The Paradox of Preserving a Performance

I have friends who work in the performance world, one is a dancer at the New York City Ballet and another is a program director at BAC (Baryshnikov Arts Center). The three of us have talked, a few times, about preserving performances and we wish we could, but they aren’t mean to be preserved.

While completing this week’s readings, I kept going back to that conversation and thinking about how the preservation of the sound/performance can alter it…thereby creating another layer of experience that wasn’t present when it was viewed by an audience. What archive the performance/sound is a part of can create and embedded meaning, how it was catalogued, who presented it, etc.

The multi-sensory archive can offer more context to the experience of the archival object, but it can’t ever fully preserve the context/time/space of the object. Do we accept those imperfections, try to improve them (as people are doing), or should we let these pieces die as perhaps they were meant to? Zen for Film was a perfect paradoxical example of this. Given the principles of Zen to be in the moment and let each moment flow and die as we move to the next.

One Reply

  • Thanks, Kristin! The challenges of archiving performance — and perhaps even accepting ephemerality and degradation —
    are a *great* discussion topic to broach with Rachel, today’s guest!

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