Performing the South African Archive inREwind: A Cantata for Voice, Tape, and Testimony

Abstract

Abstract‘You can hear everything? You can hear my voice?’ The scratchy recording that opens REwind: A Cantata for Voice, Tape, and Testimony prefigures the questions of memory and performance that underlie Philip Miller's multimedia exploration of testimony from South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). In this article, I adapt Diana Taylor's concepts of the archive and the repertoire to questions of musical communication. I posit that Miller's collage of testimonial ‘shards’, images, and historic audio recordings disrupts the TRC's official narrative by replacing the archive's narrative of completion with one comprising deliberately disjointed moments of individual suffering. The result is an audiovisual creation that sutures together disparate elements to reflect the complexity of the South African truth-telling process. I suggest that in performance, Miller's work re-animates the TRC archive, bringing it into the contemporary repertoire where it re-inscribes the experiences of TRC testifiers for contemporary audiences.