Performance Ghosting and Memory Processes

In 2002, with performer/writer/maker Sue Palmer, I staged an environmentally-specific, one-woman, durational production on the heritage ship the SS Great Britain, which now lies in the dry dock in Bristol’s Floating Harbour from where it was originally launched in 1843. Mnemosyne Dreams was designed to investigate the interactions of small-scale spectacle, actor-audience relationship, memory processes and contesting histories. It was also the second of five PARIP practical projects partly intended to provide material for research into digital documentation of practice as research, mainly in the form of interactive DVDs.

This three-hour workshop aims to animate the relationships between aspects of the original staging of Mnemosyne Dreams and the resultant DVD in order to explore the spectral dynamics of ‘live’ and ‘mediated’ performance. It will demonstrate the DVD as a preamble to a straightforward game in ‘ghost-memory’ processes as a potential route to reanimating aspects of past live performances. It will address the question of whether this form of access to past live performances via their traces might in some senses constitute a ‘restaging’ of spectator experience of the ‘original’ event. The differences between re-playing, replication, resuscitation and other modes of creative reproduction inform this experiment in the doubling of memory of performances not seen by participants, except through their ‘documents’. My hypothesis is that such doubling – the invisible aspect of Richard Schechner’s notion of twice-behaved behaviour – may shape the experience of participants in ways that newly revitalise the relationship between ‘documents’ and the long-gone live performance. It might be helpful to think of this workshop process as something like a game of reversed Chinese whispers, in which each step of memory making might seduce one into a sense of hearing the echoes of the beginning voice. Of course that voicing has gone forever, but its exact placement in present memories might determine a resonance in the echoes that haunted the live performance itself.

The workshop is an interactive installation incorporating material used in the original staging of Mnemosyne Dreams plus the PARIP DVD. Participants will explore the long-gone show through its digital and material traces in small groups. They may create ‘routes’ through the installation that, as it were, ‘ghost’ the memories which spectators of the original production are known to have had, some recorded on the DVD. Through this the workshop aims to ‘model’ modes of ‘reproductive memory’ – the transmission of experience between past and present through live memorialisation – for their significance to the live/mediated debate (Phelan/Auslander/etc.), playing with the differences between re-playing, replication, resuscitation. Feedback will be gathered from participants to evaluate the design of the experiment and its results. The installation will run to a 1-hour cycle, with places for 10-12 participants per cycle.

In ancient Greek mythology Mnemosyne was the goddess of memory and mother of the nine muses. This project is dedicated to her dreams.

See Chapter 5 of Baz Kershaw, The Radical in Performance: Between Brecht and Baudrillard (London: Routledge, 1992).

Panel abstract:

Orality and Memory: Processes in Performance: Challenges for Research

In the beginning there was the word…

…and so it remained thereafter…

There are no abstracts for this panel. Whilst the contributors are in no way arguing for the redundancy of the written, all are concerned that their subject matter should itself be embodied in its delivery to the conference. This problematic, ‘or how to’, is in part the focus of the panel itself: how can - should - a panel which attends to the embodied actualities of the spoken, to the immediacy of utterance, give itself over to the formulation of knowledge qua text, seemingly necessitated by conference abstracts and papers? Given the panels focus on orality and embodied modes of memory, we have taken a deliberate step to conduct both our presentations and our pre-conference dealings without recourse to the written word. The panel will concern itself with the notion that there is an embodied knowledge – a corpus – which unfolds in oral discourse to which the written word is not privy directly. It is this knowledge to which the panel will both attend, and in turn enact. The ‘abstracts’, such as they are, consist in the disappeared and unreferable utterances made to and amongst the panel in its convention. As such, they have no existence without audience, and thus will be given fuller and more extended utterance (for those who wish to hear them), as sung, chanted, told, ranted, and related by the panel participants at Bretton Hall.

The contributions to the panel will include discussion of: the word in the institution; historical memory in performance; orality as public event; orality as cultural memory.

The panel contributors recognise that this deferral of the normal procedure of presenting abstracts perhaps seems to suggest a noncommittal approach to both conference and content. To this end, conference participants wanting more information about the content of the various contributions are encouraged to contact the panel convenor by telephone, and speak with him directly. We hope that this opportunity for direct dialogue both acknowledges the need to be open about our aims to the conference, and stays true to the rationale we have set for ourselves.

Panel convenor: Martin Welton (tel. +44 (0)20 7882 7541)

Panel contributors:

Martin Welton

Baz Kershaw

Caoimhe McAvinchey