampton
Michael Mayhew, Honorary Associate Artist, National Review of Live Art
Prof. Susan Melrose, Middlesex University
Dr. Fiona Wright, Independent Artist/Researcher, Newcastle
Jon Aveyard, University of Central Lancashire
Convivencia – a tense but productive co-existence
The primary aim of this one-day symposium is to open a dialogue around a range of perspectives on what remains a highly politicised topic of debate within professional and academic live art contexts. Historically, performance documentation has often been characterised as an unfaithful representation of the live art experience. However, in recent years the relationship between documentation and live art practices has moved towards reconciliation. The reasons for such a shift are many, possibly including the validation of practice-led research, the use of new technologies within performance, or the wider acceptance of the value of mediated memories. Yet not all are encouraged by the promises of digital technologies, or the increasing demands for reproducible evidence by funding bodies and archive-oriented institutions. The symposium will critically explore this terrain through a series of performative and discursive presentations, addressing topics such as digital online archive databases, the fetishisation of documentation, and the performance of the past.
This event is funded in part by the University of Central Lancashire and the Arts and Humanities Research Council as part of Dr. Paul Stapleton’s current research project titled Dialogic Evidence: Documentation of Ephemeral Events.
Speaker Abstracts and Biographies
Michael Mayhew
Honorary Associate Artist
National Review of Live Art
Hello
You will need to bring with you a red object of your choice.
Please arrive at Preston Railway Station at the bottom of the stairs leading to the junction between Platform 3 / 4, locating yourself opposite the news stand.
At 10.05am please reveal your red object. Please greet every person who has revealed a red object.
Maps will be handed out giving directions from the station to Brook Building (approximately a 15 minute walk).
Hello will be followed with Goodbye presented at the end of the day.
Biography
Michael Mayhew has been working.
In that time he has engaged with a multiplicity of art forms that have often been inspired by the locations / environments he finds himself in. He establishes collaborations with people. His process has witnessed him travel widely throughout the world, often stepping into new and untested locations, testing the ground for the development of new performance practice and processes.
He will soon be traveling around the world to look for his sister who vanished.
‘I was struck by the sense of yearning in it, you seeking to find/define yourself, your past, your path to this point, your acknowledgement of yourself as a conduit for other people’s stories, a vessel other people pass through and even a yearning for the work itself, it’s ephemeral being, its lack of documentation, its here now gone tomorrowness.’ Terry O’Conner (Forced Entertainment) on Something Tender
Mayhew is based in Manchester, where he runs - art. He is currently an Associate Artist of PANDA, Artist in Residence at both the Contact Manchester ~ The School of Environment and Development at the University of Manchester, and Honorary Associate Artist of the National Review of Live Art.
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Dr. Simon Ellis
University of Northampton
Fixate
I accuse myself of yielding to the demands of archive-obsessed institutions hungry for nicely packaged objects of knowledge. The increasingly fetishised role of documentation in my artistic-scholarly research invites a rendering of the related performances as trivial. And yet it is the nature of this relationship between performance and documentation that is unsettled. Fixate is an opportunity to share and question the role that documentation has come to play in my practice as an artist-scholar. It also invites the possibility that the idea of liveness is so disrupted that the word documentation is only useful in increasingly exceptional circumstances.
Biography
Dr. Simon Ellis is an independent performance maker and performer with an artistic-scholarly practice encompassing a range of forms founded on choreographic traditions. His projects have included site-specific investigations, dance on screen, digital outcomes, black box works, and installation. Simon has a practice-led PhD from the University of Melbourne (investigating improvisation, remembering, documentation and liveness) and is currently the practice-led research fellow at the University of Northampton. Most recently he completed an initial development of Crevice in Melbourne – a solo performance and animation installation scheduled for completion in 2007/08. Previous choreographies include Full (2001), Lying (2002), Indelible (2003), Sleep. Wake. Dream (2004), Portrait (2006), Tight (2006), dad-project (2006), microflicks (2006) and Inert (2006). www.skellis.net.
