Matthew Reason Archive or Memory ? The Detritus of Live Performance

‘Efermaele’, that theatre is the ‘art of the present’, and describes directors and performers as creators of ‘ephemeral works’.1 This primary valuation of live performance as live has often been repeated by those, like Barba, who have celebrated the transitory nature of their work. George Balanchine, for example, was, according to Bonnie Brooks, described as ‘a man who didn’t give a damn about the past and cared even less about the future’.2 However, while Balanchine may not have been interested in the future life of his work, Brooks observes with evident relief that others certainly were. Making a comment that could be extended across the performing arts, Brooks suggests that ‘an examination of practices in the dance field shows that the work of saving dances often appears to fall not to the artists themselves, but to the people who surround them’.3 The work of ‘saving’ dances is, of course, one of saving them from ephemerality, and is already a long ideological step away from Barba’s declaration that performance is the art of the present. The desire to document performance is a strong though contradictory thread running through the live arts. It is a desire motivated by an awareness of the inevitable disappearance of live performance, and witnessed in the comments of one Edinburgh Festival Fringe theatre director: ‘In five weeks what will be left of [my play]? A script, a press release, a couple of photos and the reviews.’4 What is worrying this director is the imminent disappearance of his or her production: the passing of an ephemeral event and the fear that the record of that event will be mere residue, inadequate remembrance of the original live performance. Fears such as these have sparked an academic and social urge to ‘save’ theatre and live performance in general. Oddly, the idea that live performance must be saved from disappearance is not held as a position incompatible with the valuation of performance as ephemeral. In a single article, published in New Theatre Quarterly in 1994, Gay McAuley manages not only to echo Brooks’s sentiments about the need to save live performances, but also describes artists as always more interested in the present than the past or future; details the need to persuade sometimes sceptical practitioners to take responsibility for their ‘legacy’; and borrows some of Barba’s