Matthew Reason Research Articles

Performing Deaf Identity and Deaf Gain in Michael Arden’s 2015 Spring Awakening

This article examines the 2015 revival of Spring Awakening on Broadway by director Michael Arden, which restaged the musical for both a deaf and hearing audience. The performance of Deaf identity in the musical is read through Tobin Siebers’s concept the “disability masquerade,” whereby the “overvisibility” of ASL reclaims Deaf identity, as well as through elements of Deaf Gain, namely the bilingual structure of the musical and what can be learned from the Deaf experience of music. The integration of ASL into the choreography amplifies the kinesthetic quality of the performance and engages the audience physically, producing what Matthew Reason and Dee Reynolds have termed “kinesthetic empathy,” while the bilingual structure accentuates the underlying themes of interpersonal communication. The combination of the affirmative disability masquerade with aspects of Deaf Gain produces a performance that reimagines bilingual access and inclusive aesthetics, and confronts its hearing audience with their own kinesthetic relationship to the world, communication, and music.

A Small Festival for Small People

The WeeFestival, English Canada’s first performance festival dedicated to children from ages 0 to 5, acts as an advocate for the early years demographic and for the artists who create for them through three key elements of festival structure: programming, space, and creative/artistic exchange. Engaging with research by Ben Fletcher-Watson, Lise Hovik, Matthew Reason, and Adele Senior, this article uses company archives, artist interviews, and the writer’s personal experiences to analyze how the WeeFestival temporarily establishes an alternative public sphere that challenges policy-makers, funders, and artists to rethink relationships between arts, very young citizens, and urban life. Even though very young citizens may not initially know that they want to experience art, the festival attends to the interests and responses of young people, demonstrates respect for their capacity to be emotionally and intellectually engaged by artful and thoughtful productions, and establishes festivalized spaces that put an alternative public sphere into action, gesturing to the possibility of real social change. Taking into account the significance of programming for artists, educators, and policy-makers alongside the significance of meaningful audience-artist exchange, the analysis suggests that events like the WeeFestival have the capacity to gently shift how urban dwellers perceive very young children and the way they interact with the arts in daily life.

A Small Festival for Small People: The WeeFestival as Advocacy

The WeeFestival, English Canada’s first performance festival dedicated to children from ages 0 to 5, acts as an advocate for the early years demographic and for the artists who create for them through three key elements of festival structure: programming, space, and creative/artistic exchange. Engaging with research by Ben Fletcher-Watson, Lise Hovik, Matthew Reason, and Adele Senior, this article uses company archives, artist interviews, and the writer’s personal experiences to analyze how the WeeFestival temporarily establishes an alternative public sphere that challenges policy-makers, funders, and artists to rethink relationships between arts, very young citizens, and urban life. Even though very young citizens may not initially know that they want to experience art, the festival attends to the interests and responses of young people, demonstrates respect for their capacity to be emotionally and intellectually engaged by artful and thoughtful productions, and establishes festivalized spaces that put an alternative public sphere into action, gesturing to the possibility of real social change. Taking into account the significance of programming for artists, educators, and policy-makers alongside the significance of meaningful audience-artist exchange, the analysis suggests that events like the WeeFestival have the capacity to gently shift how urban dwellers perceive very young children and the way they interact with the arts in daily life.

Experiencing Liveness in Contemporary Performance: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Edited by Matthew Reason and Anja Mølle Lindelof. New York and London: Routledge, 2016. Pp. xvi + 304. $155 Hb; $57.95 Ebook.

