The performance archive : detritus or historical record?

Scrapbooks, Snapshots and Memorabilia is concerned with hidden archives of performance. By this we, the authors in this collection, mean the performance records not deemed archivable – ‘memorabilia’ to use Benjamin Hutchens’ (2007) sense of the word – those accounts, memories and practices which, for whatever reason, seem to elude, resist or confound archivisation. To this we need to question, as do several of the authors in this collection, how such records are interpreted, as it is interpretive agency – selection and appraisal – that transforms memorabilia into archives. Performances are ephemeral but for an ephemeral art, live performance can leave a lot of “stuff ” around; it is for this reason I treat with caution Peggy Phelan’s claim that ‘performance’s only life is in the present’ and that ‘performance’s being [. . .] becomes itself through disappearance’ (1993: 146 [emphasis added]). This “stuff ”, as I discuss in Chapter 9, is not the performance itself, yet it is produced by the performance and can stand for it; it is, to use Matthew Reason’s metaphor, ‘detritus’ (2003). It is through this concern for detritus that the collection suggests that the failure to archive, or to archive too obscurely, some performances ensures that they disappear a second time.1 Following the lead of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida this collection interrogates the relationship of archives and power, applied to the detritus of performance. However, it also gets down in the dust and acknowledges, as Joan Schwartz and Terry Cook observe, that ‘the history of making and keeping records is littered with chaos, eccentricity, inconsistency, and downright subversion, as much as it is characterized by jointly agreed order, sequence and conformity’ (2002: 14).