Ephemerality and beyond
The primary functions of performing art records and archives
Master Thesis Archive Studies
Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Theo Thomassen University of Amsterdam
1 June 2015
Henrik Lillin 10083308
Table of contents
1. Introduction 2
1.1 Research problem 2
1.2. Aims of the thesis 4
1.3. Research question, sub-questions and the set-up of the thesis 5
2. Theoretical framework 6
2.1 The post-custodial archival approach 6
2.2 The performing arts archive 8
2.2.1 The performing arts 9
2.2.2 Ephemerality and the violent archive 10
2.2.3 Performing arts archive in practice 13
2.2.4 Some legal aspects 15
2.2.5 An archival definition on performing arts archive 16
3. The cases: method and justification 17
4. The Dutch Opera and Ballet 20
4.1 The production- and stage-management 20
4.2 The technical department 23
4.3 The financial department 25
5. The independent artists 27
5.1 Self-representation 29
5.2 Touchstone 30
5.3 Archiving as inherent aspect of the creative process 31
5.4 The archive as the real end product 31
6. Clifford Allen and the archive of Robert Wilson 33
6.1 The Robert Wilson archive 33
6.2 The role of the performing art archivist 35
6.3 The moving target 37
7. Conclusion and reflection 40
1. Introduction
1.1 Research problem
Societal transformations and the rapid technological developments of the past decades have not only redefined the ways people create, use and retrieve information, but also put archival science to new challenges. The archival thinking and the relevant legislation are still primarily confined to conceptualizing governmental archives, and mostly acknowledge pragmatic reasons for archiving: creating and using records to keep the business going and for reasons of evidence and accountability.1 However, the applicability of this custodial perspective has increasingly been questioned, especially in digital environments and in the case of more participatory and grassroots practices of recordkeeping. Accordingly, recent post-custodial approaches argue that in order to better understand the objectives and motivations of archiving in contemporary society, it is necessary to explore non-pragmatic motives of recordkeeping as well as to shift the predominant focus from the record itself to record as process-bound information, including also the analysis of private and personal archives in a variety of societal and cultural domains.2
In line with this perspective, this thesis aims to address questions of archival practices by focusing on recordkeeping within the performing art field. Performance is often considered something transitory and ephemeral, which resists archiving and “becomes itself through disappearance”3. Theatre is thus regularly considered as an ephemeral art form and it is often
praised exactly for its transiency. As the renowned theatre director Peter Brook puts it, “a live performance is an event for that moment in time, for that [audience] in that place – and it’s gone. Gone without a trace. There was no journalist; there was no photographer; the only witnesses were the people present; the only record is what they retained, which is how it should be in theatre.”4
Gay McAuley explains this phenomenon with “the positive valuation of disappearance”.5
1 T. Thomassen. Archivists and the private desire to be or not to be documented. Keynote speech on the Brazilian archiving
congress in July 2012.
2 T. Thomassen. ‘Een korte introductie in de archivistiek’. In: P.J. Horsman ea. red. Paradigma. Naar een nieuwe paradigma in
the archivistiek. s’-Gravenhage 1999: 13.
3 P. Phelan. Unmarked. The politics of performance. London 1993:146
4 Cited in: A. Melzer. ‘“Best Betrayal”: the Documentation of Performance on Film and Video, Part 1.’ New Theatre Quarterly,
XI/ 42 (1995): 148.
5 G. McAuley, ‘The Video Documentation of Theatrical Performance’, Cited in: Matthew Reason, ‘Archive or memory? The
In this sense, traditional archival approaches are generally devaluated when it comes to this specific cultural field: the archival institutions are seen as inappropriate places for performance archive6, and the traditional approach, where the authenticity of the records are assured by freezing
them in the state in which they enter the archive, is deemed unsuitable.7 It is therefore not surprising that existing research into performance archives is primarily preoccupied with the transitory nature of the unrepeatable performance, even if performing art is much more than just performance. Rebecca Schneider even goes as far as to state that ephemerality shouldn’t be considered as a central problem. In her influential book Performing remains, she argues that the challenge of archiving in performance is that it becomes itself through disappearance but in the same time remains. According to her, “[p]erformance takes place through the dissemination of its eventful documents, our time based encounters with them in archives or beholding them in displays; the work continues through oral accounts that are passed-on, rumors, hearsay, reviews and reinterpretations in print. It remains live through research, review, use, remediation, re-performance and re-enactment, circulating and re-circulating in the cultural scene.”8 As this quote already suggests, making theatre productions is a complex process, which, next to the arrangement of the necessary financial and spatial conditions to perform, entails also a long creative work, including writing, documenting and rehearsing. We can also add to this that the network and project culture that has emerged in the past decades and in which most of the productions are embedded also turned archiving an inevitable necessity, as it provides visibility for individual artists and independent theatre groups.9
Accordingly, archival scholars has recently started to go beyond the ephemerality discourse. Current works attempt to describe the possible approaches to arranging performing arts archives after their acquisition10 or try to map the diversity of interests and approaches of theatre research
and the role of archivists and librarians in this context.11 Still, a systematic exploration of what recordkeeping and archiving actually means for the theatres, theatre makers and performance artists is scarce: holistic research into the ‘real’ nature of theatre archives is a missing link between all the above mentioned perspectives.
6 Cf. Reason, M. ‘Archive or Memory?: The Detritus of Live Performance.’, New Theatre Quarterly 19/1(2003). 7 Cf. Jones, S. et al., ed. ‘Redefining the performing arts archive.’ Archival Science 8 (2009).
8 R. Schneider. Performing remains. Art and war in times of theatrical re-enactment. Abingdon 2011: 100. 9 J. Lazardzig, ‘Other Archives.’ Yearbook 2013 of the German Centre of the International Theatre Institute: 5.
10 Cf. McNally, A. ‘All that stuff! Organizing records of creative processes.’ In: J. Vaknin et al., ed. All that stuff. Archiving the
artist. Oxfordshire, 2013.
1.2. Aims of the thesis
The goal of this thesis is to give fresh insights into the performing arts archive by using a post-custodial archival approach and analysing the primary role of performing art records. I will look at performance as process and I will problematize archiving in the performing arts from the point of view of the creators and specifically by focusing on creating, using and managing the records. In doing so, I will attempt to question and highlight the practical value of the records that are created during various processes of theatre-making. More generally, I expect that exploring the primary functions of performing art records and archives may not only show behavioural patterns that one could not possibly observe within an archival institution, but also may reveal additional meanings of archiving and recordkeeping in the performing art field, which ultimately might challenge the idea of theatre as an ephemeral art.