Experiencing Liveness in Contemporary Performance: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Edited by Matthew Reason and Anja Mølle Lindelof. New York and London: Routledge, 2016. Pp. xvi + 304. 57.95 Ebook. - Volume 44 Issue 2

Experiencing Liveness in Contemporary Performance: Interdisciplinary Perspectives ed. by Matthew Reason and Anja Mølle Lindelof

Reviewed by: Experiencing Liveness in Contemporary Performance: Interdisciplinary Perspectives ed. by Matthew Reason and Anja Mølle Lindelof Caroline Heim EXPERIENCING LIVENESS IN CONTEMPORARY PERFORMANCE: INTERDISCIPLINARY PERSPECTIVES. Edited by Matthew Reason and Anja Mølle Lindelof. Advances in Theatre and Performance Studies series. New York: Routledge, 2016; pp. 304. Scholars of performance studies have long framed “liveness” through the terms of the debate between Peggy Phelan and Philip Auslander. Dispelling many myths, the central aim of Experiencing Liveness in Contemporary Performance is to reconsider and reconceptualize this debate by moving away from a discussion of liveness per se and toward the performers’ and audiences’ experience of the live. Rather than focusing on or even addressing the well-worn debate between Phelan’s ephemeral and Auslander’s reproducible liveness, the book considers the liveness experience through the audience’s interaction with the performance. This subtle, yet reaching change in purview makes all the difference. Documentation of the “particular kinds” (7) of audience experience of liveness is long overdue. The majority of contributors manage to capture this and take some bold steps into this challenging frontier, while a few exceptions stay within the safe confines of philosophical musings. Interdisciplinary in orientation, this book discusses current [End Page 125] critical discourses across the art forms of theatre, dance, music, and the visual arts. The book consists of two parts: “Audiencing” and “Materialising.” Each contains a series of essays and shorts, which include analyses of immersive theatre, performance art, nonhuman audiences, archival performance, music improvisations, performance installations, and electronic music. Part 1, “Audiencing,” contains an array of exceptional essays on the liveness experience for the audience. Reason and Lindelof borrow the media studies term audiencing to explore the affects, effects, and practices of liveness on and for the audience. The essays in this first part reach toward the transformative power of liveness, proposing innovative ways to move forward in audience research or experience. If it is audiences who open up the world to larger meanings and augment the art event, then we need to be valuing audiences as co-creators. The chapters achieve this by exploring how the experience of the ephemeral event can be extended through vehicles such as the memorial experience, social media, creating artworks, or composing poems, with a large emphasis on mediatised audiences. Refreshingly, some of the chapters include empirical research, and some, as Reason has argued for in previous work, “ask the audience” about their experiences, perhaps not of describing “liveness” as such, but of their own meaning-making and affective responses to productions or artworks. Martin Barker discusses “high-value” experience moments that result in cultural transformation, proferring that entertainment can be transformative when texts “come alive” for their audiences. Also focusing on transformation, Katja Hilevaara explores how our memories of performances are a valid part of critique, a provocative discourse in this “post-truth” age. A much more optimistic reading of liveness than Phelan’s “disappearance,” Hilevaara’s expansive concept of the memorial experience raises multiple questions about the role, construction, and subjective experience of memory. Lucy Bennett explores the social-media audiencing of spectators at live music events as experienced by wider audiences. Also considering music, Stephanie Pitts considers educational avenues and online solutions to boost audiences as a solution to the steady decline in live classical music attendance. She includes an overdue recommendation that classical music program notes and other extraneous public discourses move away from specialized “knowledge-rich” writing to more accessible information for audiences. Paddy Scannell considers the phenomenological aspects of liveness by introducing an interesting concept of care structures of events: the behind-the-scenes labor, love, and investment that work toward productions. Problematizing the “affect” turn in performance studies, Reason suggests that affect could be an avenue for exploring the ineffable in dance performance. Based on his original experiments with different audience responses to productions, he suggests a “vocabulary of the gut” (89). Reason’s chapter introduces many new concepts that deserve a book of their own. Part 2, “Materialising,” follows more of a philosophical direction in exploring the ontological aspects of the live event. The chapters and shorts in this part contain recurring motifs of time and of the audience...

