Digital Documentation and Performance

Open Dialogues were invited to participate in Digital Documentation and Performance, a series of three one-day events on the topics of creating, managing and delivering digital documentation of performance work. The events were hosted and devised by JISC Digital Media and University of Bristol Department of Drama 23-25 September 2009.

Lifecycle list of audience member's experience c. Liz Clarke

ABOUT CREATING DIGITAL PERFORMANCE DOCUMENTATION

‘Creating Digital Performance Documentation’ featured a range of practitioners working in the field of performance including Dr Paul Clarke - Research Fellow 'Performing the Archive: the Future of the Past' University of Bristol & Arnolfini, Becky Edmunds - trained a dancer and choreographer and who now practices as a dance videographer, Open Dialogues - a UK based collaboration, founded in 2008 by Rachel Lois Clapham and Mary Paterson, that produces critical writing on contemporary art, Paul Hurley - an artist who since 2003 has been making an ongoing series of ‘becomings-invertebrate’, Heike Roms - Senior Lecturer in Performance Studies Aberystwyth University, currently researching the AHRC-funded ‘Locating the early history of performance art in Wales 1965–1979”and Sarah Whatley - project leader for the AHRC-funded Siobhan Davies Archive.

The lifecycle of a real-time durational performance - ‘Becoming Snail’ by PaulHurley – was used as case study; the creation, management and delivery of documentation from the performance was tracked over the three days: through digitisation, accession, structuring, delivery, annotation, tagging and curation by users.

Interior. Some lines made in response... c. Julien Warren

ARE YOU STILL THERE? : SKYPE CHAT [10:00:19] – [10:31:20]

For ‘Creating Digital Documentation of Performance’ we - Rachel Lois and Mary - jointly delivered a paper on the Open Dialogues critical model; a how, why and what we produce online of and for performance - be it documents, documentation doc/u- . The paper – entitled ARE YOU STILL THERE? : SKYPE CHAT [10:00:19] – [10:31:20] - discussed how digital & online technology is central to our practice and analogous to our critical model in terms of blogging, ‘Flash’ publishing, durational writing events and collaborative writing. The paper also reflected upon the non-venue based, dialogic nature of Open Dialogues, and its collaborators, and how this relates to an online archive for performance. A short excerpt is below.

ARE YOU STILL THERE? : SKYPE CHAT [10:00:19] – [10:31:20]

4.WRITING IN PARALLEL

Open Dialogues also lead a practical workshop session entitled ‘4.Writing in Parallel’ in which participants applied our methods to the performance ‘Becoming Snail’ by Paul Hurley. The session asked participants to choose one of four words: Interior, Mucous, Lifecycle and Metamorphosis (words taken from the fourth sentence of every ‘Becoming Snail’ google hit as of 28.08.2009) and use it – as prompt, proposition, object or not - to write through ‘Becoming Snail’ for the conference audience. The resulting community of texts – devised to be in parallel to, rather than as a response, record or document of ‘Becoming Snail’ - is linked by #JDMperform09 and hosted by Internet Archive.

MUCUS c. Rachel Lois Clapham

At The Edges c. Mary Paterson

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Other material from the Digital Documentation and Performance conference can be accessed on JISC Digital Media or via #JDMperform09

More on our critical model here.