Taylor 2003

Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham: Duke UP, 2003.

“Performances function as vital acts of transfer, transmitting social knowledge, memory, and a sense of identity”

Performances as object/process of analysis Performance as methodological lens that enables scholars to analyze events as performance — performance as epistemology, as way of knowing “The many uses of the word performance point to the complex, seemingly contradictory, and at times mutually sustaining or complicated layers of referentiality.” (3)

“Performatico” or “performatic” — “adjectival form of the nondiscursive realm of performance” (6)

“Though ahistorical in some of its practice, there is nothing inherently ahistorical or Western about performance studies. Our methodologies can and should be revised constantly through engagement with other interlocutors as well as other regional, racial, political, and linguistic realities both within and beyond our national boundaries.” (12)

Theatricality, the mechanics of spectacle

Turns to non-European language: “olin,” meaning movement in Nahuatl — “the motor behind everything that happens in life, the repeated movement of the sun, stars, earth, and elements” (14); “areito,” term for song-dance from the Arawack “aririn” (15)

“Performance carries the possibility of challenge, even self-challenge, within it. As a term simultaneously connoting a process, a praxis, an episteme, a mode of transmission, an accomplishment, and a means of intervening in the world, it far exceeds the possibilities of these other words offered in its place.” (15)

“I propose that we proceed from that premise — that we do not understand each other — and recognize that each effort in that direction needs to work against notions of easy access, decipherability, and translatability.” (15)

“By taking performance seriously as a system of learning, storing, and transmitting knwoeldge, performance studies allows us to expand what we understand by ‘knowledge’.” (16

“By shifting the focus from written to embodied culture, from the discursive to the performatic, we need to shift our methodologies. Instead of focusing on patterns of cultural expression in terms of texts and narratives, we might think about them as scenarios that do not reduce gestures and embodied practices to narrative description.” (16)

“The rift, I submit, does not lie between the written and spoken word, but between the archive of supposedly enduring materials (i.e., texts, documents, buildings, bones) and the so-called ephemeral repertoire of embodied practice/knowledge (i.e., spoken language, dance, sports, ritual).” (19)

“Insofar as it constitutes materials that seem to endure, the archive exceeds the live.” (19)

“The repertoire, on the other hand, enacts embodied memory: performances, gestures, orality, movement, dance, singing — in short, all those acts usually thought of as ephemeral, nonreproducible knowledge.” (20)

“The repertoire allows for an alternative perspective on historical processes of transnational contact and invites a remapping of the Americas, this time by following traditions of embodied practice.” (20)

“This means that the repertoire, like the archive, is mediated. The process of selection, memorization or internalization, and transmission takes place within (and in turn helps constitute) specific systems of re-presentation.” (21)

PRESERVATION — moving materials from the repertoire into the archive

“Part of what performance and performance studies allow us to do, then, is take seriously the repertoire of embodied practices as an important system of knowing and transmitting knowledge.” (26

“Instead of privileging texts and narratives, we could also look to scenarios as meaning-making paradigms that structure social environments, behaviors, and potential outcomes.” (28)

“The challenge is not to ‘translate’ from an embodied expression into a linguistic one or vice versa but to recognize the strength sna limitatons”

“the notion of the scenario allows us to more fully recognize the many ways in which the archive and the repertoire work to constitute and transmit social knowledge. The scenario places spectators within its frame, implicating us in its ethics and politics” (33)

“Even though the relationship between the archive and the repertoire is not by definition antagonistic or oppositional, written documents have repeatedly announced the disappearance of the performance practices involved in mnemonic transmission. Writing has served as a strategy for repudiating and foreclosing the very embodiedness it claims to describe.” (36)

“What is at risk politically in thinking about embodied knowledge and performance as ephemeral as that which disappears? Whose memories ‘‘disappear’’ if only archival knowledge is valorized and granted permanence? Should we simply expand our notion of the archive to house the mnemonic and gestural practices and specialized knowledge transmitted live? Or get beyond the confines of the archive?” (36)