Live
The 
contained many elements.
Including 
And also 
Deciding what was pertinent to someone else’s performance, what the “truth” of it was, attempting to decipher their intent and then recording that in a form that captured not only the facts of the matter, but also the spirit of the actions. All this without having seen or heard any of it. Our surroundings were key, the crime scene house had us all thinking about truth and hard facts and the traditional techniques used to collect these (photographs, interviews, torture….). Applying these traditions to live art brought home to me the subjectivity of records, and the impossibility of creating anything so concrete as fact when talking about performance. We missed so much.
The house also brought an element of site-specificity in to the performances, all of them used it as a springboard, and there was a air of sinisterism (made-up-word) throughout. Having a look round before the performances began changed the way I approached the documentation. I was looking for things that had changed since I was last in the room, interventions that the performers had made. In doing this though, I missed things that were significant to the performers and their intentions, and failed to take in to account the impact that the atmosphere of the place must have had on them, even though there was obviously no physical way to represent this. I don’t suppose “atmosphere” is admissible in court, but it’s certainly key to the experience of live performance, and so I feel that a more holistic/multi-disciplinary approach may have benefited the the evidence gathering. It did bring up an interesting question about site-specific work, and the extent to which work is truly site-specific, and to what extent it can be imbued with meaning of the the audience’s choice, based on their surroundings.
to be continued…..
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April 11th, 2007 at 9:46 am
Your comments about the “atmosphere” of performance that can’t be represented reminds me of my shady past as an Eng Lit student. The Marxist theorist Raymond Williams, who spent years studying the institutional and ideological structures of contemporary culture, coined the term “structure of feeling” to describe those elements of experience, emotion etc. that were inaccessible to traditional scholarly methods but was also essential to understanding any society; the broad cultural atmosphere, the sense of belonging or unbelonging; of humour, contentment, unease, dread, shame.
His point was that we have to stop thinking of experiences, feelings or atmospheres as essentially private and personal: they’re shaped by and shape the cultural, economic, political lives of whole cities, societies, epochs.
I’ve spent the last few years struggling with what this might mean for literature; I wonder if anyone has ideas about how we might start thinking about the “structure of feeling” in last week’s workshops, or in performance more generally?