Look, I have nothing against scholars. Hell, I am one, PhD and all, even if that fact makes me want to punch myself in the face sometimes. But there’s a particular kind of fuckery that happens when really smart people theorize about performance in ways that completely erase how it’s actually made. When they’re basically exquisitely credentialed theater critics with footnotes, writing from the mezzanine instead of backstage, where the real work happens.
Here’s what decades floundering in this field has taught me (first as a production assistant to Anna Deavere Smith; then grinding it out at Mabou Mines with Lee Breuer; selling out to make Google commercials for people who’d never set foot in a theater and wouldn’t know Brecht from a breakfast burrito; eventually producing, dragging fragments of Aeschylus and Sophocles and Euripides back from the dead for site-specific productions that only a few chosen people get to see; co-directing Genet’s The Balcony at San Francisco’s Old Mint where the ghosts of dead money still haunt the walls; documenting the work of artists like Guillermo Gomez-Peña and Ron Athey who were actually doing something dangerous; teaching at Stanford’s d.school to kids who thought “design thinking” was a personality trait; shooting Alonzo King’s dancers until my arms hurt and my bank account wept; teaching in the Film and Digital Media Department at UCSC to undergrads who just wanted to work at Pixar): there’s a particular strain of academic horseshit that poisons how some, too many in leadership roles, think about performance.
There’s been some real damage done by smart people, really fucking smart people, theorizing about theater and dance from the cheap seats, writing purple prose about ephemera while ignoring the grunt work that makes the magic trick work. They’re theater critics with PhDs and tenure. Exquisitely footnoted. And they’ve never broken a sweat in a rehearsal room. Never had to find a bathroom backstage at 3 AM in some abandoned warehouse. Never begged for grant money. Never seen an actor cry because they finally nailed it on the seventy-third rep.
And here’s where it gets worse: these professors trained a whole generation of arts administrators, the people now running foundations, theaters, dance companies, cultural institutions. Their star students who wrote brilliant seminar papers about the ontology of disappearance, got their MFAs in Arts Management or whatever the fuck, and went straight from the classroom to their comped orchestra seats. To the donor galas. To the grant panels where they decide who eats and who doesn’t.
They never built a set. Never stage-managed a show. Never loaded a truck at 2 AM. Never had to explain to a dancer why there’s no money for physical therapy but plenty for the board retreat in Napa. They absorbed the ephemerality gospel in graduate school and now they’re running the institutions, making budgets, writing grant requirements, spouting the same theoretical horseshit their professors and TAs fed them, because it justifies every cost-cutting decision, every refusal to pay for documentation, every ‘we love your work but there’s no money’ conversation while they’re sipping mediocre warm wine at the opening night party they somehow found budget for.
They learned that performance disappears, so they don’t have to make it last. Fuck you.
Not everyone’s full of shit. Rebecca Schneider dropped Performance Remains twenty years ago and told everyone to calm the fuck down: performance doesn’t evaporate into the ether, it “remains” differently, “in bodies, in habits, in residue” (Schneider 102). Diana Taylor built a whole theory around the repertoire: embodied practice as memory, as transmission. Not some David Blane disappearing act (Taylor 19). André Lepecki wrote books about choreography as repetition, how bodies drilled through movement become both aesthetic and political machines (Lepecki 45).
These people get it. They’re thinking about the actual material systems, the infrastructure of how performance moves through the world.
But they’re responding to an earlier generation of theory that refuses to die. The one that insists performance is inherently ephemeral, resistant to documentation, exists “only in the present.” That theory’s still hanging around like a drunk uncle at Thanksgiving, and it left a toxic mess in its wake. Not just in academic writing, in institutions, in labor practices, in how artists like me get valued and paid.
So let’s talk about how an ontology built on disappearance fucked over a generation of performance makers photographers, videographers and archivists.
The scripture here is Peggy Phelan’s Unmarked (1993). “Performance’s only life is in the present,” she wrote. “Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented…” (Phelan 146). Its power, she argued, comes from its disappearance.
I took classes with Peggy at Stanford. She’s brilliant, genuinely brilliant. And politically, in the 90s, that book mattered. It gave critical weight to feminist and queer performance at a time when museums wanted nothing to do with any of it. That was necessary work.
But as an ontological claim about what performance is?
It’s buying the kayfabe.
People read, or maybe misread, Phelan and think they’re witnessing something unrepeatable, some kind of holy spontaneous liveness. They think they’re watching magic when what they’re actually watching is a highly engineered illusion. And I get why it looks that way from the audience. That’s the whole goddamn point of the trick.
