Assemblage is construction, production, representation and documentation. Both archaeology and performance involve the documentation of practices and experiences. Their embodiment in sensoria raises the issue of the representation of phenomena which are, partially at least, ineffable -- beyond language.
The Form of the Document
What form might the document take? It is, as we have indicated, to focus upon fragments and assemblage: to define the objects of retrieval of performance around notions of site, time, structure and detail, which direct the attention of the narratives.
This will involve discussion:
- Of the genesis, delineation and formalisation of performance space and the creation of playing areas through the nature of the action, the placement of the audience and architectural and scenographic demarcation.
- Of the effect of spatial restriction and configuration upon the type, nature and quality of the activity and upon the essential contracts of performance -- performer to performer, performer to spectator, spectator to spectator.
- Of the existence of spatial hierarchies, intensities and stratifications of activity, the reservation of particular locales.
- And of the extent, volume and restriction of the spheres of influence of performers and spectators alike which collide and penetrate during interpersonal contact.
And this will require map, plan, section, axonometric projection.
- Of the ways in which different time-frames are manifest by performers over time and from time to time in performance, in sequence or in parallel and how they affect the nature of the activity, the expenditure of energy and the application and quality of effort. And the overall dynamic pattern of the event.
And this will require chronologies and time-bases.
- Of the explicit structure of performance as set of rules, sequence, route map, montage.
- Of the juxtaposition of different orders of material and styles and techniques of performance.
And this will require libretto, list, image, graph.
- Of the dramaturgical detail and the equal importance of kinesic, proxemic and haptic signification: of signs, distances and body-to-body contacts (Elam 1980: 56f.). After Mauss (1973), it may be interesting to select a limited range of activities - walking, sitting, falling - and discuss their particular articulation, their stylistic diversification, within this performance, this genre. Equal attention might be given to the nature of meeting and physical contact.
And this will require diagram, drawing, photograph, video.
The object of documentation then is to devise models for the recontextualisation of performance as text and as second-order performance, as a creative process in the present and not as a speculation on past meaning or intention - 'the point is that there is no definitive originary meaning, since what the "original" performance meant will itself have been fragmented, and experienced in many different ways' (Thomas 1994: 143). These models must be adequate and appropriate to the task of representing the sociology of this special world, drawing upon disciplines, principles, methods and terminologies other than those of textual analysis, and encapsulated, we are suggesting, in archaeology.
Michael Shanks
From Theatre/Archaeology
