The Representation of Live Performance

Abstract

The concept of disappearance articulates the live arts as actively resistant or impervious to representation, with this transience prominently constructed as a marker of the unique character, force and meaning of performance. At the same time practitioners and theorists alike also demonstrate a powerful preoccupation with questions of documentation, prompted by a fear of forgetting and the need for performance to exist within wider cultural and academic discourses and conversations. Partly contradictory, partly mirroring, each of these discourses of documentation and disappearance drives and motivates the other. They are mutually entangled, mutually dependent, with ideas of disappearance depending on the continued existence of some manner of trace or presence and acts of documentation always involving some degree of fragmentation and absence. Together these two themes underwrite much conceptual discussion and thinking within performance studies.