Welcome to the site specific module. We’ll be working at The Usher and The Collection, exploring arts, publics, archives and what performance can do in the spaces and sites between these concepts.
I’ll start us off with an illuminating section from Diana Taylor’s (2003) excellent book The Archive and The Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham: Duke University Press.
“Archival” memory exists as documents, maps, literary texts, letters, archaeological remains, bones, videos, films, cds, all those items supposedly resistant to change. Archive, from the Greek, etymologically refers to “a public building” to “a place where records are kept.” From arkhe, it also means a beginning, the first place, the government. The archival, from the beginning, sustains power-we might conclude by shifting the dictionary entries into a syntactical arrangement. Archival memory works across distance, over time and space-investigators can go back to re-examine an ancient manuscript; letters find their addresses through time and place, and computer discs at times cough up lost files with the right software. The fact that archival memory succeeds in separating the source of ‘knowledge’ from the knower-in time and/or space-leads to comments, such as de Certeau’s, that it is “expansionist” and “immunized against alterity” (216). What changes over time is the value, relevance, or meaning of the archive, how the items it contains get interpreted, even embodied. Bones might remain the same while their story may change-depending on the paleontologist or forensic anthropologist who examines them. Antigone might be performed in multiple ways, while the unchanging text assures a stable signifier. Written texts allow scholars to trace literary traditions, sources and influences. Insofar as it constitutes materials that seem to endure, the archive exceeds the ‘live.’ There are several myths attending the archive. One is that it is unmediated-that objects located there might mean something outside the framing of the archival impetus itself. What makes an object archival is the process whereby it is selected for analysis. Another myth is that the ‘archive’ resists change, corruptibility, and political manipulation. Individual things–books, DNA evidence, photo IDs–might mysteriously appear in or disappear from the archive.
The repertoire, on the other hand, enacts embodied memory-performances, gestures, orality, movement, dance, singing-in short, all those acts usually thought of as ephemeral, non-reproducible knowledge. Repertoire, etymologically “a treasury, an inventory” also allows for individual agency, referring also to “the finder, discoverer,” and meaning “to find out.” The repertoire requires presence-people participate in the production and reproduction of knowledge by ‘being there,’ being a part of the transmission. As opposed to the supposedly stable objects in the archive, the actions that are the repertoire do not remain the same. The repertoire both keeps and transforms choreographies of meaning. Sports enthusiasts might claim that soccer has remained unchanged for the past hundred years, even though players and fans from different countries have appropriated the event in diverse ways. Dances change over time, even though generations of dancers (or even individual dancers) swear they’re always the same. But even though the embodiment changes, the meaning might very well remain the same.