WHAT THEATRE WILL HAVE BEEN BY CHRISTINE

WHAT THEATRE WILL HAVE BEEN

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Archives of the Performing Arts in the Digital Age

By Christine Henniger and Maxim Wittenbecher / Translated by Anna Galt

ABS TR AC T:

Every process in the performing arts leaves traces and signs behind that have a relationship of tension with the ‘now character’ of the performance event. These must be translated into a form, in which they can still be read and understood beyond the present. This process of translating theatre from the past into the future is the task and challenge of the institutions of memory and knowledge that have dedicated themselves to collecting, recording and making findable collections and archives of the performing arts. The possibilities for structuring information in the digital age, for networking, linking and transferring shared knowledge, and therefore also enabling knowledge about theatre to be experienced in diverse ways, offer completely new methods of accessing these traces and signs. Until now, we have not paid much attention to these methods, partly because of their dependence on technology and therefore the apparent accompanying disempowerment of the individual, partly because of how close the digital is to the technological and scientific domains of knowledge, which (previously) seemed incompatible with knowledge about the theatre. However, the effects of digital technologies on the practice, knowledge and records of the theatre are neither positive nor negative per se. They must be understood and questioned in terms of their effect and effectiveness in order to make use of their advantages and to be able to assess and identify their (immanent) problems.

What is not experienced in the present of the performance’s space-time can never be fully known. The performance disappears again in the moment it is created, the performance carries its own disappearance in itself as one of its main characteristics. 2 Archiving the performing arts and handing down what once was from the past to the future seems therefore to be an unusual process that seems to be contrary to the actual character of this art form. What remains are possibly merely a few leftovers, 3 which are not directly the work of art, but rather represent it in parts – a plurimedial 4 puzzle that can barely be put back together (again) into a whole. What remains of the theatre – the leftovers, which supposedly arise accidentally, but also the documentation

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4. The title is a reference to the essay by Martin Nachbar and Jochen Roller: “Was das Archiv gewesen sein wird” (What the Archive Will

Have Been), in: Wolfgang Schneider/Henning Fülle/Christine Henniger (eds), Performing the Archive. Studie zur Entwicklung eines

Archivs des Freien Theaters, Hildesheim/Zürich/New York: Universitätsverlag Hildesheim 2018, pp. 202–224.

Peggy Phelan, for example, views the ephemerality of the performing arts as one of their essential features. See Phelan, Peggy:

Unmarked. The Politics of Performance, London: Routledge 2013.

The project coordinated by Dr Susanne Foellmer addresses this problem: “ÜberReste. Strategien des Bleibens in den darstellenden

Künsten“, which was funded by the DFG from 2014–2018.

Prof Jan Lazardzig calls attentions to this thingly diversity of leftovers in his “Drei Thesen zu einer zeitgemäßen Überlieferungs

strategie des theaterkulturellen Erbes” (Three Theses on a Contemporary Archiving Strategy of Theatre-Cultural Heritage), which he

that is deliberately produced – can however also provide access to what was experienced live and what was not experienced, to what cannot be experienced, what has happened in the performing arts. Every object that documents an event process in the performing arts contains an inherent explanatory power, which must be more closely examined and which can translate this knowledge about this event across space and time.

Making information on objects and events available so that they can be interpreted and analysed in the performing arts is one of the big challenges faced by the knowledge and memory institutions that look after theatre archives in their everyday work. Archiving and especially creating records of theatre performances is a complex process that has to be continually negotiated and in the best case takes internal institutional archiving systems and external search and research methods equally into consideration, in order to offer as many ways to access the information as possible for posterity. The use of a specific language system that tries to capture the history of an object in terms of its creation and reception as well as its potential future in the form of preservation, findability and classification has always been the basis of archive work. While archival classification in the traditional sense concentrates first and foremost on the precise description and cataloguing of physical archive objects in relation to the rest of the collection and the context of the collection in institutions, this is always already a problem for archival practice in the performing arts. 5 This is because one of the biggest problems of the archival recording of information about the performing arts lies in their plurimediality and the relationship of the objects to the dynamic nature of the theatre event. No model of archiving is currently fully suitable for addressing the “eventness” of theatre as well as the focus on objects inherent to the archive itself. None of them allows information on the performing arts that spans both documentation and the event to be sufficiently described. What used to be organised and classified with finding aids, classification lists and index cards now usually takes place digitally in databases, formalised in various data models. The transition to the digital age in the knowledge and memory institutions for the performing arts happened slowly and is still ongoing. Yet precisely this may present an opportunity for the special relationship of the performing arts, in their inextricable link to the event and processuality, to the archive, in its centeredness on objects and facticity.

