Live Archives

check out www.improvmover.wordpress.com I am currently exploring the documentary impulse of my practice. Tamara (More...)

I knew today would be a particularly surreal one from the moment that I woke up. Last night my dreams were ridden with archive strategies; one in particular involved us all sitting in a line and blogging (nothing unusual about that!), hitting the keyboards in different rhythmic patterns to see if it affected the information that we typed onto the website. I also became concerned last night as to whether or not the live archives workshop website is suffering from an identity crisis…with so many co-authors, certain names/ tags becoming larger than others…but then I decided it was just me (I don’t think that I’m having a crisis, but I have certainly been opened up to new approaches to documentation and improvisation this week which conflict with previous preconceptions). This is an identity celebration; thank you everyone for contributing! Now, this doesn’t mean that my identity hasn’t been played around with today. I just witnessed an entire performance in a mock court room which accused me of being guilty of ‘obstructing a ginnel’, in order to cover up the fact that the corrupt prosecutors had tortured Tamara with a sharp pencil (for being mute and not being able to divulge evidence as a witness to a performance) in the original case. I should explain this one from the start… Today we were brought to a house that is split into different crime scenes for forensic science students to practice with. We explored the correlation between the evidence/documentation that is collected to assume ‘truth’ surrounding a previously made crime, with how performance transcends its ephemeral nature in the form of different performative traces (whether photo/ film/ witnesses’ memory etc). These tools became ours to interpret each other’s performances after they’d happened. We were split into three groups: performers, witnesses, and documenters/ investigators (who don’t get to see the original performance). We all had a go at everything…and played around/ blurred the boundaries of each role quite considerably. For instance, the performance that Caroline(who kept her eyes shut), Tamara (who pretended to be mute) and I (who claimed to have a foggy memory as was under slight possession) witnessed was barely mentioned, instead Daisy, Matt and Barry constructed their own version of events that made me out to look like some kick-boxing nightmare (see below)… In return we had to present their performance (which we hadn’t seen) in the court room, relying on the comments made by Ale, Emily and Paul C. Here is a beautiful map made by Caroline that interpreted how they moved around in the performance: Below are some images that I took of the performance scene. Some images show witnesses impersonating the original performers, and all feature text that comes out of comments made about the piece, or my specific memories of what the witnesses said (which turned out to not be very accurate). Our performative response to these traces really was quite special. It involved singing ‘Wonder Wall’ in the court room (although I wasn’t so much singing as crying with nervous laughter), Tamara attempting to encapsulate the essence of Paul’s impression of Barry (which was actually excellent) and Caroline keeping the whole thing remotely together! Our performance involved undergoing a seance in a bathroom that had a severed head in it. We were attempting to contact the spirits of Hanz, Gunter and Frederick (a trio featured on the cover of a record that I bought this morning in Preston Market). It was interpreted as just being ‘a great big racket’… (More...)

The session began with an introduction to the introduction to documentation by Paul S. The session ended with the end of the introduction to documentation. Throughout the day, photographs were taken, films were made, pictures were drawn, thoughts were processed and recorded - archiving took place. It is an odd thing to document documentation being made. There were a few instances where one could document performative situations, when we rotated roles as ‘documenter’, ‘reflector’, ‘performer’, and ‘interviewee’. On these occasions, the multitude of documentation methods were the focus, though I felt that there was a certain performance; a ritual; a dance surrounding the documentation method itself. It certainly does add something to the piece (if not in terms of quality, in terms of synergies involved in the performance area): the relationship between documenter and performer - that dialogue, that conversation. I think that it is important to address the issues of documenters interfering in live performance situations, not just visually, but aurally. Obviously, this goes back to the question of the purpose of documentation. If the purpose of a performance is for that performance to be archived in one way or another, then surely the documentation should not ‘contribute’ to that performance in any way… or is the performance inclusive of the documentation? I’m not sure on this point - maybe that’s a point of discussion! (More...)