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This practice-based course invites participants to explore the processes of documenting, archiving, disseminating, and activating performance through feminist and queer lenses. It challenges dominant, mainstream narratives, offering alternative approaches that embrace ephemerality, re-imagination, and critical engagement. Through experimentation with interdisciplinary tools, theoretical insights, and case studies, participants will examine the nuances of representation and meaning in performance documentation.
The course begins with a reflective inquiry into the concept of a "body of document" and its interwoven structures, prompting participants to ask fundamental questions: Why, when, how, who, and for whom do we document performance and what are the broader implications of these choices? This phase fosters critical introspection, exploring the relationship between remembering and forgetting, as well as the ethical responsibilities inherent in documentation. Building on this foundation, participants will experiment with interdisciplinary methods that challenge conventional documentation norms. They will navigate tensions between fixity and fluidity, representation and transformation, questioning the limits of documentation itself. In doing so, they will explore how documentation can serve not only as a record but also as a generative and evolving site of performance. Participants will engage with case studies and feminist and queer methodologies that resist mainstream frameworks, investigating gaze, framing, omission, and the aesthetics of failure—emphasizing agency and co-creation. Finally, the course considers the afterlife of performance: how documentation can extend, reactivate, or reshape a work beyond its initial moment, how audiences influence performance archives, and the risks of altering meaning through documentation. Participants are invited to create their own "body of document," engaging critically with performance documentation, its afterlife, risks, and logistical challenges.
Syllabus
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