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Robin Feeny
Concordia University, Canada
Towards an Archive of the Future
The retrospective exhibition is generally understood as a comprehensive overview of a past body of work, usually by one artist, preserved for the audience of the future. Retrospective exhibitions of live art works often display documents collected from the work in question (such as photographic and video recordings) as an ontological supplements to the so-called original performance. This ontological framing of performance asks the audience to privilege the memory of an original gesture. Performance documents may also be understood as performative and reproducing its display as performance experienced through phenomenology. This strategy of performance asks the audience to experience the trace as memory of the past in the present. Both forms of performance art document present different ideologies regarding notions of originality and authenticity; however, they similarly reproduce the notions of temporality and cultural capital embedded in the genre of performance art within the frame of visual art history.
Towards an Archive of the Future explores how the frame of history, presupposing a linear chronology of time based on the grid of Euclidean geometry, is challenged by Riemannian logic and geometry. This mathematical concept suggests time cannot be charted on a linear grid as it is curved and susceptible to durational warps and foldings that create ontogenetic movement: movements that fold the past into the future creating anomaly and novelty. The processual and dynamic force of ontogenesis challenges conservationists, archivists, historians and artists working with live art and its documentation to reconsider assumptions of what role temporality plays in relation to ephemeral documents, history and the audience.
This lecture investigates the aforementioned problematics of framing, displaying and revisiting time based performance works through the work of internationally renowned Canadian interdisciplinary artist Tagny Duff. Guest independent curator, Robin Feeny explores the difficulties of situating Duff’s performance work for the online exhibition “Retrospective” featured by The Public Domain of Contemporary Art (August 2005 – ongoing).
Biography
Robin Feeny is an interdisciplinary artist-curator and organizer based in Montreal, Canada. Feeny’s intervention works, net art, web projects, video and roaming events and performative lectures have been featured at numerous international festivals, artist run-centres and universities in Canada, US, Cuba, Australia, Finland and Germany. Recent published texts include “FFWD, RWND and PLAY: Performance art, video and feminisms in Vancouver 1981-1971” featured in Caught in the Act: An Anthology of Canadian Women in Performance, Edited by Tanya Mars and Johanna Householder, and “Performing Lag Time” a catalogue essay on performance artist Tania Bruguera and her recent Vigilante performances presented as part of the curated project “Time Zones”. “Restrospective” is a current project curated by Feeny featuring the work of Canadian artist Tagny Duff, and is co-sponsored by the Public Domain of Contemporary Art (www.pdoca.ca). Feeny is completing a Phd in the Humanities Interdisciplinary Program at Concordia University, Canada.
Feeny’s current performative lecture series focuses on how methodological approaches to research, presentation and conservation of live art practices are reliant on photography and video documents, and increasingly, digital online archival databases. The function of the performance document is often assumed to prove the authenticity of past performance events. However, documents may also operate as a performative objects critiquing authoritative conventions reproduced under the auspices of art history. With the increasing obsolescence and development of recording technologies, the migration (transfer from one medium to another) of the performance document is presenting philosophical and aesthetic challenges to how one comes to experience and remember live performance. Assumptions of what an original and authentic document of live art is and how it functions in time are under scrutiny. This current series implicates the audience of the future in how performance works are reproduced through memory.
••••
Prof. Susan Melrose
Middlesex University
“Not lost but not yet found”: accounting for decision-making processes in expert/professional performance-disciplinary practices.
Certain curiosities emerge, I find, when we look back at the historical development of what has been called ‘practice theory’ (I myself prefer the terms ‘practice-theoretical-practices’, and ‘mixed-mode meta-practices’): amongst these are not simply the insights already revealed in some late nineteenth and mid-to-later 20th Century enquiries into practice, but the fact that many of these have been neglected in many early 21st Century struggles in ‘practice’ in the contexts of the performing arts. Some of you will recall Bourdieu’s observations, first published in French in 1972 (in English translation in 1977), that 1. The observation of practice from a unreflective standpoint constitutes practical activity as spectacle, leading researchers to “insist on trying to answer questions which are not and cannot be questions for practice”.