Dee Reynolds and Matthew Reason (eds): Kinaesthetic Empathy in Creative and Cultural Practices

Dee Reynolds and Matthew Reason (eds): Kinaesthetic Empathy in Creative and Cultural Practices

‘[T]his is eating your greens, this is doing your homework’: writing and rehearsing a full-length stand-up show

ABSTRACTUntil recently, the processes which comedians use to create their performances have been seldom examined. This article draws on materials from the British Stand-Up Comedy Archive (BSUCA) and a recent practice-as-research project in which I documented the creative processes behind my full-length stand-up show Break a Leg, performed at the Gulbenkian Theatre, Canterbury in 2015. In the months leading up to the show, I regularly recorded my reflections on the creative processes in which I was engaged, publishing these in the podcast Breaking a Leg, which is available on iTunes. Using these reflections in conjunction with script notes, set lists and unpublished recordings from the BSUCA, this article articulates what Robin Nelson calls ‘know-what’ – the performer's tacit, experiential knowledge made explicit through critical reflection – to shed light on the processes of writing, structuring and rehearsing stand-up comedy. Matthew Reason has argued that the main motivation for documenting live performance is ‘not the creation of new art but ensuring the documentation of existing art’. Building on recent work by Christopher Molineux, here I argue that this is not the case with stand-up comedy, where the purpose of documentation is very much the creation of new art.

After Live: Possibility, Potentiality, and the Future of Performance by Daniel Sack

Reviewed by: After Live: Possibility, Potentiality, and the Future of Performance by Daniel Sack Matthew Reason AFTER LIVE: POSSIBILITY, POTENTIALITY, AND THE FUTURE OF PERFORMANCE. By Daniel Sack. Theater: Theory/Text/Performance series. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015; pp. 272. Theatre and performance—axiomatically, selfevidently—takes place in the present, with the most famous articulation of this being Thornton Wilder's evocative statement: "On the stage it is always now: the personages are standing on that razor-edge, between the past and the future" (Writers at Work, ed. Malcolm Cowley). It is this connection between the continual now of performance and our engagement with and imagination of possible or potential futures that is the focus of Daniel Sack's book After Live. [End Page 282] There is a tension here, of course, for while onstage it may well be always now, theatre—classical Western drama, at least—is also fundamentally, structurally a kind of predestination in which the future is literally written into not only the script, action, and characters, but also the very manifestation of theatre as theatre: it will be on at these times on these nights, and these things will happen in this order. This is the nature of theatre, and the intersection among liveness, nowness, and such predestination is the quasi-theological dilemma at the heart of the practice of performance. In the introduction to our recent edited collection, Experiencing Liveness in Contemporary Performance, Anja Mølle Lindelof and I draw on Peter Brook's notion of deadly theatre. Perhaps, we ask, the opposite of liveness is deadliness, describing deadliness as the result of a failed relationship between theatre and its audience. Sack turns to Brook in his own introduction, utilizing deadly theatre to describe performances that fail to escape their own structural predestination, "where the future experienced seems as decided as the past and we can see an end coming far ahead" (11). Sack's concern is with the more radical potential of theatre and performance to go beyond staging things we already know—the known knowns that we can foretell, that are predestined—and to construct, present, articulate, and even produce futures that we cannot know until or even except in the moment of performance. This role of theatre as a form of thinking about ourselves and our future is powerfully rehearsed by Sack. Certainly, his proposal that theatre is an institution dedicated to experimenting with the future is invigorating, even if it is not always matched by our experience of theatre institutions more concerned with the conservation of traditions, techniques, and historical canons. "Drama," he writes, "allows us to rehearse our encounter with an unknown event, gives us scripts to practice such encounters" (7). Here we find echoes of Augusto Boal's description of theatre as a rehearsal for life (or indeed for revolution), and Sack cites Aristotle's declaration that "the poet's job is not to report what has happened, but what is likely to happen: that is, what is capable of happening according to the rules of probability or necessity." The careful and rigorous work of the book is to go beyond such manifesto-like statements to explore precisely how theatre and performance might engage with possible and potential futures. Here also terminology becomes key, with the nuanced definitions of possibility and potentiality being the primary contributions of Sack's work. Possibility is the focus of chapter 2, describing the working of Western dramatic theatre as a technology "devoted to the revelation of what is to come" (25), and to the careful explication of how events unfold. Here I found particularly revelatory the exploration of how the "logic of possibility" (33)—with its focus on purpose, objective, consistency—forms the basis for actor training. For Sack, possibility describes scripted dramatic envisioning of how things might be. His real interest, however, lies with potentiality: a much more ambiguous and ambitious engagement with indeterminate, multiple, and unfixed potentials. Indeed, even in exploring the narrower notion of possibility he is often interested in the gaps and fissures, in the open rather than closed text, in those moments when even the predestination of the script cuts across itself. His attention is drawn...