This project is based on three case studies into the archiving and recordkeeping practices of: 1) the
production- and stage management, the technical department and the financial administration of the Dutch Opera and Ballet (DNO), 2) five independent performing art artists and 3) Clifford Allen, the archivist of Robert Wilson. I aim to explore the motives of institutional and private
self-expression through the examined cases.
Starting point of this thesis is the hypothesis that institutions and individuals are having
different reasons to keep their archives and the records and archives have different meanings in different settings. Theatre institutions often have their own storages, repositories: archives of
ongoing or old performances for reasons of memory-, evidence- or heritage-keeping. Independent artists, on the contrary, do not have this institutional memory. Nevertheless, they also need to keep their memories or evidences, and it is expected that they also consciously build their own heritage, by relying on (digital) self-archiving.
By scrutinizing the functions and practices in the two settings, with this thesis I aim to explore the hidden, multi-layered and multifaceted meanings in “archivalization” and archiving12 inside the investigated theatre institution and in the recordkeeping practice of the interviewed performing arts artists. In doing so, I will also show that archiving and the process of archiving is
indeed multidimensional, especially because a record can undergo several processes and it can fulfil more than one meaning even at the same time.
1.3. Research question, sub-questions and the set-up of the thesis
The following question is at the core of this thesis: Why and how are records created, used and managed by the investigated institutional and individual actors of the performing arts field?
This question will be unpacked as follows: first it has to be defined what could be
considered performing arts archive (sub-question 1). This will be done under the theoretical
framework by reviewing the relevant theoretical and legal concepts and practical examples of ‘performing arts archive’, followed by the exploration of existing conceptualisations of the archive in the field.
Second, we shall understand how the examined performing arts records and archives ‘behave’, or more specifically, what roles archiving and recordkeeping play in the institutional
and individual forms of performing arts (sub-question 2). After presenting and justifying the cases
and the methods employed during the research in chapter three, this question will mainly be addressed in chapters four and five, where I will discuss (and compare) my findings resulted from the investigations of the DNO and the five independent performing art artists.
Finally, we will explore the role of the archivist in the life of performing arts archives (sub-question 3). Some insights will be given into this crucial issue already within the theoretical framework, while briefly presenting the position of the Dutch and Hungarian national theatre archives, but the more thorough elaboration on this question will take place in the fifth chapter, where I will discuss the practice of Clifford Allen. The last chapter will be devoted to summarizing the findings of the research and concluding the thesis.
2. Theoretical framework
2.1 The post-custodial archival approach
The original scope of inquiry of the archival studies was related to the governmental archive. The first attempt to systematically control governmental archives was performed by Muller, Feith and Fruin in their Manual for the arrangement and description of archives: drawn up by direction of
the Netherlands Association of Archivists (shortly: The Dutch Manual), first published in 1898.
This is also the work in which the first ‘professional’ definition of the archive appeared, which reads as follows: an archival collection is the whole of written documents, drawings and printed
matter, officially received or produced by an administrative body or one of its officials, in so far as these documents were intended to remain in the custody of that body or of that official.13 – laying down this way the foundations of the custodial archival approach. As Theo Thomassen argues, the
custodial archival methodology is the archival methodology of the industrial society where
organizations structured their records similarly to their business operations: systematically and hierarchically.14
However, this pure custodial archival approach has become more and more limited in its applicability with the dawn of the digital era of the new millennium, which introduced many changes in how people and institutions deal with their documentation. In parallel with the evolution of the computers, archival theorists realized that if they want to understand how the new ‘information society’ deals with its records, they should not only consider the records and archives of governmental record-creators but also those of civil organizations, private companies, communities, and even families and private individuals. The custodial archival thinking could not keep up with these transformations, and as a result of these changes, a new paradigm of the archival science was introduced: the post-custodial paradigm.15 A paradigm is not merely a theory, but an entire worldview, it is a lens, through which every phenomena within the given discipline is explained. The archivists, in order to be able to broaden their perspective, started to look at the
13 A. H. Leavitt. Manual for the arrangement and description of archives: drawn up by direction of the Netherlands Association
of Archivists. New York 1968.
14 Keynote speech Archivists and the private desire to be or not to be documented of T. H. P. M. Thomassen (University of
Amsterdam) on the Brazilian archival congress. July 2012: 1.
15 Cf. Thomassen, T. ‘Paradigmatische veranderingen in de archiefwetenschap.’ In: Horsman, P.J. et al. ed. Paradigma. Naar een
archive within the post-custodial paradigm as process-bound information, that is to say, as information generated by- and bound to work processes16. In the new paradigm, archivists do not
focus predominantly on the record itself anymore, but instead, they attribute more significance to the process behind the record. Additionally, as the post-custodial archival approach requires, archivists have to break out of the barriers of archival institutions where they were historically put in the role of being the unquestionable custodians of the records, and they must become record keepers. As it is also formulated by the Society of American Archivists, “[t]he post-custodial theory shifts the role of the archivists from a custodian of inactive records in a centralized repository to the role of a manager of records that are distributed in the offices where the records are created and used.”17
Despite this turn of paradigm in the archival theory, the custodial archival approach is still deeply embedded in the minds of the archivists. For example, the Dutch relevant legislation continues to primarily address government archives. In agreement with Thomassen, it seems to be difficult to move away from our control-focused approaches and to depart from our desire to take public records as a reference point when looking at private records.18 The paradigmatic shift of the archival approach entails a complete reorientation of the profession, which means that the archivists and archival scholars constantly have to challenge their own custodial patterns to make their practices more suitable in a deinstitutionalized information- and network society.
But how are records connected to processes? To understand this, we shall briefly look at two models that emerged in the twentieth century to establish the above link: these are the life-cycle and continuum models. The life-cycle model separates the records from the archives. In this model, the records serve for an institution as evidences of its action and for its own future use, while the
archives have no longer relevance for the creating organization, but mainly serve the interest of the
research community. According to this approach, the records are taken care by the record manager, while the archives are transported to the archival institution under the custody of the archivist for selection and preservation.19 As we can see, the life-cycle model adopts the organic metaphor of
16 T. Thomassen. ‘Een korte introductie in de archivistiek’. In: Horsman, P.J. et al., ed. Paradigma. Naar een nieuwe paradigma
in the archivistiek. s’-Gravenhage 1999: 13.
