The Performance Re-enactment Society

The Performance Re-enactment Society
Arnolfini 2 December 2007

Performance's only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so it becomes something other than performance. [Phelan, P. 1993: 146]

Peggy Phelan has written much about the temporality of performance. She enters into a discourse with Derrida who claimed ‘The theatre is born of its own disappearance.’ It was with this thought in mind and some trepidation that I entered the Arnolfini to attend The Performance Re-enactment Society. The aim was to reenact our performance memories and accession them to the Arnolfini’s Live Art Archive.

We sign away our memory with archivists at the doorway. We dress up to re-enact our performance memory for a photograph. We visit a Doctor on a chat show sofa who asks for more information about our memory. We walk away with a sticker and a polaroid of the performance re-enactment in a sealed envelope. We help ourselves to a cup of tea and a biscuit. The bureaucracy of performance re-enactment sits somewhere between donating blood and a REACTOR experience.

In Hill and Paris’s recent Performance and Place, Leslie Hill bemoans the fact that there is no ‘Live Art Louvre’ she can visit to see Carolee Schneeman’s Interior Scroll. And yet here I am watching Arnolfini Programmer, Helen Cole (who writes beautifully in the same publication about live art leaking from buildings) re-enacting Yoko Ono’s Cut piece with a man who had witnessed a restaging of the original. A re-enactment of a re-enactment. Here I am witnessing the recreation of a Derek Jarman installation at the National Review of Live Art in 1989 and leafing through the NRLA brochure from the same year with white gloves on. Here I am recreating Chris Burden’s Shoot with a man I’ve just met shooting me in the arm with a cardboard rifle and a blob of ketchup for the blood. I think I have found the Live Art Louvre. In the end we have our own Mona Lisa as a member of the audience disrobes to recreate a memory of Forced Entertainment nudity. Perhaps no Live Art Louvre would be complete without a naked woman – with or without her interior scroll.

The denouement of the event is Tom Marshman’s poetic text delivered from the aluminium surface of the Arnolfini bar. He has collated data from our memories – fusing his father's recollections of riots at a Little Richard gig with Lady Diana’s death. The Spaghetti Club has given us closure by opening an archive of words and images of which we are all the architects. If performance’s life is only in the present then perhaps we have re-presented this present to create new palimpsests of our memories. I think of our Shoot as Re-shoot and Cole’s Cut as Re-Cut. This event is the hyphen between re and enactment as we participate in the circulation of re-enactments of re-enactments taking place today.

In conclusion it is no coincidence that I slip from past to present tense. In order to capture the ghosts of performances being brought back to life I start this blog at the event. However, re-enactment is more interesting than documentation of re-enactment so I am compelled to engage more with the live than the blog. I have the experience of subjectivity Phelan cites in response to Derrida’s claim of performance's disappearance:

Writing towards preservation, must remember that the after-effect of disappearance is the experience of subjectivity itself [Phelan, P. 1993: 148]

Bibliography

DERRIDA, J., 2005, Writing and Difference, New York: Routledge

HILL, L. and PARIS, H. eds., 2006, Performance and Place. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan

PHELAN, P., 1993. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, Routledge: London and New York

REACTOR, Nottingham-based artists collective. http://www.reactorweb.com/homepage.htm

