The conference was a first chance to have the work done over the first year of RECITE properly critiqued by an audience who really knew the subject area. TaPRA is structured around the 'working groups', which form the bulk of the conference programme and provide a platform for smaller-scale, specialised discussion within the conference sessions as well as helping to foster a close-knit network one the conference has finished. Coming from outside the field I was initially unsure in which working group my project would be most appropriate, but given my interest in the effects and legacy after performances (and the lack of specific group for site-located theatre), the 'Documenting Performance' group seemed to offer the best fit.
The documentation working group was making its reappearance at TaPRA after disappearing for a few years, and referring to this absence Toni Sant (co-convenor) suggested that a mentality had set in in performance research whereby ‘if everyone is documenting now so why do we need a specific group?’. However he felt that it was the interdisciplinary nature the group (with presentations covering web media / mapping / information design / archival studies) that made the new direction distinct. Though from a personal perspective it was very useful to be part of a cross-disciplinary dialogue, it will be interesting to see if the working group has a long-term future, given this fragmentary nature of documentation research.
Perhaps a product of this new mentality across the discipline, there was surprisingly little questioning in the working group about the fundamental philosophy of why we to document live performance and the ‘secondary’ nature of documentation. The majority of the presentations assumed that you would document ‘as much as possible’ - with the debate then about how you create access to archive (digital, social media documentation, wiki etc) and how to ‘activate’ archive material (re-embodying, inspiration). Perhaps therefore the debate has moved on - there is an assumption that ‘documentation’ will happen whatever on youtube & flickr (with performance being subsumed into the mass media) so the aim should be to discover methods of doing this in a way that will be useful for future performers & academic study. The panel session, where delegates were more free to move between working groups, saw Heike Roms (Senior Lecturer in performance studies at Aberystwyth) present her long-term research project into Welsh site-specific work from the 1960s and 70s, which employs an admirable array of methodologies and techniques to uncover how these performances became embedded in the cultural memory of a place.
Perhaps a product of this new mentality across the discipline, there was surprisingly little questioning in the working group about the fundamental philosophy of why we to document live performance and the ‘secondary’ nature of documentation. The majority of the presentations assumed that you would document ‘as much as possible’ - with the debate then about how you create access to archive (digital, social media documentation, wiki etc) and how to ‘activate’ archive material (re-embodying, inspiration). Perhaps therefore the debate has moved on - there is an assumption that ‘documentation’ will happen whatever on youtube & flickr (with performance being subsumed into the mass media) so the aim should be to discover methods of doing this in a way that will be useful for future performers & academic study. The panel session, where delegates were more free to move between working groups, saw Heike Roms (Senior Lecturer in performance studies at Aberystwyth) present her long-term research project into Welsh site-specific work from the 1960s and 70s, which employs an admirable array of methodologies and techniques to uncover how these performances became embedded in the cultural memory of a place.
Beyond the working group, we heard interesting keynotes from Ian Brown on Scots playwrights and Louise Jeffreys, director of programmes at the Barbican. However these sessions (and much of the other discussion around the conference) only really served to highlight the marginal of performance research that interests me and that I am able to engage with to any kind of informed degree!
Overall I came away from TaPRA with mixed feelings; one the one hand very pleased that the presentation went down well and the the first year pilot produced results that appear valuable to theatre research community. That said, I couldn't help but come away considering the disadvantages of crossing disciplines - that its easy to miss out on significant attitude changes in performance research and end up covering ground that is well-established (albeit with an architectural spin), or worse - that the audience don't know enough about architecture, urbanism or the research questions to feel able to criticise.
No comments:
Post a Comment