Documenting Performance, 2019

Full Name: Johanna Linsley

Venue and Date: Tate Exchange at Tate Modern, 13 May 2019

What were the main points that emerged from your interim event this year?
Hear Tell

This study day circulated around three key actions: describing, reporting and narrating. Each of these terms can be understood as a mode within theatre and performance. It also presents an approach to writing and talking about events. The idea behind staging such a study day was to bring attention to key methodological issues within theatre and performance studies and to connect these issues with wider concerns. Points that emerged through the presentations and conversations included:

Describing:

• Language and materiality in contemporary performance making and analysis;
• Description as representational and/ or appropriative;
• Self-description, reiteration, displacement, and dissidence;
• The productive frictions between description, quotation, and citation.

Reporting:

 

• Who reports and who gets reported on, in contemporary theatre and beyond?
• Reporting and making reference – to structures, ideas, and objects outside the show.
• Logistics of staging and production, institutional infrastructure, and conventionality.

Narrating:

 

• Decisions, consequences, and causality;.
• Sequential forms that are not chronological;.
• The value of narrative (particularly fictional or speculative) in filling in gaps within official records or accounts
• The ethics of narrativising histories, particularly histories of trauma or violence

Types of contributions (papers, performances, workshops, etc.)
Papers, performance lectures, sound interventions, presentations of works-in-progress, structured conversation

Number of Delegates: 30

How many were new to TaPRA? 6

Did you have any non-UK participants? Yes

Any additional points or feedback not covered above?

As with previous gatherings of the Documenting Performance working group, this interim event arose directly from ideas and concerns of the group, in this case from the gathering at Aberystwyth in Autumn 2018. The study day is also feeding into a proposal for a special issue of Contemporary Theatre Review, developed by the event organisers Johanna Linsley (University of Dundee) and Georgina Guy (Royal Holloway, University of London). The organisers found, as with an interim event in 2017, that it was particularly effective for a discursive event of this type to hold it in a cultural venue that is open to the public.

Overall budget awarded: £550

Amount spent: £300

Breakdown of costs:

£100 – invited speaker travel costs

£50 – PG bursary

£50 – PG bursary

£100 – Catering