STOP

There is a large red sign outside the Arnolfini with STOP written on it. It's there to stop the traffic but because it's outside a gallery it looks like it might be art. I STOP. I go in and ask where the Performance Re-enactment Society are. 'In the cinema' says the lady behind the desk. I STOP. I walk in and there are people sitting on sofas drinking cups of tea. I can't tell if this is a tea break or a rehearsal. The work or the bit before the work. I STOP. I join them for a cup of coffee. An americano. A chat. We blu tac posters to the wall. Old Arnolfini archive posters of shows from the seventies until the present day. Inbetween time. I STOP. We run out of blu tac. We run out of posters. The wall is full. They want to do a dry run with Tim and I as guinea pigs. We go outside and come back in again to be interviewed at a desk near the doorway. I STOP. They ask us questions. What is our name. Our address. Our memory. They use the word accessioned. A word I'm not sure I've heard before. They STOP. My memory is complicated. A memory of a photograph of a my parents in a performance of The Sound of Music before I was born. My Dad was a Nazi. My mum was a Nun. They ask questions about intellectual copyright and which box is the right box to tick. I go to sign the form. To donate my memory to the Performance Re-enactment Society. They STOP me. I should use a pen not a pencil. Makes it more official. I am handed an envelope like the ones used for internal mail in an institution like a university or a hospital. I STOP. I am passed on to the costume department. They read the keywords. Nazi. Nun. They STOP. They find me a jacket and a military hat. They cut swastikas out of brown paper and pin them to my sleeve and the peak. I STOP. I feel conscious of choosing to be a Nazi. They decide to dress a girl up as a nun. They take our photo. We STOP. I am interviewed by a Doctor in lamplight. He asks me questions about the moment where I saw the photograph of the performance. And how I felt when I saw it and what I was wearing. And how I felt to recreate it wearing what I'm wearing now. I say the photograph reminds me of a world before the world I know. I STOP. I realise that looking at the photo for the first time cooincided with deciding to be involved in performance. I STOP. I realise that when I looked at the photograph it was the time of the first Gulf War. I draw a connection between wars and worlds. The amateur dramatics and the amateur Nazi I am now. I STOP. They ask for feedback. That is the end of the rehearsal. I STOP. I have a cup of tea. I STOP. I am writing this now. I STOP. Time to reenact a performance.

What the Dickens

A man in a fake beard, a wig and a period suit sits next to a woman who has been wearing a box on her head and a kimono. An everyday occurrence. They have both shared their performance memory at The Performance Re-enactment Scoiety event. A conversation begins.

I am Charles Dickens. I have come from London to be here today.

I was listening to Dombey and Son on the radio earlier today

What's that?

It's one of your stories. You wrote it Charles.

Well. It's over a hundred and fifty years ago.

I'm really ashamed to say Charles that I've never read any of your books.

I have a copy of The Christmas Carol with me. It's quite short.

Do you want me to read it now.

If you've never read one of my books this is a good one to start with. It's seminal.

I don't know if I can read it now.

Well pick up a copy.

I've read all about you.

My reputation precedes me.

I believe there's even a phrase now - Dickensian. They didn't have that in my lifetime.

Marshman and Thornton Recollection

There is a curtain. There is a balcony leading to a staircase that sweeps around to about a mid-depth point here. This is used for internal scenes in the Von Trapp residence. At some stage, drop cloths would come in for scenes and pieces of furniture would be brought on to signify where we were. There is a desk here to my left. The area on this side of the stage is a dead one used for storage and beyond that down some stairs is the Green Room where players could wait while they were getting ready for their entrance.

The changing rooms are in cramped conditions up above. The theatre is very intimate. There is a rapport between the artists and the audience enhanced by that intimacy. There are boxes on the immediate sides. Stalls. One circle. And a balcony affectionately known as the Gods. No one from the theatre is very far away from the action. By and large the sightlines are very good. This is where I stand for my line:

‘Ulrich block the driveway!’

I only have one line. It was quite a frustrating show to be in.

Darkside Bursaries Application

I would like to attend The Performance Re-enactment Society to continue my investigations into recollection. I am working towards a PhD with Professor Adrian Heathfield exploring the ‘dance of absence’ in writing on performance. The PhD proposal asks what is left of the live act. I will focus on recreation and representation, recreating the real and recapturing the live. I will explore theatrical reenactment by restaging performances and recreating real life events. From the 1972 amateur version of The Sound of Music in which my parents met to my own Christening.

My work is an illustration of loss and an ongoing autopsy of experience. I use performance, text, film and installation to expose absences and spaces left behind. I am interested in moments where the work ceases to mean and how we reconfigure the meaning at these moments. It is a journey of self-discovery, retracing footsteps and reliving memories.

The Darkside Present

Tom Marshman and Claire Thornton
The Darkside Present
The Performance Re-enactment Society
Sun 2 Dec, 4.00pm - 9.00pm
FREE

Bristol-based artists Tom Marshman (Spaghetti Club) and Clare Thornton are on a mission to breathe new life into your memories of performance through re-enactment and ’tableaux vivants’. Bring your performance memories between 4pm - 8pm when they will be on hand to make them come to life once more before capturing them forever in a photograph. Return at 8pm for a glass of wine and a look through this unique collection of images created over the course of the day. All the photographs will be collected in an album and added to Arnolfini’s archive.