17 Website of Society of American Archivist. < http://www2.archivists.org/glossary/terms/p/postcustodial-theory-of-archives>
Consulted: 28.11.2014
18 Keynote speech of T. Thomassen (University of Amsterdam) on the Brazilian archival congress. July 2012.
19 G. Dingwall. ‘Life cycle and continuum: a view of recordkeeping models from the post war era.’ In: T. Eastwood et al., ed.
life and death and it is based on the assumption that the life of the record is linear. The life-cycle model became popular in North-America for managing records, but it also appears in Dutch
Archival Terminology, which describes records as going through the stages of being ‘active’,
‘semi-active’ and ‘in‘semi-active’.
To offer a more holistic approach, and to reflect on the artificial separation between record- and archives-professionals, the concept of continuum model emerged as an alternative to the life-cycle approach. This was also due to the fact that the administrative structures of the record creators became more and more complex, moving away from nineteenth-century Weberian bureaucratic patterns in favour of distributing responsibilities throughout the organizational structure.20 In addition, the life-cycle model could not respond anymore to the emerging challenges of preserving the digital records, simply because the digital age has changed the way how people access and use records. The continuum model deemphasizes the time-bound stages of the life cycle model and claims that the record serves different interests in different times, or even the same time. Accordingly, the life-cycle model can be seen as a custodial approach to the records, while the continuum model provides a more comprehensive, post-custodial approach.
In this thesis I look at the archive as process-bound information, that is to say, information that is bound to work processes. The work processes are oriented to realise the same goal: the mission of the creator.21 One of the main task of the archivist in this respect is to keep these
processes together intellectually, so the records stay interpretable while fulfilling and after they have fulfilled their primary function.
2.2 The performing arts archive
In this chapter I will discuss theoretical, practical and legal aspects of performing arts archives to understand what is meant under this term in the field. At the end of this chapter I will propose an own archival definition on performing arts archive. Since this thesis is devoted to the analysis of performing arts archives, in the first subsection I shall briefly discuss what actually performing art is and how various forms of this art form historically developed. In the second subsection I will not
20 Dingwall. Life cycle and continuum: 145. 21 Thomassen. ‘Korte introductie’: 12.
only review performing arts theories regarding to the conceptualizations of the archive, but I will also elaborate on the ephemerality discourse and on associated archival theories about the archive as the space of power. In the third subsection I will take practical examples from Dutch, Belgian and American archival institutions and archivist groups. In my view, it is important to take a look on practical approaches to the performing art archives before we start looking at the primary functions of them. In the fourth subsection I will briefly discuss legal aspects of performing arts archives, considering that they can have an enormous impact on the national processes of canonization.
2.2.1 The performing arts
Theatre studies finds its roots in literally studies. But, as soon as Max Herrmann (1865-1942), the
‘founding father’ of Theatre Studies in Germany stated that “the most important aspect of theatre is the performance”22 at the end of the nineteenth century, theatre was no longer defined by the
dramatic text being performed. As Erica Fischer-Lichte points out, “Herrmann emphasized that instead of producing text and artefacts theatre brings forth performances that are something that can be neither fixed nor handed down for another generation, something transitory and ephemeral.”23 Theatre is thus historically divided into two categories: the dramatic text, relating to
the literary tradition, and theatrical production, which is related to the performance.
In the nineteen-seventies the performance study became recognized on its own right and it certainly influenced the later conceptualizations of theatre.24 Nevertheless, the term performance is rather broad and it can include aesthetic and artistic performances (concert, theatrical events or
performance art) as well as religious or sport events.25
At theatre institutions the dramatic text is mostly the base of the production. One of the main focus point of this thesis is the Dutch Opera. Opera is a specific genre of theatrical art with its own rules and traditions. In this art form singers and musicians perform a dramatic work
22 “Bei der Theaterkunst ist die Aufführung das Wichtigste” M. Hermann, Forschungen zur deutchen Theatergeschichte des
Mittelalters und der Renaissance, Berlin 1914, Part II: 118, Cited in: Fischer-Lichte., E. ‘From text to performance. The rise of the theatre studies as an academic discipline in Germany.’ Theatre Research International 24/2 (1999): 169.
23 E. Fischer-Lichte. ‘From text to performance. The rise of the theatre studies as an academic discipline in Germany’. Theatre
Research International 24/2 (1999): 171.
24 Marini. ‘Theatre research’: 18.
combining text (called a libretto) and musical score, usually in a theatrical setting. Opera incorporates many of the elements of spoken theatre, such as acting, scenery, and costumes and sometimes also includes dance. The performance is typically staged in an opera house, accompanied by an orchestra or a smaller musical ensemble.26
Contrarily to the opera, in the cases of independent production houses and artists there is often no dramatic text involved. Instead, the production (performance or event) is based on a long creative process which includes exchanging of ideas, workshops and improvisations.
2.2b Ephemerality and the violent archive
Thus, theatre and performance scholars usually differentiate material (textual based) and immaterial (ephemeral) traces of performances. In this context, the traditional archival approaches are often attacked. Matthew Reason, for instance, is rather critical about the archival institutions as places of performance archive. Reason, who mainly bases his theory on the already mentioned “positive valuation of disappearance”, argues that the memory is the only appropriate site for performance records and not the archive, which, while acclaims to be complete, authentic, neutral and objective, it is actually the reverse.27 According to Reason, the archive consists “dumb objects
not allowed to speak for themselves, but spoken for.”28 Reason proposes a theoretical archive of
detritus, which would resemble both the characteristics of the audience’s memory of the
performance and the liveness of live performance. For Reason, the audience’s memory echoes more closely the real nature of performing arts archive for it is similarly fluid and fallible. It isn’t difficult to recognize how deeply the assumption about ‘theatre as an ephemeral form of art’ is embedded in the approach of Reason. However, life is similarly ephemeral and archival theorists also struggle with the supposed authenticity, completeness and objectiveness of the archive.
As a reaction to Reason’s article, Sarah Jones, Daisy Abott and Seamus Ross in the Archival
Science agrees that the archival approach should respond to the above sketched concerns about the
archive and accordingly, the traditional approach of archiving – where the authenticity of the records are assured by freezing them in the state in which they enter the archive –, should be
26 Wikipedia about Opera. Cited in 11. 05. 2015. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera> 27 Reason. ‘Archive or memory?’: 85
reconsidered: as they argue, fixity is seen by many as a constraining property. They propose an archive which is open to re-use and where the process, central to performance, is represented in the archivist’s approach. 29 The archiving of the born-digital records raises the same problem with
regard to the archival process: “archivists are not interested in the ‘original’ record but in capturing and recreating the fleeting and temporary performance of that record.”30 Digital records are thus becoming performative because they are mediations of technology and data.
