written by Beth Potter

As I write this, by hand at first to keep things loose and free, I sit before a document on my laptop screen, a dense 39 pages of notes. Its title is ‘BBC Written Archives visit’, and I compiled it in early September during three intense – enriching, nourishing, project-broadening, but intense – days in Caversham a few weeks ago, during which my neck cracked a thousand times and no amount of shoulder rolls saved my back from the archive ache.

The visit was long-awaited, and came almost exactly a year after I first requested material from the BBC Written Archives Centre (WAC). It felt, to be sure, ecstatic, as my supervisor had hinted it might, to be back sifting through old letters and carbon-copied memo papers, my clean hands gaining a film of tacky archive dust as I leafed my way through stacks of cardboard files. But now I’m back, at a desk, frontloaded with all the photographs (3,186 in the folder, I just checked) and notes I could accumulate in those three short days, I don’t feel very ecstatic at all; I feel daunted. What was a (paradoxically?) stiff-bodied but lively few days soaking up the experience of the archive – noting who came and went, what conversations I had with the archivists or other researchers, what things smelt like (horribly, beautifully, almost-mouldy) – has become a list of pixels on a screen again. I’ll have to read it all back through again, remember it all again, make myself experience it all again, all 39 pages and 3,186 photographs of it, I think, but this time in pixel form. And I’ve had enough of pixels this year. 

I’m grateful, though, to my archive self who, true to her name, archived the archive as she went. Just before lunch on Day 1, I/she writes , ‘Right now my mouth feels a bit like Steedman’s, a bit furry, breath dusty, musty, lips dry, but they also feel like they have ink on them, cakey.’ A moment later, Lu, the archivist, tells me how she’s so happy and lucky to work there: she loves that as an institutional archive – a corporation, even a business archive – the documents show the care (or not – she side-eyes) that the corporation gives its contributors and puts into its work. She’s been vetting the material I’m looking at today for months, and says she’s enjoyed noticing how the business-speak of correspondence between the corporation and the circuses they employed for Outside Broadcast entertainments has elided into personal catch-ups: great show, new contract in the post soon, and thanks for having the kids over for dinner on Friday, Ronnie, love to your wife; you must both come over soon. I trace these relationships through the archive as I follow Lu’s footsteps across these files. Occasionally she places a black rectangle over some information I’d love to see, redacting, institution looming over a photocopied page. I experience three concurrent timelines: the time of writing these documents; then Lu’s timeline, her hand popping up in December 2020 when they thought the archive would re-open, then May, then July, then here she is again in August, dating a slip to vet the file as my visiting days approached; then me, today (or not today – in September – I forget when I am). 

But maybe it’s four timelines, actually, for one is hidden from me entirely: is its own elisions and gaps, the things I assume have happened or still do not (will never) know about. Case in point: a show that has all the planning documents for it, scripts written, cameraman contracted, but which never materialised (or would it ever have been material?) – no ‘Programme as Broadcast’ record splicing the file into a ‘before’ and an ‘after’ transmission like there usually is, but instead a letter lamenting the failure of the OB connection at Winkfield, individual apology notes to each circus act – how fantastic you looked in rehearsal, such a deep shame, nothing we could do, sometimes the live line just drops and that’s that. I find myself wishing I could see that show, but there is no trace: no recording to call up and watch as it stutters, or which will show me the behind-the-scenes aftermath of confusion and vast disappointment at a Christmas Day failure live on the BBC in 1957. But then I think, I never called up the recordings that broadcast without a hitch anyway, never saw those either: did the show not happening really make any difference to me here, now? 

Reading my archive of my archive trip puts me right back there again, a form of time travel to just two weeks ago when I was there (I know I should’ve written this blogpost earlier, kept it fresh, but maybe writing by hand and letting my memories spill onto the page directly from my hand is helping). I’m back in this imaginative space I’ve constructed, thinking about the frustration and potential of the gaps – and all the while sure that I too am now eliding, here in writing, am forgetting (I should have written this on my way back home on the bus, I was too tired then, but isn’t tired and loose better than forgetful?).

At lunchtime on Day 3 my phone photographs of yellow page after yellow page of script drafts (not aged: this BBC producer liked using mustard yellow card for camera scripts, so hold your clichés) are interrupted with a photo of some trees and a fence. I have taken a walk around the BBC WAC, on the compound of BBC Monitoring Services (apt, I think: they’re monitoring, I’m monitoring, my walk round the back of the compound has inevitably been captured on CCTV – they are funny with security here; I’m not supposed to take photos of the building). This is the place where BBC staff have kept tabs on international media since before World War 2, where they listened to Soviet Radio through the Cold War, and where they are still listening – even now. And now the archives are here too, throwing a surveying eye backwards; and now I am here, documenting it all, every last bit: page, tree, fence, bench – there’s even a picture of my boots by the reception intercom while I stand and wait for them (them) to let me in, and a close-up of a gate round the back of the compound. This one is of a fence that seems to bifurcate my own mental mapping of the BBC site – but that must be wrong, surely, as a metal sign on the fence reads

WARNING: POLICE DOGS
TRAINING IN THIS AREA

(PRIVATE PROPERTY BY PERMISSION)

And I think: what do they think I’ll find in the next file? 