Confetti and red squirrels: a stand-up autoethnography as an archive of detritus

ABSTRACTI take Matthew Reason's theoretical ‘Archive of Detritus’ as the starting point for a written archive of detritus in which my memories of an academic presentation and an audience's drawn and written responses are included together. It becomes an account of the type of subjective, embodied material which is often left out, both of research about comedy and performance archives. Accounts of the performance function as alternative memories of the event and the way in which official archives compete to become official memories of live performances is critiqued. I explore the possibilities of performance auto/ethnography and creative audience response methods for giving new insights into stand-up comedy as a dialogic form and look ahead to research methods which might give both audience and performer more of a voice in stand-up research.

Kinesthetic Empathy in Creative and Cultural Practices. Edited by Dee Reynolds and Matthew Reason. Bristol, UK: Intellect Ltd., 2012; pp. 224. $43 paper.

Kinesthetic Empathy in Creative and Cultural Practices. Edited by Dee Reynolds and Matthew Reason. Bristol, UK: Intellect Ltd., 2012; pp. 224. $43 paper.

The Audience Experience: A Critical Analysis of Audiences in the Performing Arts Edited by Jennifer Radbourne, Hilary Glow, and Katya Johanson (review)

Reviewed by: The Audience Experience: A Critical Analysis of Audiences in the Performing Arts Edited by Jennifer Radbourne, Hilary Glow, and Katya Johanson Cason Murphy The Audience Experience: A Critical Analysis of Audiences in the Performing Arts. Edited by Jennifer Radbourne, Hilary Glow, and Katya Johanson. Bristol, UK: Intellect, 2013; pp. 160. There is a monumental shift occurring in the current artistic marketplace in regards to what audiences are expecting from the live arts performances they attend. Many arts practitioners are desperate just to keep the core audiences they have already built; others look nervously toward revolutionary new ways to generate effective, innovate strategies to measure and market the “fun,” “socially relevant,” and “educational” elements that make theatre so compelling. Whether or not they are ready and able to commit to change, these organizations have no doubt already been discussing the hows and whys in hushed voices during board meetings or at intermissions of half-filled matinees. The Audience Experience makes a valiant attempt to address these questions through the new discipline of “audience experience research,” a school of thought that combines new and traditional modes of surveying audiences of arts events. Through eleven essays by leading researchers in this emergent field, this book runs the gamut of exploring recent phenomena of digital streaming, cocuration, and convergence marketing, as well as redefining the traditional audience by interviewing samples of children, adults, amateurs, and professionals alike—all in hopes of finding something tangible behind ever-mercurial audience behavior. Having only gained traction during the past twenty years, audience experience research is still effectively in its embryonic stage as far as research fields go. Yet, this collection offers a good overview of the myriad research methodologies, analytical tools, and industry technology used in quantifying that elusive “audience experience.” One cannot help but feel the sense of urgency in the arts world today that is informed by the belt-tightening demanded in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. A repeated referent is arts administrator Ben Cameron, who, since 2009, has sent shockwaves through the established arts community by repeatedly questioning the need for a “professional artist” in creative endeavors. At times, some of the essays rely upon buzzwords that are almost too slick—jargony concepts like audience reach and cultural intermediation come to mind—but the contributors featured in The Audience Experience avoid veering too far into the Chicken Little “sky is falling” territory. The book’s three editors—Jennifer Radbourne, Hilary Glow, and Katya Johanson—contribute the first, outstanding chapter, “Knowing and Measuring the Audience Experience.” Here, a basic terminology is laid out clearly and concisely for readers, conceived as an index measuring audience engagement through attributes of knowledge, risk, authenticity, and collective engagement. In the case study that makes up the rest of the chapter, the authors test their index on two different Australian arts organizations: a small, independent nonprofit house, and the other a mid-sized, regional for-profit theatre. When the results come they may seem logical, but the market-research component gives the chapter’s conclusions a certain concreteness. This basic formula sets the stage for many of the other essays: research questions are posed, specific ethnographic audiences are chosen, methodologies are implemented, charts and graphs are made, and (usually) the concluding information is extrapolated into broader ideas about what we (ourselves, an audience) can make of it. Yet, the most exciting chapters manage to transcend this formulaic feel and inject humor, passion, and applicable real-world ideas into their findings. A fascinating example of this practical application is Matthew Reason’s “The Longer Experience: Theatre for Young Audiences and Enhancing Engagement” (chapter 7). In it, he attempts to reconcile the research around a group of Scottish grade-schoolers’ negative engagement with Echoa, a popular dance performance marketed for young people. Despite that Echoa has played 500 performances across the globe and garnered rave reviews from critics, parents, and other young audiences, these Scottish kids hated it. Instead of treating his respondents like baffling test subjects, Reason flips the script and engages with his audience through the scientific process; the heart, humor, and personalities of the students and Reason himself converge and make for some sublime reading...