2. Correspondingly, Bourdieu adds, a “theoretical disposition” is thereby brought to bear on practitioners’ work, which disposition tends to “invite …a quasi-theoretical attitude” from practitioners. This attitude, in turn, “tacitly excludes reference to a whole range of tactical operations”. According to Bourdieu, writing in the early 1970s, the form that the questioning (by sociologists?) of practitioners takes tends to elicit an ordered sequence of answers. That ‘ordered sequence’, then, “betrays” the questioner’s own “non-practical” disposition, inviting the practitioner to adopt a “quasi-theoretical attitude”. Practice, on that basis, comes to assume the status of an “object of thought, predisposed to become an object of discourse and to be unfolded as a totality existing beyond its ‘applications’ and independently of the needs and interests of its users” (1977:106). Plainly some of the terms in Bourdieu’s own writing (such as the negatively-defined “non-practical”) are historically-specific, and need to be reviewed; on the other hand, the notion that certain sorts of enquiry constitute practical activity as spectacle seems to me to have particular resonances in the context of enquiries into expert practices in the performing arts, where ‘spectacle’ is both literalised, in performance events, but may not, for all that, serve to identify the specificity of expert practices, for the practitioners involved in their production.
This presentation asks how attentive ‘we’ might need to be, in writing production and documentation in the performance research context, to the distinction between models of knowledge and models of intelligibility specific to expert spectating, and those that are highly specific to expert-practitioner decision-making processes. The latter are not lost, in documentation, but they are equally not yet found: instead, they are widely subject, in Performance Studies terms, to erasure. Highly indicative of ‘institutionalised erasures’ are what I have called the operations of expert or professional intuition, in performance-making processes, not least where the former meet (and catalyse) the logics of expert production.
© Susan Melrose
January 2007
Biography
Susan Melrose is Professor of Performing Arts and Research Co-ordinator, Performing Arts, in the School of Arts and Education, Middlesex University. After completing doctoral research in performance analysis at the Sorbonne (Nlle) in the early 1980s she established and ran postgraduate profession/vocation-linked theatre and performance studies courses at Central School of Speech and Drama and Rose Bruford College London. She has taught at universities in Turkey, France, Tunisia and Australia. In a number of recent publications, she has questioned the appropriateness of certain discourse-apparatus-driven approaches to the analysis of (expert-practitioner-specific) performance and performance-making practices. The full text of a number of keynote addresses presented over the period 2002 and 2006 can be found at:http://www.sfmelrose.u-net.com.
Recent publications include:
• Rosemary Butcher: Choreography, Collisions and Collaborations
Rosemary Butcher and Susan Melrose (eds), Middlesex University Press, 2005.
•”Who knows - and who cares - about performance mastery?”, in R. Gough & J. Christie (eds), A Performance Cosmology, London & New York: Routledge, 2006. ISBN: 0415372585.
•”Bodies Without Bodies”, in S. Broadhurst & J. Machon (eds), Performance and Technology: Practices of Virtual Embodiment and Interactivity, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
• “The Vanishing, or Little Erasures Without Significance?”, in Performance Research, Volume 11, No 2, ‘Indexes’ Taylor & Francis Ltd, June 2006.
•” ‘Constitutive Ambiguities’: Writing Professional or Expert Performance Practices, and the Théâtre du Soleil, Paris”, in J. Kelleher & N. Rideout (eds), Contemporary Theatres in Europe, London and New York: Routledge 2006.
•N. Hunt & S. Melrose, “Techne, Technology, Technician: The Creative Practices of the Mastercraftsperson”, in Performance Research, Volume 10, No 4, ‘On Techne’, pp 70-82, Taylor & Francis Ltd, December 2005.
