Performing Documents: modelling creative and curatorial engagements with live art and performance archives

Many archives of live art and performance have been or are being produced, as this contemporary form becomes valued by museums or collections internationally gaining significant cultural capital. AHRC funding has or is enhancing a number of key resources, through conservation, cataloguing and digitization, making them accessible to potential user-groups: e.g., Bristol's recently completed project to digitize the National Review of Live Art Video Archive and the award for 'It was forty years ago today...': Locating the Early History of Performance Art in Wales 1965-1979. Performing Documents will research and facilitate a further significant advance in the understanding, engagement with and use of these archival materials and performance archives more widely. Where traditional scholarship has tended to appraise archives in relation to art-historical narratives and read documents as the textual remains of past events, this project will produce models for the investigation of this archival material through practice-as-research. Thus the project will advance an understanding of existing archival holdings through their relationship to current and future creative practice, in ways that will deepen academic, professional and public engagement with what remains of this ephemeral work. Specifically, the project will explore the potential for knowledge transfer from the Live Art and Arnolfini Archives; it will develop practical models for the future use of this material for a wide range of communities of professional users, including scholars, practitioners and curators. It will also develop strategies for the exhibition of these materials and ephemera, such that culturally significant, event-based art can be understood and communicated across generations of artists and scholars, as well as to a broader public.

Practical approaches to historiography will be explored through three distinct dialogues between renowned professional practitioners and scholarly practitioner-researchers, and between academic and cultural industry partners. The first workshop will focus on artists' re-use of their own archival materials; the second on artists' use of other artists' documents; the third on the exhibition of documents and performance ephemera using curatorial practice as its mode of enquiry. Each enquiry explores a distinct approach to engaging with these documents: they model a set of experimental tools for future creative use and re-use. The project will enable audiences, scholars and professional practitioners to access these workshops through a series of symposia and showings, which will make these processes public, alongside ongoing online documentation. The third workshop concludes with a two-day conference that will be synchronized with an exhibition and performance of selected outcomes. This will draw out and make public significant discussions and comparative reflections from the previous symposia and add a wider call for international academic engagement with the project's questions. A co-authored and edited book, combining DVD, will compile documentation and reflection on the practical inquiries, essays from the investigators and developed conference papers. Published by a leading publisher, this will be distributed internationally across the various sectors involved.

Collaboration between the Department of Drama & Theatre Collection (UOB), the Drama Department of Exeter University & cultural-industry partners Arnolfini & Inbetween Time Productions (Bristol) will provide extensive access & dissemination to the various academic & creative-industry constituencies as well as major public engagement. The project's impact will be enhanced by its exhibition and performance outcomes being included in the Arnolfini programme and Inbetween Time international festival of live art (2012). This festival will include a contextualizing archivaldisplay and additional commissioned re-enactments by national and international artists.

Performing Documents will impact on the academic and creative- and cultural-industry sectors' use of live art and performance archives, on curatorial and cultural industries' approaches to showing past ephemeral and time-based art, both in the UK and internationally, developing ways of enhancing re-exhibition in accessible, engaging and performative ways, preserving forms which might otherwise disappear from cultural visibility, unlocking the legacy and value of documents held in collections and communicating the work to future audiences.

This collaborative partnership is ideally placed to facilitate and maximize knowledge-exchange between academic and creative- and cultural-industry constituencies: impacting on scholars (Universities of Bristol and Exeter); museum or gallery-based archivists (Theatre Collection and Arnolfini); professional practitioners; public-arts curators (Arnolfini & Inbetween Time Productions). The partners house internationally significant archives: Arnolfini Archive, Live Art Archives and Exeter Digital Archives.

Insights will be transferable to a wide range of archives and museum-holdings, especially those investigated and visited internationally through the survey (RM1). Models for creative use and the re-purposing of documents will be applicable to a range of collections, enhancing public engagement more generally (RM2).

An international call and bursaries will enable emerging professional practitioners to participate in the workshops alongside doctoral practitioner-researchers. Working with the PI, CIs and renowned artists, Tim Etchells (Forced Entertainment), Lin Hixson and Matthew Goulish (Goat Island), they will gain new insights applicable to their own professional work. The workshops, in interrogating the practice of participating artist-consultants, will enable professional development, enhancing their work with collaborators in their own companies, and through their pedagogy (Hixson and Goulish' Summer School, Art Institute, Chicago).

Through Cole's dialogue with Kaye new tools will be developed for the effective installation and re-exhibition of performance documents and approaches to programming re-enactment and re-use, applicable in future Arnolfini exhibitions and disseminated to other gallery and international festival contexts with which Inbetween Time Productions, Arnolfini and the investigators are networked.

The project's impact will be significantly enhanced by inclusion in the Arnolfini's programme and the Inbetween Time international festival of live art (2012), specifically including additional commissions curated by Cole engaging with the project's core questions. These will facilitate further exchange with professional arts-communities nationally and internationally.

Existing international links (made through the digitization of the NRLA Archive, Performing Presence and JISC-funded workshop/symposium Digital Documentation and Performance) will be developed with consortia working with media art and performance: e.g. Forging the Future: New Tools for Variable Media (Berkeley Art Museum & Franklin Furnace) and Inside Movement Knowledge (International Choreographic Arts Centre & Netherlands Media Art Institute).

There will be considerable opportunity for public engagement with the research processes and outcomes: through the symposia, conference and exhibition held at Arnolfini in the context of this international arts centre. Exhibitions attract 35-45,000. The project website, hosted on Arnolfini's web platform, will make the process accessible remotely to international audiences, scholars and practitioners, through notation, observations and related dialogues. National and international reviews of the exhibition are guaranteed.

Documentation of the outcomes will be accessioned into public collections, Arnolfini Archive - housed in Bristol City Council's Pu