The use of so-called structured data offers a very promising option for being able to react to the demands described above. 6 It enables findability and comparability by making recurring types of information on objects and artefacts findable in recurring places. Structured data in an archive, and this is a significant advantage for records of the performing arts, is therefore no longer bound to the physical materiality of objects. Increasingly, data on non-tangible “objects” is also recorded in a structured way. This means: it allows ephemera like the events of performances and productions to be described in a structured way. While in the past, relational databases were mainly used to store data like this in table format, today flexible and dynamic technologies and methods are more frequently used,

F.A. Cramer and B. Büscher’s DFG-funded research project “Verzeichnungen” tries to exlpore this problem using tools from

such as the linked data application 7 and the Resource Description Framework (RDF). 8 Here the information is saved as a collection of many individual, clearly defined, almost natural linguistic statements, containing a subject, predicate and object. “Frank Castorf is the director of ‘Die Brüder Karamasov’” is an example of such a statement. The number of statements about a person, a production, a video, etc. are unlimited. It is precisely the fact that they are unlimited that gives the system of these initially simpleseeming statements its flexibility and dynamism. The data models behind such a system, described as ontologies, comprise descriptions of the classes, i.e. kinds of things, and the relationships between these things.

Acentral idea of such linked data ontologies is that they can be shared and used along with their data, and that their applications are openly described in order to give anyone access, not just to the data itself, but also to the language used for the description. 9 This openness makes it possible to link archives from different institutions, thereby making the information coming from them visible so it can be shared and used to complement other records. The Media Centre for Dance and Theatre at the ITI Germany, as a knowledge and memory institution, is working here on the intersection between practical application and theoretical reflection. It works in numerous projects both with freely available structured data, but also generates its own reusable data. It is involved in existing projects in the linked data application area, but also in the cooperative development of data models and data model further development. 10 Furthermore, it seeks and offers a space for discussion on questions about applicability and the limits of such models. Every “How theatre is technological detranslated into the velopment should (digital) archive be questioned therefore depends and discussed in very much equally terms of its strucon the users of the ture and intensystems and models.” tion – so too should the technological implications that linked data-based models bring with them. Because what is said about performing arts events and their documentation must be said in the model’s language system, in which they are described. This means that such models can, firstly, come up against limits of expressivity, i.e. they are not capable of comprehensively representing the intention of the person creating the archive. But they can also categorise things too narrowly and as a result leave too little space for interpretation for the person making the archive and the person searching it. How theatre is translated into the (digital) archive therefore depends very much equally on the users of the systems and models. As diverse as the possibilities of such new, more flexible data models and modelling

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10. An introduction to linked data can be found here: linkeddata.org

A description of RDF can be found here, for example: www.w3.org/RDF

The models range from very simple forms like schema.org to highly complex models for the description of cultural heritage like the

CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CRM).

Worth mentioning here are:

The founding years of the Tanzfabrik Berlin: www.mimecentrum.iti-germany.de/de/projects/tanzfabrik

Meyerhold’s biomechanics and its reconstruction: www.mimecentrum.iti-germany.de/de/projects/digbio

are, so too do they require, on the one hand, a fundamental understanding of digital spheres, systems and the way they work on the part of the user, and on the other, an understanding of the knowledge and description domains on the part of the model’s developer. If the knowledge domains of the performing arts function on an equal level and in cooperation with the technological, information-scientific work processes of the modelling, in which artistic and scholarly reflective processes are studied alongside archiving and modelling processes for possible mutually transformative ways of working, both areas of work can significantly benefit in this crossover area of interdisciplinary and intersectional cooperation and thus enable a more profound critical questioning of the use of digital technologies, also in relation to archives of the performing arts. The possibilities resulting from a decentralisation of information inventories for the dehierarchisation of language, knowledge and information (for the performing arts too) are diverse, but on the other hand, hard to predict. 11 Agency with regard to such new digital systems, however, will only result from testing their practical application, fundamentally recognising structures, categorising them and then questioning how they function. Herein lies one of the strengths of the performing arts and their accompanying Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies – in the relationship of tension between practice and theory in them, which is characterised by a permanent questioning of one’s own working techniques and research methods. They can react quickly and flexibly to the challenges resulting from the digital turn, reflect on and discuss these from different perspectives, negotiate newly created practices and thus link a wide range of ways of working and think about them together.

Christine Henniger manages the Mime Centrum Berlin Media Library for Dance and Theatre at the German Centre of the International Theatre Institute. As part of the Initiative für die Archive des Freien Theaters e.V., she is engaged in setting up a decentralised, digital archive of the performing arts and has co-published the study “Performing the Archive. Studie zur Entwicklung eines Archivs des Freien Theaters”.

Maxim Wittenbecher coordinates the video and media studio at the International Theatre Institute in Berlin. Along with working on several ITI digitalisation projects in the area of cultural heritage – most recently “Nonverbal Theatre in former East Berlin” (2019) – he has developed the digital archive Theater der Welt. He is the coauthor of the Paam data model for cataloguing the contents of the archive for the performing arts.

11. James Bridle, for example, discusses “Handlungsmacht im Zeitalter der Dezentralisierung” (Agency in the Age of Decentralisation) and