Regenerating the Live: The Archive as the Genesis of a Performance Practice

178 Pages·2016·1.94 MB·English

Title Regenerating the Live: The Archive as the Genesis of a Performance
Practice
Type Thesis
URL http://ualresearchonline.arts.ac.uk/8990/
Date 2015
Citation Dunne, Joseph (2015) Regenerating the Live: The Archive as the Genesis
of a Performance Practice. PhD thesis, University of Lincoln.
Creators Dunne, Joseph
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REGENERATING THE LIVE: THE ARCHIVE AS THE GENESIS
OF A PERFORMANCE PRACTICE

Joseph Dunne

A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the
University of Lincoln for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

July 2015
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My first thanks go to Claire Warden and Andrew Westerside for their
unwavering support and guidance during the course of my PhD, and to Mark
O’Thomas who encouraged me to apply to Lincoln in the first place. Thank you
to Ashleigh Griffiths, Cara Davies and Mads Floor Anderson in Tracing the
Pathway for continuing to inspire me, especially during difficult times. Thank
you to Jenny Minton and Anton Kardasis for your excellent vocals. Thank you
to Bill Lowe for helping me to set up the website, and thank you to Aaron
James for his outstanding editing skills and creativity.
Thank you to the drama department at the University of East London, with
particular thanks to Dominic Hingorani and Conan Lawrence for their
mentorship. Thank you also to Mary Smith and Libby Homer for allowing me
to experiment with theatre archives during the CEDAR project, when the seeds
of this thesis were sown.
Thank you to Jorge Ramos and everyone in ZU-UK for collaborating with me
on the Audience as Document project.
Thank you to the staff at Peckham Library for giving me the flexibility and time
to complete this project. And to all of those dedicated professionals who have
committed their careers to maintaining quality public services in the teeth of
opposition: the fight continues.!
Thank you to all of my friends who I have the privilege of sharing my life with,
who have accompanied me at different points throughout my studies, and who
are always with me, no matter what distance separates us. !
My final thanks go to my Mum, Lin, who taught me what true dedication
means, and for always gently guiding me back on the right path. !
And to my partner, Hannah, for her honesty, her limitless patience, her
creativity and intelligence, for instilling in me a strong desire to share
knowledge with others, and for teaching me it’s not wrong to ask for help. I
could not have completed this thesis without her.
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Live performance lacks the durability of art practices such as photography, film and
painting, and so definitions of ‘live’ acts have traditionally been formulated in terms
of ‘transience’ and ‘disappearance’. In this context the archive and archival documents
are often described as the antithesis of performance’s ontology. An archive’s primary
function is to preserve material for future, undetermined uses, whereas a live event is
temporary and cannot endure as ‘itself’ outside of the temporal-spatial zone it unfolds
in before an audience. Yet archival documents are intimately imbricated in the
creation of live acts. This can be seen in all performance practices, from written plays
in the dramatic theatre, to the assemblage of materials used in devised performance, to
the ways sites are framed as sources of historical knowledge in performance re-
enactments. By examining the role documents play in performance practice I argue
that archival materials have the potential to act as the genesis for live acts.!
The archive’s generative function makes performance a potential method of historical
research, where documents can help engender an interactive reciprocity between
spectators and the past. The archival mode of performance practice I advocate in this
thesis requires spectators to become participants inside the performance sphere, just as
historians participate in the writing of historical discourses in the archive. !
There are several practice-as-research components to my project. These include the
Audience as Document events and two workshops. The primary practice-as-research
event is a participatory site-specific performance Voices from the Village. The
Olympic Village in Stratford, East London, is framed as a type of authoritative
historical document that works as a meta-narrative of London’s past. The Olympic
Legacy anchors the memories of East London’s residents to a time they are
encouraged to re-live in their everyday lives. At the centre of contemporary urban
regeneration projects is a firm conviction that the future can be built in the here-and-
now. Participants are guided through the Village and by two tour guides who attempt
to inculcate them into the Legacy Project – a new type of citizenry based upon the
neoliberal hegemony. In the third part participants explore what would happen if the
neighbouring Hackney Wick estate was ‘regenerated’ in the future. My practice
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examines how documents in performance can act as interlocutors between a site’s
past(s) and a participant’s ‘live’ experience. The enduring form of digital documents
creates a manifold afterlife for performance on the Web, which is the home of an
evolving network of people who connect to each other through their re-interpretation
of the Olympic Legacy. I am arguing that the life of a performance does not end over
a fixed duration, but is instead a dialogic process with a multitude of access points. !
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