To have a deeper understanding of the central problem of ephemerality, next to theatre studies, we also can turn to performance studies. Performance studies has multiple origins. What seems to be quite important within the scope of this thesis is the origin of performance studies in anthropology. Cultural anthropology traditionally focuses on the study of social groups of non-Western cultures with oral traditions. An excellent example of the work within performance studies with a strong anthropological influence is The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the
Americas from Diana Taylor. In her book, Taylor explores the Latin-American performance and
theorizes the relationship between the archive (intentionally constructed material sources, such as photos or programme booklets of performances) and the repertoire (memory of things, invisible imprints on minds, bodies and spaces). The distinction between the oral and the literal tradition is important here, because it helps us contextualizing and brings us closer to cases investigated in this thesis: while opera is based on a strong literal tradition (with its clear Western European roots), we cannot state the same about the works of the independent artists, who often don’t use (dramatic) texts for their works. Let us therefore take a look at how orality, ephemerality and the repertoire are connected with one other and how the archive becomes violent in their light.
For Schneider, as mentioned earlier, the “performance doesn’t disappear at all”. According to her, “the logic of the archives demands that performance disappear in favor of discrete remains – material presented as preserved, as non-theatrical, as ‘authentic’, as ‘itself’”.31 Following her
argumentation, we shall realize that the performance actually becomes ephemeral in the shadow of this archival logic which doesn’t recognize the repertoire as archive. Schneider’s archival logic is, arguably, the archival approach of the previously discussed modernity: top-down, centralized,
29 Jones et al. ‘Redefining the performing arts archive’: 169.
30 H. Heslop, et al. An Approach to the Preservation of Digital Records Canberra: National Archives of Australia, 2002. [Cited in
20.10.2014]. < http://www.naa.gov.au/Images/An-approach-Green-Paper_tcm16-47161.pdf>
hierarchical, bureaucratic, and, perhaps most importantly in this context, a logic based on the
literary tradition of Western societies. In this interpretation, the archive becomes violent and it
turns into the space of power.32 But how is the archive violent and what is exactly this power? As
Rodney Carter suggests, archival power is, on the one hand, inclusive: it allows voices to be heard. On the other hand, the power to exclude is also a fundamental attribute of the archive: “there are distortions, omissions, erasures, and silences in the archive. Not every story is told.”33 A vivid
example for this exclusivity can be Verne Harris’ discovery, namely that the speech acts, which became the very elements of ‘knowing’ in the oral tradition of non-Western societies are kept outside the circle of knowledge in South-Africa.34 Contrarily to the notion that the oral cannot be archived, Mónica Mayer, Mexican performance artist asserts that “[w]e have also trained as storytellers to make performances where we tell stories about performance. In an oral culture such as ours, it seems an adequate way of documenting.”35
Neglecting the speech acts is certainly an omission of the archive, however, as Rodney Carter suggests, the archives are deliberately created “to transcend the limitations of the oral”36. Yet in my opinion, in the digital age the oral sneaks almost seamlessly into the archive. Hugh Taylor already noted in 1988 that “we are beginning to move into a post-literate mode which, while not dispensing with literacy, reintroduces the immediacy of rapid interactive net-working and feedback analogous to oral ex-change”37 If we agree with Hugh Taylor’s argumentation, it goes
without saying that we are now knee deep in the post-literate age: through the impact of computers and internet, communication speeded up; with the birth of the new media, interactivity and creative
participation became important issues that cannot be overseen in the archives. The performativity
of the record – next to the above mentioned born digital records – can also be captured in the process how the records are used: according to Laura Millar, the records and archives are not themselves memories (and certainly not reality itself), but rather “touchstones”, upon which memories can be retrieved and articulated.38 As Ketelaar writes, the archive should be seen as a
32 Cf: Foucault, M. The archeology of knowledge. London 2003 and Derrida, J. and E. Prenowitz. ‘Archive Fever: A Freudian
Impression’ Diacritics 25/2 (1995): 9-63.
33 R. G. S. Carter. ‘On things said and unsaid: power, archival silences and power in silence.’ Archivaria 61(2006): 216. 34 V. Harris. ‘On (Archival) Odyssey (’s).’ Archivaria 51: 9.
35 M. Mayer. ‘Macular degeneration: some peculiar aspects of performance documentation.’ In: A. Jones et al., ed. Perform,
repeat, record: live art in history. Chicago 2012.
36 Carter. ‘On things said and unsaid’: 222.
37 H. Taylor. ‘My very act and deed: Some reflections on the role of the textual records in the conduct of affairs.’ The American
Archivist 81/4 (1988): 457.
“repository of meanings” which can be deconstructed and reconstructed, and then, interpreted over and over. An archival record is read differently today as it will be read by the next generation.39
After theories on the archive, let us see more practical approaches to the performing arts archive through de lens of some archivists and archival institution.
2.2.3 Performing arts archive in practice
“An archive can never be complete, but to say it is lacking item is also miss the point. An archive is what it is: what is left, no more and no less.”40 – writes Anna McNally rather pragmatically on the archives of artists. She argues that an archive is not a carefully selected collection, as it may appear for many researchers, but on the contrary, it often consists of records which randomly survived. According to McNally, it is the role of the archivist in the process of archiving that should be more stressed: while the researcher sometimes takes an inventory granted, it is actually the interpretation of the archivists. The archivist is supposed to be objective during the process of cataloguing, however, “it’s hard to be objective when you describe art”41.
The former Dutch Theatre Institution, Theater in Nederland42(TiN) understands archive as a collection of documents, newspaper-cuttings and other 2-dimensional material which
demonstrates the history of a person or an organization.43 TiN does not consider all information
as ‘archive’, however, we should realize that TiN is not an archival but a heritage institution, and it collects material from the Dutch theatre history. The collection-profile of the TiN differs from an archival institution: TiN acquires only certain materials of Dutch performances actively (photos, posters, programme books, press-material), selected by a committee, instead of whole archives. Thus, archives are only acquired passively: they may be accepted, if offered. According to the official policy of the TiN, an archive has to be kept together to maintain the original order. Keeping the original order is often considered as one of the main task of the archivist, serving to preserve
39 Ketelaar. ‘Tacit narratives’: 139. 40 McNally. ‘All that stuff’: 99. 41 McNally. ‘All that stuff’: 106.
42 Theater in Nederland (TiN) [Theatre in the Netherlands] is the former Theater Instituut Nederland (TIN) [The Dutch Theatre
Institution]. The collection of the institution, because of financial reasons, was brought together of the Bijzondere Collecties [Special Collections] of the University of Amsterdam. While, the collection still belongs to the TiN in legal sense, the managers of the collection are the employees of the university.
