Documentation with the result of its own performing
Una Lee · Studies in Theatre and Performance · 2018
As a practitioner of sonic arts who often creates live performance works, I face the challenge of documenting my ephemeral works. This is a subject frequently considered as an issue among the practitioners working with any type of live performance, which can be partly ascribed to the expectation to adequately revive the past performance through the documentation. However, many live works including my own feature elements such as the experience of one-to-one performance or the immersiveness of solitary soundwalking, which have proved hard to translate through the direct capturing of the performances alone. This article will accordingly discuss an alternative way to view the notion of documentation, in which documentation can serve as more than a mere record of a performance: I will illustrate how the documentation of a work can result in an independent work on its own or form an additional layer within the work, by introducing some of my works that exhibit characteristics of documentation, and the links between those works and their process of being made.