Herbert Blau understood this better than most. The audience, he argued, is itself an illusion, something constructed by the performance, not some neutral observer sitting out there in the dark (Blau 25). There is no pre-existing audience. Performance produces its spectators through repetition, through conventions, through doing it over and over until the event coheres. He called this “ghosting”, the presence conjured through absence, through previous iterations haunting every gesture (Blau 163).
Side note: Herb Blau read my dissertation and gave me fifty single-spaced pages of notes. Fifty pages. This was a man who gave a shit about ideas. We spent hours on the phone while he told stories about building the early avant-garde scene in San Francisco, creating something from nothing in a city that didn’t know it wanted it yet.
And here’s what Blau got that the ephemerality crowd missed: recognizing that presence is constructed doesn’t make performance less real, it makes the construction more visible. It honors the labor of building the machine.
Here’s what goes down before that curtain rises:
We spend weeks in rehearsing. Sometimes months. The actors do a scene. They do it again. And again. And again. They do it fifty more times until their bodies memorize it, not just their minds, their whole body. The muscles remember. The vocal cords remember. You’re literally writing a script into their nervous system through repetition. The French don’t even bullshit about it, they call rehearsal répétition. Because that’s what it is. Repetition. Groundhog Day with blocking notes.
If you look at my work, the thousands of photos I’ve shot of rehearsals over the years, you’ll see I document this process obsessively. Not the dressed-up finished product with lighting cues and program notes. The studio. The sweat. The repetition. Because that’s where the art lives. That’s where discovery happens. That’s what the audience is applauding without knowing it.
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Opening night? From the house it looks spontaneous, alive, ephemeral. From backstage? It’s a reconstruction. A reproduction of everything that came before. The actor’s body is the recording device.
This is what Schneider was pointing to: performance doesn’t vanish. It remains in bodies through labor, through training, through repetition. But she, Taylor, and Lepecki are still arguing against this lingering romance of disappearance that obscures the real conditions of how performance gets made.
So let me be clear:
* Performance’s ontology is repetition with variation, not unmediated presence.
* Documentation doesn’t betray performance; it constitutes it.
* The audience experiences a constructed illusion, not spontaneous liveness.
* Rehearsal labor creates the performance object.
That last one? That’s the one with real-world consequences. That’s the one that determines whether artists eat.
You want to see repetition taken to its logical extreme? Look at Robert Wilson. Wilson choreographs every movement to the count. A hand gesture? Timed. A cross? Timed. His actors move like living architecture, every motion drilled into ritualistic precision (Holmberg 112). Influences from silent film, Buster Keaton, Merce Cunningham, George Balanchine. Time stretched into sculpture.
And Wilson doesn’t lie about it. He doesn’t romanticize spontaneity. The whole enterprise is a machine of repetition.
Ask Aleta Hayes, who performed with him. Ask her about drilling the same gesture for hours until it carved itself into muscle memory. Ask her about reproducing the same sequence with mechanical accuracy, night after night.
There’s nothing “only in the present” about it. It’s ruthlessly, beautifully past-tense.
Let’s talk about Chris Burden. In 1971, the man had someone shoot him in the arm with a rifle. Shoot. You want ephemerality? You want the myth of the unrepeatable moment? That’s about as extreme as it gets.
Except only twelve people were in that gallery. In a gallery in Santa Ana, California. And what happened to that supposedly powerful disappearance? One art critic reviewing a 1998 survey show complained, “You had to be there,” as if this was some kind of tragedy, some irreplaceable loss.
Yet everyone knows about Shoot. Why?
Because Burden filmed it.
He Photographed it too. His wife Barbara helped documented it. And here’s the part the theorists don’t want to talk about: Burden didn’t just accidentally document it. He carefully curated the documentation. He’d take the photographs home and study them “for a l-o-o-o-ng time,” then select one image to represent the whole thing. He reduced the event to a terse description: “At 7:45pm I was shot in the left arm by a friend. The bullet was a copper jacket 22 long-rifle. My friend was standing about fifteen feet from me.” He called these photographs “symbols.”
He shaped the documentation into its own aesthetic form (Govan et al. 121).
In 1974, he self-published Deluxe Photo Book 71–73: archival documentation that sold decades later for thirty-five thousand dollars.
Thirty-five thousand. For documentation of supposedly “unrecordable” work.
