Documentation as Artistic Research           

Currently, I am interested in exploring documentation as a distinct artistic practice. In 2012, I had several opportunities to conduct experiments in various settings both with students, as well as with performing artists. In order to examine questions of documentation both in a practical as well as artistic way, I provided the participants with a photo camera, audio recording devices, paper, writing materials and crayons, in addition to a video camera.  A short, performance sequence was repeated several times. The first time, participants should just watch, the second time document and the third time revise or modify their documents. Giving participants a second chance at documentation allowed them to question whether they chose the “correct” instrument the first time around and whether their idea of what was to be documented really fulfilled itself.

This setting is based on my belief that dance as an art form cannot be described in its entirety by a single medium alone. Photo material, moving images, interviews and notations of all kinds provide a container of documents, which are able to make statements about dance as containers of knowledge. In doing so, they may strongly diverge from the visual representation of a performance and thus also fail to substitute it. However, they involve others senses and say something about the dance or the performance, which goes beyond simple representation. Thus they enable new visions of a documentary approach to dance that also provide us with the chance to regard and utilize documentation as a source of inspiration for our own artistic work.

In a workshop for the masters program Contemporary Dance Pedagogy (ztp) at the Frankfurt University for Music and Performing Art, I presented participants with a five-minute performative structure that contained movement, images and language. The students were given the chance to choose a means of documentation. In a second round, they were asked to select a different form of documentation or to elaborate the one already chosen. As the students approached the action without inhibition using photo cameras, video cameras and audio recordings tools, they themselves became part of the ‘performance’. With each new round, their reflection of how and what they were observing as well of their choice of means, increased – simultaneously generating new ideas for creative work.

Joa Hug, a dancer-performer in the Artistic Research Lab associated with Tanzfabrik Berlin, formulated the following words after a lab in March 2012:

“Documentation can reveal and make intelligible that which was implicit to the maker or conceiver of the performance. It can be creative, inventive, performative; it doesn’t need to aspire to be faithful to representing that which is actually there, but it can enter the realm of the virtual. The act of documenting is always an act of changing, maybe even transforming the documented; maybe it is precisely this that is the task of the documenter: to enter the work, but then to create his or her own piece (artistic research as documentation). This need not be a violation of the creator’s original intention (although it can feel like that), but it can be perceived as an act of collaboration in which the unconscious or unthought-of in a work is brought to the fore and made sensible and perceivable.”