43 “Een archief is de verzameling van documenten, knipsels en ander 2-dimensionaal materiaal dat een weerslag is van de
the context of the record. However, original order is a custodial concept and it does not exist in the digital environment. The concept of original order, of course, still can come useful when it comes to paper archives, but with post-custodial terms (and especially in the digital environment) we should call it a process which the record undergoes. One can only analyse the records in its original meaning if the process is maintained after it fulfilled its primary function.
Next to the archivists and performing arts institutions who manage archives themselves, there are also engaged communities trying to help actors of the performing art field in managing their own records. Two outstanding examples of this phenomenon are the American Theatre Archive Project
(ATAP), and the Belgian Toolbox & Richtlijnen voor Archief- & Collectiezorg in de Kunstensector
[Toolbox and directives for managing archives and collections in the cultural sector]: Tracks. According to ATAP, archives are non-current records deemed to be of permanent
historical value.44 ATAP offers help to theatres in the United States with workshops and by
co-operating with archivists across the country to preserve theatre archives, however, it does not differentiate between theatres and individual performing artists or grassroots theatre practices. The committee of ATAP created a manual with the most important issues coming up during archiving theatre – this manual consists a list of the possible elements of an archive. Such a list, and the practical method of the manual can be quite handy for theatres. It also tells a lot about theatre archives and theatre archivists in the practice: theatre archivists attempt to preserve theatre-making in its context by making sure that the whole process is documented. ATAP is also a fine example of the fact that the life-cycle approach to the record still remains popular in North-America. One could, nevertheless, argue with the ATAP definition of the archive, namely that the archives consist of non-current records. When is a record non-current? According to whom is it non-current? Such a separation of records and archives, typical to the life-cycle model, seems to be rather artificial indeed, as we shall see especially in the practice of Clifford Allen, who comes from the North-American archival tradition as well.
For Belgian artists and artistic organisations, it is an obligation to take care of their own archives, which is written in the regulation of the so-called Kunstdecreet.45 In response to this
44 S. Brady. et al., ed. Preserving theatrical legacy: archival manual for theatre companies: 8. Website of ATAP. Last consulted:
03. 03. 2015. http://www.americantheatrearchiveproject.org/
45 Website of the “Executor of Belgian culture, art and heritage policy”. Last consulted: 03.03. 2015.
regulation, a Belgian organization PACKED, an expertise centrum for digital cultural heritage, created the Tracks in co-operation with other heritage and archival institutions. Tracks is a website where artists and organizations find practical advice and examples from practice, to take care of their own archives or collections. Tracks seems to be more flexible in defining the archive then ATAP. According to Tracks, your archive and collection consist everything that is created during
your work as an artist or artistic organization. The precise content [of the archive] can be highly various: from administrative documents and works to all kinds of objects and collections, either physical or digital.46
We can see that similarly to the theory, there is no agreement in the practice either about what performing arts archive should consist.
2.2.4 Some legal aspects
Not only the fact is interesting that the archive is differently conceptualized in different institutions and countries, as we saw at the Dutch TiN, the Belgian Tracks or the American ATAP, but also the question how archiving practice determines (consciously or unconsciously) the heritage-building and canonization process in a given country through legislation or the policy of national theatre institutions. As I already mentioned, the Dutch archive law primarily addresses government archives, which means that the TiN is on his own to decide which archives and records she keeps. The TiN – next to the premiere-database, consisting a list of the Holland premiere data’s – collects materials actively of only one hundred chosen performances every year. Here we can catch in the very act the exclusivity of the archive in practice. This list may be edited by prominent Dutch theatre professionals and such a list may have practical reasons – for example: lack of storage, subsidy and staff – but it is what it is: it is a list with enormous power that decides what the posterity will remember and what may come into consideration at all for canonization in the future.
In turn, the Belgian regulation, as it is laid down in the Kunsdecreet, requires the artists to take care of their own archive in order to qualify for subsidy.47 However, the regulation does not
46 “Je archief en collectie wordt gevormd door alles dat tot stand kwam tijdens je werking als kunstenaar of kunstenorganisatie.
De precieze inhoud kan heel gevarieerd zijn: van documenten en werken van administratieve of artistieke aard, tot allerhande objecten en verzamelingen, zowel fysiek als in digitale vorm.”
47 “Om in aanmerking te kunnen komen voor subsidiëring, moeten de organisaties (...) zorg dragen voor het eigen archief.” Cited
specify how one should take care of the archive nor what the archive should consist of. Instead, it is the already mentioned Tracks that guides the actors of this field. Since the Vlaams Theater
Instituut [The Flemish Theater Institution] is not an archival institution, but more of an expertise
centrum, it does not take over archives of theatres, therefore Tracks refers to other public or private archival institutions where theatre archives can be transferred to.
The Hungarian regulation is rather similar to the Belgian one: an explicit aim of the law
about the subsidization of performing arts organizations is to support the professional
documentation and research activity.48 The difference between the Belgian and the Hungarian regulation is that the Hungarian government establishes the components of the archive by giving subsidy to only those organizations and artists who submit 1) a video registration of the subsidized performance and 2) a press folder of the production to the Hungarian Theatre Institute. As we can see, similarly to the Dutch situation, there is also a selected list of performances in Hungary (since not every performance in Hungary is subsidized by the government), not to talk about the very limited selection of sources that must be kept at the theatre institute.
2.2.5 An archival definition on performing arts archive
Acknowledging that performing arts archive is very differently characterized and conceptualized in practical, theoretical and legal fields, and emphasizing furthermore that I look at the archive as process-bound information, I propose the following archival definition: performing arts archive is
(physical or digital) information about processes, which aims to realize performing art works.
