Can (and should) we preserve performing arts?

To collect and preserve are two of our most favorite occupations. What formerly was crucial in order to survive (next to hunting), today has become a hobby: collecting stamps,  old records or postcards are some of the more frequent examples.
We are fascinated by old things as well as by the idea, that we can hold on to someting, even if we know that everything is fading, especially us humans.

Collecting and preserving is what made the institution of the museum necessary. But it was also the reason museum's critics came up with the term of the mausoleum: a dusty place were inanimated objects of the past are storaged and on display.
We want to collect everything: visual arts, all kinds of furniture, means of transport, even life!
The way we display life shows the contradiction of this: natural history museums are full of immobile dolls, bones and padded dead animals. But we seem to be fine with it, in fact, it is most normal to us.

But there are still some things we are just starting to collect and preserve, and that pose a challange:
the performing arts.
Originally, they are more true to life because they base upon the concept of ephemerality.
Perofrmances and Happenings of the 1960ies wanted to connect art with life and with the public. They were situational and ephemeral, could never be repeated the exact same way.

The museum was criticised and called a mausoleum because of its lack of life. So that was what they wanted to change about it. Choreographers are being invited more and more often to dance and perform in museums nowadays. This may seem a paradox at first, because we often connect museums with statues and paintings on the wall. Dance on the other hand we see as something ephemeral, one course of movement after the other, always changing.
To display something ephemeral in a place were otherwise lifeless objects are exposed nonetheless could be seen as a contradiction. But is it really?

Boris Charmatz, well known French choreographer, thought that too...at first.
In 2009 he took over the "Centre National Choréographique" in Rennes, northern France. He wasn't happy with the name of his Centre and chose to rename it "Musée de la Danse" - Dancing Museum. He restructured it as well: It shouldn't be just a place of production and residence but also an experimental place of thinking and "pushing further the borders of this phenomenon called dance".
Then, in the following years, the dead objects and the mausoleum began to interst him more and more, something you can also see if you look at his exhibition: For "brouillon" (2010) he confronted his dancers with works of art he brought into the museum. Later he even chose the traditional format of the monographic exhibition: First he invited famous choreographer Jérôme Bel (2011), followed by Xavier Le Roy (2012) whose "Rétrospective" may be the first retrospective of a dancer in a museum.

You can display dance and performance also with its documenting material. Historic dance exhibitions work this way: "Move: Choreographing you" (2010 in London) and "Danser sa vie" (2011 in Paris) were two recent examples of this kind of exhibition. Both showed the relationship between dance and art in the last century, and to do that videos, texts, photographies, and other documenting material, were used.
My guess is that dance exhibition will increase rapidly in the future. One of the reasons is that the museum isn't just an archival storage anymore, but opened it self up to the performing arts a few decades ago. If the museum wants to stay up-to-date it has to experiment and invite artists from other lines into its spaces.

But can and should we preserve performing arts, as we do with all other arts displayed in museums?

Fact is: Videos and photographies as well as descriptions and other relicts of performances are often equally important and well known as the performance itself. To name just two examples:
The black and white photography of Carolee Schneemann's piece "Interior Scroll" (1975) has found its way into many art history books, as well as VALIE EXPORT's pictures from the "Tapp- und Tastkino" (around 1970).

Can performing arts be preserved in their original way?
Is it enough to preserve them with documents like flyers, descriptions and photographies?
Or is the reenactment the more authentic way to preserve them?

Yes, says Marina Abramovic, often referred to as "mother (or grandmother) of performance".
She lately founded her own institute, which dedicates itself to preserving "her legacy and will serve as her homage to time-based and immaterial art".
She not only tries to safe (a verb she uses often in this context) her performances by documenting them with video, photography and descriptions, but she also teaches people how to re-perform them.
Abramovic explains that she is afraid that people are going to forget about performances if they aren't put on record in one way or another.

I don't doupt that this is one of the main reasons she is doing it, but my guess is that it is also about the fame: to have something material you can preserve and storage not only means that it can be secured for the future but also that it can be canonised.
But what does it mean, if a performance can be repeated again and again, in other contexts and from other performers?
Is seeing Abramovic and her former boyfriend Ulay (with whom she had a troubled relationship) in one of their performances the same thing, as seeing it performed by two students of Ambramovic, many years later?

It is clearly a current topic that requires discussions, because not everyone agrees about it.
Like former dancer and Turner prize nominee Tino Sehgal: he mocks this conservation delusion by leaving documentation out completely. For his exhibitions neither taking videos and photographies is allowed nor catalogues are being published. And by doing so he broaches the issue of preserving performing art just the same!

Charmatz' "Musée de la Danse": http://www.museedeladanse.org/
Abramovic's Institute: http://www.marinaabramovicinstitute.org/


by Hannah Rocchi
Blog: http://hannah-rocchi.blogspot.ch/