Surely, there are many overlaps between the ways institutions and individual artists use their records. The performing artists also benefit from the evidence, memory and heritage values of the records, but they must use their archives for self- representational purposes as well. Documentation is performed when creating and preparing for a performance, when applying for grants, accounting for the subsidies, when corresponding, when recording and photographing shows and when distributing them in order to be recognized in the artistic field. For some archivists the constant reuse of the archive can be a new phenomenon that they have not experienced before. As an example, I would like to mention here an interview I have recently conducted with Clifford Allen, archivist of the famous theatre maker, Robert Wilson. Similarly to the practice of the abovementioned performing artists, new records are added, old records are being removed or changed also in the Robert Wilson archive. The intellectual challenge for Allen is not only to archive the records with keeping in mind that they will potentially be reused, but also to archive the whole process of 'moving', and therefore to be able to grasp historically how for example an image from a given performance was restaged in another performance years later - this may be relevant in the long run. As Allen claimed, the Robert Wilson's archive is changing in a rather odd way. According to him, an archive traditionally changes its meaning only when a new record is added to the archive, or when new collection comes in and that changes the context, but, as Allen said, "that the whole thing is moving, is something new". It is not only the notion that sometimes the documentation is what makes a performance significant that fundamentally challenges how we look at theatre. The archival practice of the production management of the DNO also questions the idea of theatre as an ephemeral art: with the precise notes of the stage-managers a performance can be (and must be) perfectly remounted! A performing art can only be seen ephemeral if one concentrates merely on the live event and takes exclusively one function of the archive into consideration. As argued by theatre scholars, it is the function of heritage that is often and primarily addressed, and accordingly, performance is archived, as Reason writes, in the "fear of ephemerality": it's our heritage so it has to be saved. In that fear, the performance is fixed in the form of documentation, which is far from being similar to the original event. This is a crucial point, and it is exactly why the primary functions of the performing arts archive have to be analysed. Naturally, a performing arts archive has a heritage value, but that isn't why theatre is archived in the first place! There are other issues at stake. Who could remember all operations that have to be done to restage a complete performance? Which performing artist could get a new grant without having any spectators that is encompassed by their self-archiving practice? There is no performance without archive. Theatre only becomes ephemeral if one takes its archives out of its 'natural habitat' and tries to force it into a traditional archival institution.

Periodiekviewer Koninklijke Vereniging van Archivarissen

Schetsboek | 2015 | | pagina 101