48 “E törvény célja, hogy (…) támogassa a szakmai dokumentációs és kutatási tevékenységet” Cited in 06. 05. 2015:
3. The cases: method and justification
Next to archival and performing art literature, this thesis is based on three case studies. I conducted ten, approximately one hour interviews with different actors of the theatre making process and I observed three different sites of archival practice. The data gathering is, therefore, based on
interview-study in the one hand. In the other hand, I also conducted desk-research to be able to
analyse the documentation I collected during the interviews. Due to the explanatory nature of this endeavour, I have tried to leave my questions open during the interviews to grasp the elementary issues that emerge during the recordkeeping and archival practices of the examined cases. It has to be kept in mind though, that the interviews I conducted did not strive to draw ground claims or conclusions about the motives of recordkeeping and archival practice of ‘The theatre’ and ‘The theatre artist’ in general. Rather, they served as a trigger to think about possible further meanings and values of records and archives in the theatrical field. The questions during the interviews were directed mainly towards the conceptualization of the archive and the main aspects of the recordkeeping practices, linking them as much as possible to concrete examples of the actors’ artistic work: What do the actors think about what the archive is? Who and how performs the documentation? What is documented? Why is certain information documented and kept? How big is the archive? How and why is the archive used or re-used? Is the archive destroyed and if so, why?
The cases I have chosen made it possible to look at small segments of the performing arts field and the role of the theatre archivist, even though in such a small sample they merely demonstrate themselves. On the institutional side I visited the DNO several times. The DNO is a rather extreme example on the professional, institutional recordkeeping. It is the biggest state-funded theatrical organization in the Netherlands, with approximately 600 employees and a rather complex working process. The artistic and business management of the DNO – next to the general management of the whole organisation – is divided into opera-, and ballet-management. The rest of the departments are shared. The main departments of the DNO are: technical department; costume, hood and make-up; production- and stage management; marketing, communication and sales; education, marketing and programming; fund acquisition and relation management; finances; personnel and organisation; facility services; public guidance. I made four interviews and visited
three departments (the production-, the technical- and the financial department) six time in total. Following or during the interviews, I also looked at the departments’ physical and digital archives.
With the assistance of Marie-José Litjens stage manager and Frank Lever, secretary of production department, I was allowed to look closely into the archival practice of the production- and stage management at DNO. Stage management is responsible for organizing and coordinating a theatrical production. The tasks within this unit encompass a variety of activities, including the organization of the production and coordinating communications between various personnel (for example between director and backstage crew, or actors and production management). Since this was my first visit in DNO, I tried to gain information from my first two interviewees about the whole organisation – this allowed me to recognize the main characteristics of the archival system. The third interview in the DNO took place in the technical department with Jolanda Müller, assistant of the head of technical department. The technical department is a rather complex area of the DNO with many co-workers (over 160 people). The fourth interview, the last one in the DNO, was conducted at the financial department with René Domen. He is responsible for the secretarial work of this department, which includes also archiving.
In contrast to the DNO, the artists are all independent (they are not affiliated permanently to one particular institution but work individually, or collaboratively on project basis) and, of course, document on a much smaller scale. With the artists I had more ‘open’ conversations than in the Opera and also posed more opened questions. I usually let them talk about their ideas of archiving and about their documentation practice. I only led the conversation where it was necessary, that is to say, when they turned too much away from the subject matter. This method proved to be fruitful, as long as it led to hear and recognize also ‘hidden’ aspects of the documentation practices. The interviews with the artists also took approximately one hour. The artists are: Eva Susova, Czech performance artist based in Amsterdam; Zsófia-Tamara Vadas and Imre Vass Hungarian dancers; Martin Boross, director of a Hungarian independent production house and Júlia Balázs Hungarian stage designer.
The practice of Clifford Allen is seemingly an outlier, but in my opinion it fits in this analysis. During the one and a half hour Skype interview we not only talked about Robert Wilson’s recordkeeping practice but also his own archival practice and expectations. This case is a hybrid
example of recordkeeping practice in theatre: Robert Wilson is (obviously) an individual artist, however, he created around himself such a large scale industry – considering all the artists, organisations and (theatre) institutions he worked, and continually works with –, that his name became a brand, and therefore he can almost be seen as an institution. One could say, Wilson’s example is not that representative because of these reasons: there are not many artists who could afford a very own archivist. However, this thesis is not based on a quantitative research: I do not try to generalize archival practices through representative cases, but instead, following a more ethnographic approach, I look at archival and recordkeeping practices in different settings to think about the ways and meanings of private archives and self-archiving. The Robert Wilson archive not only demonstrates the work of an individual performing artist on a large scale, but, through the practice of Clifford Allen, it also displays many aspects and challenges of the work of a performing arts archivist.
After this brief introduction of the cases, we now turn our attention to the presentation and the analysis of the cases. First we will discuss the recordkeeping and archival practice in the DNO.
4. The Dutch Opera and Ballet
The history of the Dutch Opera goes back to the first performance of De Nederlandse Opera
Stiching [The Dutch Opera Foundation], namely the ‘Der Rosenkavalier’ of Richard Strauss,
which took place in the congress hall of the RAI in 1965. The successor of the foundation, Het
Muziektheater opened in 1986 on the Waterlooplein in Amsterdam, where, up until now, both the
Dutch Opera and the Dutch Ballet performs. Interestingly, the building is commonly referred as the ‘Stopera’, which name is actually a word-puzzle and originated from the surprising structure of the building: the Opera and the City Hall (‘Stadhuis’ in Dutch) share the same roof. In 2014, the organization transformed legally into ‘De Nationale Opera en Ballet’. This integration mainly has consequences in terms of the documentation of the two previously separated organizations: during my visits I did not physically enter the ‘territory’ of the ballet, still, throughout the investigation of the departments of the institution I also encountered some documentations of the ballet.
4.1 The production- and stage-management
Marie-José asserts that the archive is all operations [handelingen], all movements, all props,
costumes, lighting cues, and everything about the performance, what is documented precisely. This
definition of the archive reveals already a great deal of the archival practice of a theatre institution. Namely it shows how an actual performance is put together on the stage and how it is documented: in the archive of a production, all the above mentioned elements have to appear, so it can be
reconstructed (or re-staged), often also outside the location of the Stopera.
There are three kinds of archives in the production-management department: 1) ‘on-going productions’, 2) ‘deep-freeze productions’, and 3) ‘discarded productions’. ‘On-going productions’ are either productions that are rehearsed at the moment, or they are forthcoming new productions. ‘Deep-freeze productions’ are past productions that the DNO has decided to keep, either with the possibility of presenting the production again in the future (a revival), or the renting them to opera companies in other countries. This archive contains all the production manager’s correspondence, the (stage-technical) production budgets, the production planning, stage planning, the safety risk assessment documentation and anything else relating to the organization of the stage-technical side
of the production, covering the period from the moment the management decides to produce the opera up until the production starts the rehearsals. The archive also contains the stage management documentation including:
a. piano score with all cues (e.g. entrances, lighting, flies, special effects) b. scene-breakdown
c. running plot d. checklist(s)
e. any running plots made by stage management for other departments, eg. props running plot or stage crew running plot
f. notes re-stage music (banda)
g. ground plans with floor marks for furniture etc. h. curtain calls
i. rehearsal costumes
j. timings of scenes, scene changes etc. k. photos of stage and stage area (e.g. wings) l. performance reports
m. any notes that might be useful for a revival
All scenery, props, costumes, sound or video recordings et cetera for ‘deep freeze productions’ are stored by the respective departments.