Kinesthetic Empathy in Creative and Cultural Practices. Edited by Dee Reynolds and Matthew Reason. Bristol: Intellect Books, 2012. Pp. 224. £29.95/$50 Pb.

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The Young Audience: Exploring and Enhancing Children’s Experiences of Theatre by Matthew Reason (review)

The Young Audience: Exploring and Enhancing Children’s Experiences of Theatre by Matthew Reason (review)

The Young Audience: Exploring and Enhancing Children's Experiences of Theatre by Matthew Reason. Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham Books Ltd., 2010. 196 pp., paperback, £20.99. ISBN: 9781858564500

The Young Audience: Exploring and Enhancing Children's Experiences of Theatre by Matthew Reason. Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham Books Ltd., 2010. 196 pp., paperback, £20.99. ISBN: 9781858564500

‘Did You Watch the Man or Did You Watch the Goose?’ Children's Responses to Puppets in Live Theatre

Puppets are inanimate objects that, when watched by an audience, are invested with life and motion and character. This is particularly the case, we imagine, with children's theatre, where there is a cultural assumption that young audiences engage with the illusion and imaginative experience. In this article Matthew Reason uses innovative visual arts-based audience research to explore this question, asking how children respond to puppets in live theatre. In doing so he engages with questions of reality, illusion, belief, and disbelief in the theatre, as well as with questions about the respect and sophistication of young audiences. Matthew Reason is a Senior Lecturer in Theatre and Head of Programme for MA Studies in Creative Practice at York St John University. In 2006 he published Documentation, Disappearance, and the Representation of Live Performance (Palgrave), and a full-length exploration of children's experiences of live theatre, The Young Audience, will be published by Trentham Books in 2010.

Documentation, Disappearance, and the Representation of Live Performance (review)

