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.