•’Untitled (1)’, in Issues in Curating, Contemporary Art and Performance, ed. J. Rugg, Intellect Books, forthcoming 2007
••••
Dr. Fiona Wright
Independent Artist/Researcher
Newcastle upon Tyne
notes on lying and syncope
This symposium presentation is based on a short written paper, also titled notes on lying and syncope soon to be published in the UK journal Performance Research.
“She cannot find lying here, so she takes a pencil and draws a line…”
The live paper begins with an account of looking for the word lying in the subject indexes of books as an example of the deliberate and random routes that our research paths, our works and documents often take. The proposition offered up partial navigations and fragmentary readings of particular texts, for example Catherine Clément’s Syncope: The Philosophy of Rapture.
This performance paper promises a live body as a possible document in thinking around ways of not being here and really meaning it and even losing yourself, along with further contemplations on the need for betrayal and fidelity in dancing and the uncertain joys of quoting Derrida naked.
“She moves into the aftermath. Where else would you go?”
Biography
Fiona Wright has been making primarily solo performances since the late 1980s. Her series of performance lectures titled Other versions of an uncertain body were seen at both performance and conference programmes. These were linked to a PhD submission at Nottingham Trent University (2005) concerned with writing as documentation of performance practice and also included a collaboration with video maker Becky Edmunds. An early version of her new solo On Lying will be performed at OPENPORT Festival in Chicago in February 2007. She taught on the Contemporary Arts degree at Nottingham Trent University (1994-2000) and on Dance and Visual Art at Brighton University (2002-2003) and currently works as a part time and visiting lecturer and also in a mentoring role to other artists. She also works with Caroline Bowditch under the name girl jonah. Their recent duet this two was presented at Dance Umbrella 2006 and was a movement based contemplation of their two bodies (one disabled and one non-disabled) working with difference and unison in choreographed dances. The solo performance ’salt drawing’ was one of a series of works made for a small audience and was performed for one person at a time, just 5 minutes duration and repeated over hours in various sites, including a dressing room and a kitchen and a ship’s cabin (2006 Gresol, Girona; 2005 Navigate/Baltic, Newcastle; 2004 Serralves, Oporto).
Publications by Fiona Wright include:
• 2004 amino essays: twenty short performance papers. Newcastle upon Tyne, amino (limited edition, small book: amino.org.uk)
• 2002 uncertain bodies: fragments. Performance Research (On Archives and Archiving) 7 (4): 88-91.
• 2002 Notes at close quarters: fragments/early version (first edit). Contemporary Theatre Review (Practice as Research) Vol. 12. Part 4: 37-41.
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Jon Aveyard
University of Central Lancashire
Mix 46 (Audio Installation)
This piece was edited together from 46 extracts lasting between 30 and 90 seconds taken from recordings captured on in-ear microphones worn by the improvisation group theybreakinpieces. The sounds are made by the performers’ voices as well as a variety of instruments and other objects intended to make sound or transform the sound as heard by the performers. As a consequence of using in-ear microphones, when the piece is heard over headphones the sounds are externalized (that is, they seem to be coming from outside the listener’s head rather than from inside the head as with most recordings heard over headphones) placing the listener in mixed and montaged recreations of the soundscapes experienced by the performers during their improvisations. In listening to the piece, consideration might be paid to whether gestures and textures seem to have come about through the improvised work of the group in the recording studio or through the mixing carried out by the composer in the editing studio.
Biography
Jon Aveyard is a composer and audio artist who uses field recordings and found sound to produce performances, installations and acousmatic music for loudspeaker and headphone playback. In recent years he has concentrated on combining skills developed through interdisciplinary improvisation and acousmatic composition, and the use of recordings captured from in-ear microphones. These recordings, when heard over headphones, vividly recreate the recordist’s audio environment promoting the exploration of the spatial positioning of sound and subjective points-of-audition.