‘Discarded productions’ are the productions that the management of DNO has officially discarded. This archive is identical to ‘deep freeze productions’ except that it is moved to the basement. All scenery, props and costumes etc. are either recycled for new productions or thrown away. Since props and costumes are sometimes very expensive, they are naturally often re-used.
The stage-management has a ‘helicopter-view’ on the performance. It is also documented what happens in the studio, where the stage-manager sits to direct the technicians during the live show. For this, they use their “bible”, which is the stage-manager book. This book is the music sheet of the given piece with the notes of the stage-manager, laying down everything that happens during the performance. The stage-manager is present at every rehearsal and writes everything down, for example how much time an action takes or how many steps the actor needs to take to reach a certain
point on the stage. This means that the notes of the stage-manager are a very detailed memory, but not only that. It also functions as evidence with which the director can prove during the later rehearsals how he previously arranged something. The notes have to be updated after every rehearsal, since there could be changes any time during the rehearsal process. The stage management keeps every note until a given day, but after some time an outdated note can be removed. At the end, the most updated notes are kept.
However, the stage-management archive is not only formed out of the records of the rehearsal process, but records from the actual performances are also archived. These are evaluations and notes made after every single performance, to document the remarks, oddities or special occurrences. These could be also important for a possible revival.
As already mentioned, the archive of the stage-management is important for re-staging a piece. By re-staging I mean not only the day to day activity of a repertoire theatre or a possible revival later at the DNO, but also the instances of playing the performance on tour abroad. Marie-José exemplified this with a DNO production played in Barcelona, where next to the assistant-director and the assistant-designer, only the production-management archive was brought from the DNO to reconstruct the production. This primarily has financial reasons: it is much more cost-effective to use the archives than sending the actual stage-managers and technicians with the production. That’s why it is crucial to lay everything down exactly how it should happen.
Frank Lever, the secretary of the stage-management is responsible for keeping the archives of this department in a good order. He created a list for the stage-managers about the components of the archive. I find a sentence at the end of the list – “Frank zeggen dat het archief af is” [Notify Frank when the archive is completed] – particularly meaningful. Frank explained that sometimes he had to urge the stage-managers to archive their works appropriately. In this respect, he also brought up a rather unexpected issue, as long as he described archiving as an affective process: “you are greatly involved in the process of making a production, but after the premiere the enthusiasm slowly fades away, that’s why you have to document during the process!”
Frank, next to his ‘official task’, is busy with setting up the old archives of the whole DNO. According to him, the old archives (which are dated before the moving of the institution into the ‘Stopera’ in 1985) still have to be organized and described: pictures are waiting to be digitized in order to be preserved and booklets with other valuable pieces of the Opera have to be organized
into a ‘meaningful’ order as well. When I asked Frank why he would not send all these material to the Dutch theatre archive, his answer was, again, quite emotional: “It belongs to this house. It isn’t worth going to the Bijlmer [the depot of the Dutch theatre archive] to research all this material if you can also keep it inside the house.” This illustrates quite well the heritage and also the identity value of the archive next to its memory or evidence values.
As I learned from Frank, there is no central archive for the whole institution. This means that if researchers want to investigate the entire archive of one performance, they have to look for the records separately at every single DNO departments. Lacking of a central documenting or archival plan or policy, every department carries its own archive based on its own rules and common sense. This can be quite risky, since parts of the archive can easily get lost after a couple of years, as it is also rather accidental which old archives survived from the period before 1985.
4.2 The technical department
This department consists of secretariat, planning, décor-studio, maintenance theatre technique,
podium- and lighting service, audio-visual service and the props-service. Similarly to the practice
of the whole DNO, the technical department does not have a central archive either. The disadvantages of this fragmented character of the archival system has recently been discovered and solution is currently been sought. For example, the department recently made a ‘production folder’, where every sub-unit has to hand in their own records of a given production. One can, for example, find in this folder the transport- and building planning, the technical list, the props list, drawings or notes of the master carpenter, but also budget planning, reports, meeting minutes and correspondence.
The technical department has a classification system where every elements of its process can be found. The classification system can be seen as an access key to the archive as well, since it indicates the place of records in the archive by using numbering. The main categories of the classification scheme are the following:
C. Conferences D. Direction
E. Fireworks and pyrotechnics
F. Physical agendas and diaries (discontinued per august 2013) H. Housing
I. Policy- and art-planning
J. Yearly schedule of joint planning K. Costs
L. OSAT
M. Production management N. Suppliers
P. Personnel
R. Regular consultations technique S. Stock
T. Team Technique W. Gun licences
G. Education, participation, programming B. Ballet
O. Opera
According to the classification scheme, next to the current- and planned productions (which are organized be theatrical seasons) there is also a ‘static’ archive, where the productions are placed seemingly in disorder.
As another part of the solution for the fragmented character of their archival system, the technical department attempts to keep together the records of each productions also in the classification system (under ‘Personnel’). Next to the production folder, this is also an important step in the process-oriented thinking. Since productions are processes, they should be kept together, instead of having bits of information physically scattered at every section of the department. Seeing the whole process together makes it easier to remount a performance or to research its archive. Since this is a new development, the procedure concerns mainly the new productions, older productions still have to be brought together.
The technical department also re-uses records and archives, to see for instance how big the estimated budget of a future production should be and how many people should actively work on a new production.
As it is the case with the production management, it is also important in the technical department to have the archives in a good order when sending productions to other opera houses. Sometimes, of course, the whole scenery has to be taken with trucks to re-mountain a production, but there are also instances when only the master-carpenter and the lighting-technician from the technical department travels with the performance. The archive of the technical department, as well as that of the production management, has to be flawless so the production can be re-mounted abroad.
4.3 The financial department
The archive of the finances mainly consists of outgoing and incoming invoices, salary
administrations, contracts and the archive of the cashier that the department receives and variable financial statements and correspondence that the department self creates. The size of the archive
of the financial department grew in 2013, when the administration of the building itself (Stopera), the ballet and the opera was brought together.
