Circus studies
Lucie Bonnet, Univ. Grenoble Alpes, CNRS, Litt&Arts, 38000 Grenoble, France
My name is Lucie Bonnet and I am currently in my first year of a PhD in Performing Arts at the University of Grenoble Alpes. I belong to an artistic field which is at the core of my research, that is circus studies. This contribution aims at illustrating the notion of "archive" in light of my physical and scientific practices.
The concept of ‘archive’ is readily called upon and integrated into the research process, but, in the end, it takes on a completely different meaning when one is tasked with the production of these historic documents. This concept is challenged within the performing arts, whose ephemeral character clashes against any and all archival effort, often understood as an attempt at temporal paralysis. Within the scope of two different internship experiences during my Masters in artistic creation – with a specialization in the performing arts – I was confronted with some of the issues raised by this notion in the fields of dance and circus.
Within the framework of the "Archives Plurielles de la Scène" project of the OPSIS program, I have contributed, and continue to contribute, to the archival work of the circus in several collections (Cirque à Grenoble, Collection Jean-Christophe Herveet, etc.). The notion of the archive is used here in a rather conventional way: in a dedicated facility, documents are stored and are then passed through the hands of meticulous people who attend to their transmission and conservation. However, the particularity of these archives is that they focus on the circus arts, which might be described as amnesiac in light of their difficulty in asserting, affirming and preserving a circus history and culture. The term "archive" is used here to describe a quasi-militant act that consists in filling in, step by step, the gaps in memory with which circus is subjected to. In light of this first plunge into the archives, it seems to me that this term, at times somewhat out-dated, implies a great responsibility for the archivist. The selection of documents, the classification method, the storage choice: these all number among the decisions that influence the way in which the history of circus will one day be received. Yet, throughout this experience, I had the feeling that I was an intermediary between the artists’ lived-experience, the history of circus that is being created one step at a time, and the curious potential of these fragments of life.
At the same time, I participated and continue to participate in the Performance Lab’s “Gestures & Frequencies axe. This work package allowed a whole new meaning to the notion of archive, which was gradually replaced by "traces". Here the challenge is to rethink the methodology of creating traces in dance and, to do so, to develop a multimodal archive that makes use of various technologies (sensors and camera for motion capture, 3D avatar, interviews, digital interfaces etc...). This project challenges the type of archiving that dance has known until now, which was limited to audio or video data that excluded the performers in a whole. The archive is here an attempt to approach the reality of the dancer and his or her body as memory, by integrating a plurality of strata, notably his or her oral history and the internal dramaturgy that takes shape during the performance act. This experience was very important to me because it proved to contradict the paradox that the living arts cannot be successfully archived because of their ephemeral nature. In fact, the performer bears an extremely vivid memory, the reactivation of which opens up access to the history of the performances. In both cases, the archive becomes multifaceted and can be claimed as an approach to a given past reality. These traces are justified by a need to reveal voices that are often silenced, ignored or remain unheard. As a result of these experiences, the notion of archive, or traces, is constantly reinvested in my research work, which focuses on a living and embodied archive: the body.
Cite this item: Lucie Bonnet, “Archive”, translated by Caroline Schlenker, Performascope : Interdisciplinary Lexicon of Performance and Research-Creation, Grenoble : Université Grenoble Alpes, 2021, [on line] : http://performascope.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/en/detail/177591
Theater studies
Alice Folco, Univ. Grenoble Alpes, CNRS, Litt&Arts, 38000 Grenoble, France
I am an associate professor in performing arts with the UMR 5316 Litt&Arts laboratory. I originally came from a literary background, and I have since moved into theatrical studies. Thus, I never underwent any methodological training in history and I was even less so introduced to the concepts and subtleties of Archival Studies. Nevertheless, I have a practice of archives, which combines both a form of expertise - that is, the ability to critically examine a certain number of traces that can document the historic material of staging performance in the 19th and 20th centuries- and a concrete experience of rather varied collections, linked firstly to the exploration of resources deposited at diverse public archives, libraries, museums, theaters, etc. and notably scenographic models and finally, the collection of visual or audio documents for the “Archives“ room in the Maison de la Création et de l’Innovation at the Université Grenoble Alpes.
For a long time, I used the term “archive” in its common meaning, and with a slight flair for the magical: I was on a quest for hidden “treasures,” mesmerized by the materiality, raw and outdated, of antique theater programs, of handwritten letterheads, and other slides abandoned in bulk; fascinated by the aura of “authenticity” conferred by traces of paint left on my fingers by scenery mock-ups still yet to be identified. And then, largely as a result of Marion Denizot’s texts on performance archives, I learned to refine my vocabulary. From here on, I prefer to use the term “archives” in the plural in order to refer to an institution or a body of traces that are kept in a (more or less) organized way. For the items themselves – objects, papers, images, etc. – I tend to alternate between “document” and “source”, words that bear witness to the use I make of them, since I now describe myself as a “performance historian”, investigating precise bodies of work with the aim of trying to document facts whenever possible.
In my relationship to “archives” today, there remains, nevertheless, both a trace of my initial naivety – a fascination for the sensorial remains of performances that have disappeared forever, for the objects that trigger an imaginary reconstitution of times gone by – and a commitment to highlighting their probative value. In the particular case of the performing arts – where, by definition, the work itself disappears as soon as the show is over – the recorded trace, in fact, testifies of a vanished practice. Yet, in order for the scenic archive to become proof, it must obviously be considered in a critical perspective that makes it possible for us to grant a kind of guarantee to the history that we are writing. But we must also seek out adequate forms to make this history visible and, so to speak, readable today.
With regard to this final historical and memorial issue of promoting the materials collected, I have for the moment been working mainly in two directions. One is a general and almost metaphysical question: beyond historical writing, what gestures (documentary, artistic, other?) can be used to make the archives of performances that no one has seen anymore, and that no one will ever see again, persist and resonate in the present? The other, a certain historiographic willingness, rooted in the conviction that unpublished archives, barely exploited or newly constituted, could come to disrupt the history of the performing arts and participate in an immense task that many of us are already committed to: a cartography of the “forgotten” – the women, the non-artistic professions, the so-called minor genres, and, as far as I am concerned, essentially the “provincial”.
More from this author:
Alice Folco, « De l’intérêt des sources non artistiques pour penser le geste créateur : archives municipales et décoration théâtrale », Fabriques, expériences et archives du spectacle vivant, B. Boisson, M. Denizot, S. Lucet (dir.), PUR, 2021
Cite this item: Alice Folco, “Archive”, translated by Caroline Schlenker, Performascope : Interdisciplinary Lexicon of Performance and Research-Creation, Grenoble : Université Grenoble Alpes, 2021, [on line] : http://performascope.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/en/detail/177591
