Archives

Abstract

Within discourses of documentation, nowhere can the impulse to stop things from vanishing, and the feeling that one is able to access the past, be stronger than with the archive. Archives are by conception and practice intended to preserve traces of the past, making it available for future generations to access, study and, more broadly, simply to know. To archive is synonym with to document; to archive is to do documentation. To archive symbolically asserts ideas of recording, preserving and remembering events and the past. This is not least the case, although not unproblematically so, with the performing arts archive. It is unsurprising therefore that the question of archives, and theories and hopes about archives, permeate through and around discourses of live performance practice, research and theory. In response to perceptions of transience and disappearance, the archive in concept represents the purest desire to document and preserve live performance.