Reviewed by: Documentation, Disappearance, and the Representation of Live Performance Harvey Young Documentation, Disappearance, and the Representation of Live Performance. By Matthew Reason. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006; pp. xii + 269. $80.00 cloth. In Documentation, Disappearance, and the Representation of Live Performance, Matthew Reason inserts himself into the decades-long (and still ongoing) debate related to the (im)permanence of live performance. Published before the anticipated tenth-anniversary edition of Philip Auslander's Liveness and shortly after a series of journal special issues dedicated to documentary theatre and choreographic notation, Reason's book arrives at a moment of renewed and heightened interest in performance documentation. Is performance, by definition, an activity that disappears or vanishes in the very act of its unfolding? Although the timing of Documentation's release could not have been better, it is Reason's meticulous retracing of the evolution of the performance-as-ephemera debate, coupled with his fresh insights—especially his reading of "performance photography"—that makes his text not only worth reading, but also worthy of adoption within classrooms as a reader-friendly introduction to the anxieties associated with documentation in contemporary performance scholarship. Reason divides Documentation into four parts. The first exists as a literature review on the performanceas disappearance/vanishing/ephemera phenomenon. The second part looks at video recordings of live performances and engages with the formal differences of the two media. The third blurs the two together by examining production photos that were created before the live performance event began rehearsals and, yet, remain as archival documents of the expired event. In a final chapter, Reason offers suggestions on how to write performance reviews that can gesture toward the experience of witnessing a live enactment and relay a sense of the transience of live performance. He suggests that critics should resist the temptation to give an overview of the entire performance and, instead, focus on particular moments that they find meaningful. It is through these moments that the spirit—and the sense of transience—of the performance can be accessed by the reader. Although Reason's careful parsing and methodical representation of past scholarship on the ephemerality of live performance provides an intelligent overview of the disappearance debates and promises to be the part of the book most frequently read and assigned by performance scholars, this first section is the part in which the author's voice is the most muted. Reason chronicles how intimations that the [End Page 316] value of live performance may rest in its disappearing quality were reductively hardened into the equation "performance equals disappearance" without revealing his perspective of the appropriateness of either description. Through his analysis of newspaper reviews, publicity photographs, and video recordings in the second section of the book, Reason demonstrates that "live performance" does not entirely vanish. There are traces of its occurrence and, more importantly, these traces introduce the performance to considerably larger and differently situated audiences than the original event. Despite the presence of these recordings, Reason maintains that the experience of engaging with such documents differs from the experience of witnessing the original, live performance. What, according to Reason, constitutes live performance? After rehearsing a series of defining concepts invoked by previous theorists—from disappearance to vanishing to ephemerality to transience—he asserts that live performance occurs "here and now," and before assembled audiences who share the same here and now. It is not clear, however, whether here and now disappears, vanishes, or fades away. Reason's emphasis on a singular moment—the intersection of temporality and spatiality—within his definition of live performance suggests a kinship with these earlier descriptors, but does not appear to improve upon them. The most interesting and significant contribution that Reason makes to the study of theatre and performance within his book is his investigation into "performance photography." Excusing himself from the performance-as-ephemera debate, the author looks at images created in advance of a production (or rehearsals), usually for publicity purposes. For Reason, the appeal of such images anchors itself in the fact that they are created to represent an event that has yet to occur. The first items associated with a performance to be presented to the public, these...

Performing Arts Archives: Dynamic Entities Complementing and Supporting Scholarship and Creativity

