An Archaeology of the Live

Saturday, May 1st
2:30-6:30 pm

Session Organizers: Rebecca Schneider (Rebecca_Schneider@brown.edu), Shayoni Mitra (Shayoni_Mitra@brown.edu), Daniel Peltz (dpeltz@risd.edu), James Dennen (James_Dennen@brown.edu)

What and where is the site of the live? An answer may seem obvious: the live is where it happens and nowhere else… in that spot… on that stage “there.” However, attempts to be more specific, or to expand an inquiry into temporal terms – i.e., where in time – provoke a number of complications, which trouble the sufficiency, the hegemony, and the promise of stability of the documentary archive. We can ask how liveness has been posed relative to antonyms. Generally, in performance scholarship, and also in most dictionary definitions, given antonyms are the “dead” or the “recorded.” Yet, it is also the case that relative to “new media technology,” liveness does not necessarily imply contemporaneity or coextensivity. If we do not require a shared time and space to be live, what limits, if any, can we ascribe to the descriptor? And, what is at stake in its demarcation? Many accounts of liveness rely on references to “instantaneity” or “the now.” However, there is nothing incontrovertible about now. If the “now” is more than the nexus of the past and future – if there is “duration” (a la Bergson) – then what becomes of the possibility of activating the past and/or the future in terms of the live? Can there be something “live“ in the past that might be countenanced (or recountenanced) in a time other than past? Such questions are redolent in popular cultural approaches to historical reenactment as well as in theatre’s own histories. Certainly, such questions multiply and confound linear (spatialized) concepts of time, deeply sedimented in the western cogito. History “proper” is challenged and performance studies itself is provoked and propelled.

Ultimately, the long‐standing privilege of material evidence – native to so many fields of study – is deeply troubled by attempts to locate the live event. Any and all site‐specificity is destabilized when the notion of repetition is put into critical play. If we are steadfastly committed to the material – and thereby insist on locating both event and memory in matter – then a challenging and productive living history is activated, for it is not always clear that flesh can be material. As so many have asked in sociology, anthropology, critical theory, and performance studies: how would we maintain a history that acknowledges the materiality of flesh… how would we keep it or preserve it… and what are the stakes of preservation in such a gambit? We propose a session that asks whether there can be an archaeology of the live. The answer might well be “no.” Scholars from the Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies propose to engage with media and performance artist, Daniel Peltz, of RISD. Peltz’s interest in tele‐presence and his practice‐based investigations have strong resonance within the problematic outlined above. Our hope is modest: that a session which searches, both in content and by way of its mode of analysis, for “the site of the live” will inspire discussion and, despite inevitable fault lines between disciplines, potentially enrich our collective inquiries.

2:30: Rebecca Schneider (Brown University): Meantime, Syncopated Time, Real Time, Between Time: Digging Now
3:15: Shayoni Mitra (Brown University): Playing in the Here and Now: Site Specificity in Street Theatre
4:00: Coffee break
4:30: James Dennen (Brown University): Botrayal OR a Speculative Mechanics of the Live and the Living
5:15: Daniel Peltz (Rhode Island School of Design): Digging for the Live

Participants and Abstracts:

1. “Meantime, Syncopated Time, Real Time, Between Time: Digging Now”

Rebecca Schneider (Associate Professor, Chair, Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies, Affiliate Faculty, Modern Culture and Media, Brown University)

Can There be an Archaeology of the Live?

Is it useful to think of an archaeology of the live? Recent work in performance studies has experimented between theatre and archaeology, and this panel takes up the question of the site of the live and the degree to which performance might be usefully considered a “remain.” Until recently, live performance was considered to disappear, to be ephemeral, to not remain in any tangible sense. Of course, this assumption was largely born of an art historical bias that, considering performance art in distinction to object art, could only read the temporal event as vanishing. But performance, always reiterative, might also be considered a fleshy kind of remain, and the ways that histories and memories are captured and preserved in orature and other embodied repertoires, speaks to an approach to performance that does not over-privilege vanishing. Still, the site of flesh is volatile, and difference versus identicality is its modus operandi. What does difference remember? What does it get right? How can it be read? How is gesture an artifact, cracked and weathered but remaining? How useful is it to approach physical affect, and affective engagement generally, as such? These questions will be taken up in a paper in which I present some instances of “reenactment” in live arts, culling for theatre and performance art that looks specifically to replay history across the body as a way of accessing the past.

This paper (and the panel as a whole) comes from the perspective of theatre studies, visual art (RISD), and performance studies, and not from archaeology. We consider this a step in a direction of interdisciplinary conversation, and humbly appreciate the Joukowsky Institute’s willingness to entertain our questions-- which we suspect might trip a bit on crossdisciplinary pot-holes in the sidewalks between our studies. Let’s hope the trip is profitable for us both!

3. "Playing in the Here and Now: Site Specificity in Street Theatre"

Shayoni Mitra (Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies, Brown University)

How does the live moment modulate the relative fixity of a performance score? To what extent does the site of a performance impinge on the actor’s abilities? This presentation seeks to answer these questions through the instance of street theatre in Delhi, India. A particular play, Machine, is performed over a thousand times. While the actors, dialogues, props of the play remain constant the site of performance changes each time. Through a history of this particular spatialization, a larger narrative of political theatre starts to unfold. If street theatre seeks to maximize its impact through a direct actor audience interaction, it does so through its adept maneuvering of spatial configurations. An ‘archeology’ of the play, while taking into account these places of performance, must also contend with the traces of dramatic action – as thought provocation, conflict resolution, direct political action – that live on in the body of the spectator.

The live moment then gets stretched from the instance of its iteration in theatrical action, to a prolonged temporality in the conscientization and subsequent labor of the spectator. The street, as place both ordinary and extraordinary, becomes the conduit of this protracted play. The human machine, an impoverished and embodied approximation of the technological sway over everyday life, allegorizes this disproportionate displacement of action and reaction.

3. "Botrayal OR a Speculative Mechanics of the Live and the Living"

James Dennen (Ph.D. Candidate, Theatre & Performance Studies, Brown University)

When we watch a “live” video feed, there is (at least) a short delay between the performance and its reception. And while this temporal lag has surely been all but eradicated by modern technology, there may be more at stake here than technology is able to determine. First, the belief that such a gap exists (no matter how imperceptible) may produce its own framework around a performative event such that simultaneity is effectively “ruled out” in spite of high fidelity. Second, however timely the exchange, if we focus for a moment on the space in time, then we must either embrace the communion of living bodies and machines or rigorously investigate the communicative limits between human and screen. This paper reads a “low-fi” webcast performance with a sizeable delay for its significance in relation to the location of liveness and works toward a theory of co-presence that attempts to map the unique productivity of living bodies in correspondence… and one which accounts for such a mediatized co-present across a more nuanced registry of indices – that is, not only isolated notions of spatial or temporal proximity, but also coordinates of (un)certainty, materiality, and response-ability.

4. “Digging for the Live”

Daniel Peltz (Associate Professor, Interim Department Head, Digital+Media, Rhode Island School of Design)

This presentation uses the lens developed through this panel, of an archeology of the live, to explore a series of my own projects and performances. My practice, as a visual artist and educator, frequently employs live-feed video in various social situations - ranging from a crowded downtown in Cameroon to karaoke bars throughout Denver to a small glass mill in Sweden - as a means of exploring the spaces opened by the mediation of the present.