More-and-Less-Than: Liveness, Video Recording, and the Future of Performance

Abstract

With the spread of digital and other modes of electronic recordings into the auditoria and lecture theatres where performance is studied, the debate about the video documentation of performance – already well rehearsed and in the pages of NTQ – is about to intensify. Rachel Fensham and Denise Varney have based the article which follows on their own work in videoing live theatre pieces for research into feminist performance. This article deliberates on their experience with the medium and examines the anxieties that surface at the point of implosion between live and mediatized performance. The first part locates these anxieties in the question of presence and absence in performance – especially that of the performer, whose body and self are both at stake in the recorded image. In the second part, the authors offer a description of viewing practices, which they present as a model of ‘videocy’. Rachel Fensham is Senior Lecturer in the Centre for Drama and Theatre Studies, Monash University, and Denise Varney is Lecturer in the School of Studies in Creative Arts, Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne.

South African drama and theatre heritage (part I): a map of where we find ourselves

“…How else can one teach models of excellence, when available models don't exist? (1995, p. 149) Varney and Fensham (2000) also question whether any performance research can be done without documentation. They criticise the binary logic, which Phelan advocates, of regarding the live event as pure and documentation as contaminated:…”

Depth‐charge in the archive: the documentation of performance revisited in the digital age

“…There is plenty of opportunity for 'error' and misrepresentation of the artist's intentions in this game of Chinese Whispers (Wyman 2007). Nevertheless, Jones (1997) and others (Varney and Fensham 2000;Auslander 2006;Wyman 2007) still argue convincingly that documentation is a sufficiently reliable medium through which to experience performance. Indeed, it could be asked whether the misinterpretation associated with reading of documentation is in fact any different from or greater than that associated with the witnessing of the live performance itself since 'neither has a privileged relationship to the historical "truth"' (Jones 1997, 11).…”

Schrödinger's Research: When does practice as research occur?

“…Moreover, video can map a view of the performance, mediating a difference between presence and absence, retaining traces of the performance but not replacing it (Varney & Fensham, 2000).…”