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Performance Lecture
* Performance survives as a cluster of narratives, those of the watchers and of the watched, and of all those who facilitate their interaction – technicians, ushers, stage-managers, administrators. The same event is experienced, remembered, characterised in a multitude of different ways none of which appropriates singular authority. And these may constitute the traces which theatre that is not reliant upon the exposition of dramatic literature generates, the ‘artefacts’ it leaves behind; these, and plans, drawings, lighting plots, a handful of photographs…From the ‘watched’ comes the ‘folklore of practice’ coloured by aspiration, intention and rationalisation, preserved in memory as anecdote and analect and revealed in discussion and interview and in personal archive as diary and notebook. And from all types of watchers – first-timers, aficionados, critics – springs description, opinion, personal interpretation. Ironically perhaps, performance most often survives in the writings of critics – as reportage, article, thesis – because of their high rate of preservation in libraries and cuttings agencies. By narrative, I simply mean discrete ways of telling, some recognition of the oral nature of performance practice. But if we extend the notion of narrative to cover all orders of information generated by, and around, performance – strategic, operational, observational, critical, speculative – before, during and after the event then we might envisage documentation as requiring an integration or incorporation of these narratives. Performance might then be reconstituted as complex forms of text which integrate image, musical score, technical instructions, dialogue or as second-order performance or as installation or as…Just as performance need not resemble the exposition of dramatic literature, the performance document need not resemble the play script.

* Performance exists in and amongst these narratives. Its record will need to be adequate and appropriate, necessitating creative acts of representation. And it will need to draw upon disciplines, principles, methods and terminologies, other than those of textual analysis, to describe and document itself, approaches taken from sociology and ergonomics, architectural theory and forensic science. Yet we can neither create the authoritative record nor control its reception.

* A theatre archaeology has then the following intentions :
1] To find appropriate and useful ways of describing and documenting what is, or was, going on in performance – with performance as a totality of context, strategy and operation – and not simply the record of the words or choreography of performers.

2] To regard performance as generative of narratives produced before, during and after the event, not only as technical information but as personal experience. ‘I think that it means that what we are discussing is a particular way of being attuned to performance and its traces, which involves a form of production. That is, the production of narratives which stand for the past, rather than constituting faithful replicas of the past.’(Julian Thomas)

3] To attempt a synthesis of the narratives of the watchers and watched in non-hierarchical integrations of the written and the remembered. ‘…polyvocality, multiple texts, fragments, postmodern ethnography and the question of who has the right to impose a metanarrative. An ethnography of performance?’ (Julian Thomas)

4] To define the objects of retrieval of performance around notions of space, time, pattern and detail which orientate the attention of the narratives. This will involve discussion :
Of the genesis, delineation and formalisation of performance space and the creation of playing areas through the nature of the action, the placement of the audience and architectural and scenographic demarcation.
Of the effect of spatial restriction and configuration upon the type, nature and quality of the activity and upon the essential contracts of performance – performer to performer, performer to spectator, spectator to spectator.
Of the existence of spatial hierarchies, intensities and stratifications of activity. The reservation of particular locales.
And of the extent, volume and restriction of the ‘spheres of influence’ of performers and spectators alike which collide and penetrate during interpersonal contact.
And this will require map, plan, section, axonometric projection.

Of the ways in which difference time frames are manifest by performers over time and from time to time in performance, in sequence or in parallel and how they affect the nature of the activity, the expenditure of energy and the application and quality of effort. And the overall dynamic pattern of the event.
And this will require chronologies and time-bases.

Of the explicit structure of performance as set of rules, sequence, route map, montage.
Of the juxtaposition of different orders of material and styles and techniques of performance.
And this will require libretto, list, image, graph.

Of the dramaturgical detail and the equal importance of kinesic, proxemic and haptic signification: of signs, distances and body-to-body contacts. (After Marcel Mauss, it may be interesting to select a limited range of activities -walking, sitting, falling – and discuss their particular articulation, their stylistic diversification, within this performance, this genre. Equal attention might be given to the nature of meeting and physical contact.)
And this will require diagram, drawing, photograph, video.