We stand in solidarity with those at the University of Roehampton who are facing cuts in the Drama, Theatre & Performance, and Dance departments. 

Sixty per cent of Roehampton’s performing arts students are Black or from other minoritised ethnic backgrounds. Cutting these programmes that have been so successful in supporting Black British and other under-represented students is especially misjudged, at a time when HE institutions should be urgently decolonising and diversifying their spaces. We condemn the Vice Chancellor’s decision to cut funding in the very departments which support historically under-represented artists and cultural producers, and provide space for them to excel.  

As TaPRA and others have suggested, these cuts are also ideological in nature, in line with the UK government’s short-sighted bias against the arts and humanities and its instrumentalisation of HE to these ends. 

Please consider signing the petition to oppose the proposed £3.2 million cuts. 

Read Dr Kélina Gotman’s letter in response to the proposed cuts here.

Read about the Vision for Roehampton here.

We are excited to announce the launch of the Performance@ Postgraduate Reading Group.

Meeting online once a month, our aim is to read, discuss, and share our own and others’ work in an exploratory and supportive environment.

In each session the group will either read a combination of theoretical texts and performance studies works, talk through thorny research questions, or share our own works-in-progress. We hope that our diverse interests and the range of angles with which we approach performance research will encourage fertile points of discussion. As interdisciplinary humanities researchers, we are eager to investigate how our work intersects and diverges across the field of performance studies.

All meetings will be held online for the foreseeable future. While the ongoing COVID-19 crisis has necessitated this arrangement, we are motivated by the way that our geographical remoteness – and our desire to remain connected – has the potential to bring together scholars who would normally be unable to meet and engage in discussion. As such, we invite scholars from King’s, UCL, and beyond to participate.

The first session will take place on Tuesday 13 October, from 16:00-17:30. Please email beth.potter@kcl.ac.uk to receive both the recommended reading ahead of the session, and a Zoom link. 

by Paul Readman, Professor of Modern British History, King’s College London

Restaging the Past is a new book is from UCL Press, available for free open-access download here: https://www.uclpress.co.uk/products/123496. Also available for £25 in paperback.

Restaging the Past is the first edited collection devoted to the study of historical pageants in Britain, ranging from their Edwardian origins to the present day. Across Britain in the twentieth century, people succumbed to ‘pageant fever’. Thousands dressed up in historical costumes and performed scenes from the history of the places where they lived, and hundreds of thousands more watched them. These pageants were one of the most significant aspects of popular engagement with the past between the 1900s and the 1970s: they took place in large cities, small towns and tiny villages, and engaged a whole range of different organised groups, including Women’s Institutes, political parties, schools, churches and youth organisations.

Pageants were community events, bringing large numbers of people together in a shared celebration and performance of the past; they also involved many prominent novelists, professional historians and other writers, as well as featuring repeatedly in popular and highbrow literature. Although the pageant tradition has largely died out, it deserves to be acknowledged as a key aspect of community history during a period of great social and political change. Indeed, as this book shows, some traces of ‘pageant fever’ remain in evidence today.

Find out more about Paul Readman’s Historical Pageants project here.

Paul Readman, Professor of Modern British History, Department of History, Vice-Dean (People and Planning) for Languages & Literatures, King’s College London. https://www.kcl.ac.uk/people/paul-readman; paul.readman@kcl.ac.uk

by Corrie Tan, Ph.D. Candidate, Theatre Studies, King’s College London and National University of Singapore

Throughout July and August 2020, the Southeast Asian arts platform ArtsEquator organised a four-part series of online talks titled Burning Questions. COVID-19 has exposed the extreme precarity of the arts sector in the Southeast Asia region, and ArtsEquator hoped to offer a space for regional voices to dialogue and discuss some of the difficult questions facing the transnational arts community during the pandemic. This panel on July 28, “Is There Still Hope for Integrity and Intimacy in Online Performance?”, investigated the various possibilities around keeping intimacy alive between artists and their audiences against the backdrop of social distancing and restrictions on travel worldwide.

The panel was facilitated by Corrie Tan, contributing editor at ArtsEquator and a third-year doctoral candidate on the joint PhD programme between King’s College London and the National University of Singapore. This panel featured three practitioners from the region: dance artist Bernice Lee (Singapore), cultural critic and activist Katrina Stuart Santiago (Manila) and puppet artist Maria “Ria” Tri Sulistyani (Yogyakarta). Questions that surfaced included: What does it mean to maintain the structural and foundational integrities (ethics, credibility, honesty) of artistic practices and cultural labour, even if the way practices now unfold may take different shapes or forms? What new intimacies of care and reciprocity might be formed?