There is no official archival policy at this department, nor an inventory for the archive. Instead, it is organized ‘meaningfully’ on shelves, so everyone can find their way in it. The department distinguishes two kind of archives: on-going and sleeping archives. The on-going archive consists all the records created and received within two years, and it is kept in the office self. The sleeping archive consists of records which are older than two years but not older than seven. The records which are older than seven years are removed and destroyed. Destroying the old archive is a necessity, because these records are no longer used and they occupy an enormous space: approximately 13400 invoices are generated every year. Naturally, ‘important’ documents, for example the yearly financial statements or contracts with singers or ballet dancers are kept in the archive permanently, because they are part of the heritage of the DNO.
After looking at the archiving- and recordkeeping practices of a rather complex theatre institution, let us wander along the thoughts of independent performing art artist about the similarly multi-layered meanings of their records and archives.
5. The independent artists
The artists I interviewed all work independently: none of them are associated with a theatre institution. Accordingly, they rely on ways and meanings of self-archiving. This grassroots working process of the independent artists are fundamentally different from that of a theatre institution. As we could see at the Opera, there is a vast group working on the productions which are, in most part, already pre-written. Such productions are made to perform it in an opera house, more or less under the same conditions everywhere in the world. The composition of the group can change, it does not really matter if the stage manager or the main actor is not the same. For such a flexibility it is an imperative that the documentation is flawless, so the production can be re-mounted years later with different stage managers and artists or in an entirely different opera-house. The performance artists don’t work that way. In the next paragraphs, I shall briefly explain this different working method, illustrating it with the performances of one of my interviewees, Hungarian independent theatre-director Martin Boross.
The individual artists generally work on projects that come into being within their network system. That basically means that they find other artist(s) they want to work with in their artistic network and when the composition of the group is settled, they start working on a project from the bottom. The base of the work are their own ideas and experiences which they elaborate on by means of research, brainstorming-sessions and workshops. For instance, for his work entitled Promenade
– Urban fate tourism, Martin Boross went to Amsterdam and recorded his bike trips in the city to
get inspiration for the performance. The performances which the interviewees create are mostly improvisatory: during the performances, the frame and the basic dramaturgy of the scenes are already laid down, but the outcome of the actual shows can depend very much on the actor(s), the audience or even the location. Let me illustrate this with some examples.
Martin’s performance, Promenade is played on the streets of Budapest. The audience is sitting on the bus, which goes through a preliminarily established route, while the actors perform outside on the streets and change their location depending on the bus’ route. Promenade got invited to the Oerol festival, Terschelling, the Netherlands in 2015, so Martin went to explore Terschelling in order to adjust both the logistics and the performance as a whole to the new location. Another example of how different conditions can influence a performance can excellently be illustrated with Martin’s other work, Before you die where the audience is actively involved in the show. At a
certain point of the performance the actors leave the stage and go to the audience to ask them about their dearest wishes, desires they want to fulfil before they die. These wishes are recorded and collected to be played at the dramatic peak of the show. But the audience can have even bigger influence on an actual performance. At the end of Boross` work entitled The thirty-six – Story of a
fake messiah, played in an old, abandoned synagogue in Budapest, the audience faces with a moral
dilemma: either sacrificing the innocent and protect the community (which is “played” by the audience) or protect the innocent, endangering this way the entire community. Martin explained that the choice made by the audience has a fundamental impact on the ultimate experience of the performance. When the community/audience decides to sacrifice the innocent, the performance often ends sorrowfully and the audience left with a palpable sense of guilt and a bitter taste in their mouth. In instances when the audience decides to protect the innocent, the performance ends up in catharsis.
These brief descriptions of the above performances underline what substantial role the sense of ephemerality plays as long as the experience of the audience is concerned. Yet I found quite interesting during the interviews that the notion of ephemerality hardly came up. It was certainly unexpected, since it dominates the discourse about performing arts archives. That the performance is ephemeral, at least in its effects, seems to be self-evident for the artists, it is not the point. However, the creative working process underlying these performances has to be documented for
own recordkeeping and to make it part of the heritage. As Mónica Mayer writes, “I have always
thought it is paradoxical that half time I produce ephemeral art and the rest of the time I document it as many ways as possible. For me, as for most performance artist I know, keeping record of our work, and that of our colleagues has always been important because apart from registering our process, we realize it is raw material for history and theory. To reach that stage, it must first penetrate institutions where it can be classified and safeguarded. This has not always been easy.”49 This remarkable argumentation perfectly illustrate that the archive remains the space of power: your work as an artist only have the chance to survive if the archivist finds it worthy to safeguard it. How the digital age will change that, is still a question. The opportunities given by new media, creative participation and interactivity certainly give chance to multiple interpretations. However, archivists also have to fight for equal representations and they have to deconstruct their own image as the custodians of archives.
Let us see in the following subsections, how and why the artists think to document themselves and their artistic processes. In the following sections we will follow five independent artists’ ideas about recordkeeping. I attempted to organize these thoughts around the most relevant functions that came up during the interviews.
5.1 Self-representation
An archive of a theatre artist can be very colourful: photos, video-footages, critiques, notes, drawings, grant applications, financial settlements. A very common objective of self-archiving is representational. Performing artists often need to submit critiques, photos and video footages for grant applications or as a proof to the subsidizer that they actually made the project they acquired the money for. Grant applications came up by every artist; without financial support the artist usually cannot work. Still, an interesting, recurring theme of the interviews in this respect is the notion of ‘archiving as burden’: archiving is something that the artist doesn’t have time/affinity for, but still has to be done due to external pressures. Contrarily to the stereotypical image of the ‘messy’ artist, they have to represent themselves to the subsidizer as well organized, responsible persons who are able to handle the grant money. The interviewees also acknowledge that an organized archive would be beneficial not only for the documentation of their past works, but also in the process of collecting materials for their new projects. Common notion was that if the archive was more organized, a given record could be retrieved much more easily. Still, organizing comes often at last, if it comes at all.
Naturally, every artist wants to be known for an audience, which is why advertising is a very important representational function of the archive. In the network culture the artists have to promote themselves on different platforms: own websites, blogs, Vimeo, online cultural forums. Self-presenting is often also seen as a burden: the artists are pressured to keep on presenting snapshots of works for reasons of advertising or towards the subsidizer, but these works are in progress as long as they run. Every performance is different. For example, Martin Boross’ performance Before you die is highly improvisatory, and in many cases not only the actors but even the spectators shape the performance. However, as Martin said, only one version is archived: only one performance is recorded with cameras, and only from this performance was a transcription (a written “drama text”) made. Archiving might be an inherent part of the process, but it also costs
