Reviewing Performance

Abstract

As a form of performance documentation, writing is self-evidently different from either of the media, still photography or video, examined in the previous sections. Writing does not bear a direct mimetic relationship with the world and cannot claim mechanical objectivity, audio/visual completeness or documentary transparency. However compromised such assertions may be in relation to photography and video, writing about performance is evidently much more inherently transformative. As Auslander observes, ‘Written descriptions and drawings or paintings of performance are not direct transcriptions through which we can access the performance itself, as aural and visual recording media are’ (1999: 52). In which case, Auslander suggests, although audio/visual media may transform performance in the process of recording it, they nonetheless provide a directness of knowledge that non-mimetic forms do not allow.