Performing Arts Archives:Dynamic Entities Complementing and Supporting Scholarship and Creativity Francesca Marini (bio) Francesca Marini Francesca Marini is Assistant Professor of Archival Studies at the School of Library, Archival and Information Studies of the University of British Columbia, Canada. She has a B.A. in Theatre and Performance Studies and a Ph.D. in Information Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research interests focus on performing arts archives and digital preservation; she publishes internationally in archival and theatre journals. Notes 1. Richard Pearce-Moses, A Glossary of Archival and Records Terminology (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2005), s.v. "record." 2. The InterPARES 2 Project, Terminology Database-Glossary (current as of April 26, 2007), s.v. "record," http://www.interpares.org/ip2/ip2_terminology_db.cfm. 3. See the Society of American Archivists, "Guantanamo Detainee Records May Be in Jeopardy; SAA and Others Seek Clarification," April 20, 2007, http://www.archivists.org/news/Guantanamo.asp. 4. See Carolyn Hamilton et al., eds., Refiguring the Archive (Cape Town, South Africa: David Philip, 2002). 5. See, e.g., Randall C. Jimerson, "Embracing the Power of Archives," American Archivist 69, no. 1 (2006): 19-32. 6. See, e.g., Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); and Verne Harris, "A Shaft of Darkness: Derrida in the Archives," in Hamilton et al., Refiguring the Archive, 61-81. 7. Among many postmodern archival writings, see Terry Cook and Joan M. Schwartz, "Archives, Records, and Power: From (Postmodern) Theory to (Archival) Performance," Archival Science 2, nos. 3-4 (2002): 171-85; and Tom Nesmith, "Seeing Archives: Postmodernism and the Changing Intellectual Place of Archives," American Archivist 65, no. 1 (2002): 24-41. 8. As an example, see Jimerson, "Embracing the Power of Archives." 9. See, e.g., Matthew Reason, Documentation, Disappearance, and the Representation of Live Performance (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). 10. Ibid. Among many writings that address performance documentation, see, e.g., Kenneth Schlesinger, Pamela Bloom, and Ann Ferguson, eds., Performance Documentation and Preservation in an Online Environment (New York: Theatre Library Association, 2004); Denise Varney and Rachel Fensham, "More-and-Less-Than: Liveness, Video Recording, and the Future of Performance," New Theatre Quarterly 16, no. 1 (2000): 88-96; Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London: Routledge, 1993); Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003; reprint, 2005); and Reason, Documentation. 11. "L'archivio deve vivere, deve essere un nucleo attivo con tutti quanti. Agli scenografi che . . . ho il piacere di conoscere, dico 'Questo qui è un archivio che aspetta le vostre opere. Sapete che c'è.'. . . Perché [l'archivio] deve vivere. Se non è conosciuto, se non convive con la città, con le persone, con gli studiosi . . . è un archivio morto. E il teatro non deve assolutamente essere un discorso morto, anzi deve far capire agli altri tutto quello che c'è, la possibilità proprio di fare, di scoprire." Francesca Marini, "Sources and Methodology of Theater Research in the View of Scholars and Information Professionals" (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2005), 174-75 (interview 3). In the discussion, I am withholding the names of the interviewees and of their institutions. This is an established practice in qualitative research and is required by the regulations enforced by the Office for Protection of Research Subjects of the University of California, Los Angeles, with which I was affiliated at the time of the study. The English translation of the quotes is mine. Since literal translation is not always possible, I have included the original quotes in the notes to allow for comparison. 12. Martha Ullman West, "Dancers as Living Archives," Chronicle of Higher Education, April 7, 2006, B14. 13. Marini, "Sources and Methodology," 107 (interview 28). 14. Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire. 15. Marini, "Sources and Methodology"; see also Marini, "Archivists, Librarians, and Theatre Research," Archivaria 63 (Spring 2007): 7-33. 16. See Marini, "Sources and Methodology," 148-50. Research on the uses of performing arts archives is currently under way at the Theatre Museum in London, conducted by Bonnie Hewson. Bonnie Hewson, e-mail to author, April 17, 2007. 17. See Richard Schechner...

Archive or Memory? The Detritus of Live Performance

The positive valuation of theatre as live performance, and therefore also its transience, is frequently accompanied by the urgent expression of the need to counter that transience by means of documentation. This desire to ‘save’ theatre reaches its most fervent expression (and hope of authority and permanence) with the live performance archive. Archive theory, however, now insists on the instability and uncertainty of the archive, which not only documents but also constructs its subject. In this article, Matthew Reason argues that, by tracing comparisons between archives and human memory, it is possible to establish a new formulation of the archive – as detritus, not completeness – that puts a value on mutability as a reflection of theatre's liveness. Matthew Reason is currently completing a PhD on representations of live performance at the University of Edinburgh. He has edited a special edition of the Edinburgh Review (ER106) on Theatre in Scotland, and has previously worked at the Edinburgh International Festival, where his responsibilities included maintaining the archive.