Ria talked about her company Papermoon Puppet Theatre’s recent show A Bucket of Beetles (premiered August 2020), which incorporated barter exchanges into its ticketing framework for local Indonesian audiences who might otherwise have struggled with the financial investment of a theatre ticket. Ria also highlighted a series of Instagram Live conversations she hosted with puppeteers from around the world in a gesture of cross-border solidarity. Katrina talked about the advocacy work and food distribution she’s doing with her non-profit organisation PAGASA (People for Accountable Governance and Sustainable Action), and how her intermediary role as a cultural critic helped build a culture of trust and support in the thick of the Duterte regime. Bernice shared about her work with children as various workshops transitioned to the digital sphere, but also her long-time practice of #ghosting and how she’s been playing with the female gaze online. She also introduced her experiments with touch and the intimacy of being in domestic spaces with various branches of a collaborative long-term project called Tactility Studies (for which Corrie is dramaturg).

Through discussions of their work and current practices, the panel mapped out a sense of how intimacy and spectatorship has transformed across the cultural capitals of Manila, Yogyakarta and Singapore, and the possibilities of building expanded transnational relationships.

Corrie TAN (she/her) 陳霖靈; Ph.D. Candidate, Theatre Studies; Department of English Language & Literature; Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences; National University of Singapore; Block AS5, 7 Arts Link, Singapore 117570; corrie.tan@u.nus.edu; www.corrie-tan.com

To whom this may concern,

We are writing to let you know that we are still here. On Wednesday 6th May, the Performance@ administrators met with Kélina Gotman to talk about how to launch Performance@ in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic. It was invigorating to hear each other’s voices and to see each other’s faces on our screens at home.

A conversation.
Our topic of conversation was seemingly simple: What does the scheduled launch of this performance network look like now? This simple question provoked a series of deeper meditations: Who is involved, now that we are not, per se, geographically restricted? How do we demarcate the boundaries of this network at a time when borders and divisions are changing, moving, devolving, and inevitably, re-appearing in new forms, more tangible than ever? And how should we launch? On whose terms, where, when, with what technological affordances? What would be an adequate event, a sufficient gathering, an apt happening? By which we really mean to say, what is performance now?

Solidarity.
We find ourselves in a time of deep questioning, of social and economic upheaval, of lifestyle and habitual change, and of loss. Through the collective trauma of COVID-19, many of us have lost physical contact. We have lost contact with loved ones, with the elderly, with the rhythms of our day, with ourselves even. We have lost contact with our sense of normal, whatever that may be. This loss of contact almost feels like a unifying experience, perhaps allowing solidarity in a time of extreme solitude. Our bereavement for contact feels inimitably bound to matters of corporeality, liveness, presence, embodiment,– that is, bound to long-established frameworks for understanding performance. And so perhaps this, more than even, is the best time to be launching Performance@?

Solace.
Everyone decides to walk. Or at least, it feels like a decision. People smile as you pass them, it’s quiet and across the street a sheet of newspaper drifts naturally on the breeze. There is no traffic. Your phone buzzes in your pocket. Two different people who have never met instantaneous send you the same Snoop Dogg meme. You smile. A bird sings in a tree. You have walked for 45 minutes. This is a new route for you. You remember to side-step around the couple with a pushchair. It’s easier for you. They thank you with a nod. Their child is wearing a mask. It is 245pm. You cannot remember what you did this morning. Tomorrow you will Facetime your Nan on her carer’s iPad. She is hallucinating, with COVID-19 they later realise. You teach her how to close her eyes and count her breaths, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, … She seems almost to fall asleep, almost.

Security vs. Morality.
Someone remarked on Instagram the other day that this is the first time their tendency toward rebelliousness had conflicted with their moral compass. The securitisation of social distancing via the police-enforced state of “lockdown” re-articulates behaviours we might otherwise see as respectful, thoughtful, sensible, through a legal framework. What does performance studies look like in a time when the command of law over how bodies may co-exist in space has so radically shifted? That my body may not legally come into the same 2-metre sphere as yours is a remarkable event in the history of global biopolitics, demanding swift critical reflection. Performance studies is poised to commence this interrogation, whenever we are recovered and ready to do so.

A letter.
It seemed like the best thing to write this letter. The internet is amass with COVID-19 statements, policies, regulations, restrictions, people reduced to figures of precarity, mobility and mortality. A letter is first and foremost an address. Maybe the letter says something of note. Maybe you lift a phrase from the letter, pin it to your wall, to remind you to respond. But if nothing else, a letter is a point of contact. It says: we are still here. It says: you are still here. It says: we are here together.