The documentation wasn’t a supplement. The documentation wasn’t a betrayal.
The documentation was the fucking work.
This isn’t unique to body art. Brecht did it with his Modellbücher: photographs, diagrams, notes intended not to “capture” a production but to generate future ones (Brecht 7). Documentation as a forward-facing dramaturgical machine.
Performance survives because artists document it. Period.
Or look at Alexey Brodovitch. The man revolutionized how we see ballet, not by freezing dancers in perfect crystalline poses like some calendar photographer, but by using blur, motion, grain. His photographs from the 1930s and 40s weren’t trying to “capture” the ephemeral moment. They were creating a parallel aesthetic language. The blur wasn’t a failure of the technology… it was the point. He understood that documentation doesn’t preserve performance; it translates it into another medium entirely, with its own rules, its own power.
Brodovitch’s photos didn’t make people not want to see ballet. They made people desperate to see it. The documentation became its own form of circulation, its own mode of memory. His images are how we remember dancers who’ve been dead for eighty years. And nobody, nobody, wrings their hands about whether his photographs “betrayed” the liveness of dance. Because that would be fucking stupid.
Documentation doesn’t kill performance. It’s how performance stays alive.
This is where Auslander and Roach come in, who, frankly, should have killed the ephemerality fantasy decades ago. Philip Auslander argued that liveness is not an ontological state but a historically shifting category defined in relation to recording technologies. Performance borrows credibility from mediation and vice versa. There is no “pure presence”, just relational frameworks.
Now Auslander’s a problematic figure, he’s been rightfully called out for sloppy theoretical work, for applying theory without really understanding the material practices he’s writing about. Judith Butler herself took him to task for exactly the kind of armchair theorizing I’m complaining about here. The irony isn’t lost on me. But even a broken clock gets it right twice a day, and on this specific point, that liveness is constructed, not inherent… so he’s not wrong.
Joseph Roach, on the other hand? Unimpeachable. The man’s a fucking titan. Roach emphasized “surrogation”: the way cultural memory persists through substitution, repetition, reenactment. Performance reproduces itself across bodies, time, and contexts… always haunted… never original. Roach actually understands how culture works, how bodies remember, how performance moves through the world. He’s one of the real ones.
Both of them dismantled the myth of disappearance. Both reinforced what artists already knew:
Performance circulates. Performance reproduces. Performance remembers.
Now look, I do site-specific work. Outdoor theater. Theater in the wild. And yeah, each performance is technically “unique.” A seagull shitting on Hamlet during “Alas poor Yorick?” Not repeatable. Rain on Tuesday, clear skies Wednesday. Random drunk guy stumbling in thinking it’s an actual wedding.
But uniqueness isn’t ontology. It’s noise in the system.
Goffman’s performance frame (Goffman 82) and Schechner’s restored behavior (Schechner 35) both tell us the same thing: the accidents aren’t the performance. They’re variables intruding on the repeatable core. The scaffolding underneath.
And audiences know about repetition. They fucking love it. Hamilton superfans don’t go back seventeen times for “spontaneity.” They go for precision. Craft. Reproduction.
Here’s where Shannon Jackson becomes essential. In Social Works, she argues that performance is never just an aesthetic act—it’s infrastructural. It depends on institutions, spaces, labor systems, networks of care. Institutions don’t just house performance; they co-produce it (Jackson 15).
And here’s the kicker: institutions love the ephemerality myth because it lets them off the hook.
If performance “disappears,” then:
* They don’t have to fund documentation
* They don’t need robust archives
* They don’t have to compensate rehearsal labor as part of “the art”
* They can ignore long-term infrastructural support
Ephemerality becomes austerity in theory drag.
This isn’t ontology. This is budgetary convenience.
The worst part? The people running cultural institutions (grantmakers, administrators, funders) were educated during the heyday of 90s ephemerality theory and never updated their software. They’re still quoting this crap like gospel at panel discussions, decades after the field moved on.
Meanwhile painters get their work archived, conserved, catalogued, insured. When I photograph paintings, the documentation itself becomes part of the artwork’s market life. It increases value.
Dancers? Actors? The people whose work literally cannot exist without repetition and labor?
Broke.
I spent years at Google after grad school making videos for a company that probably did more harm than good to human consciousness. But say what you want: they understood documentation as infrastructure. Memory as infrastructure. Reproduction as cultural technology.
Artists understood this long before tech did. Institutions are still struggling with it.
The ephemerality argument mattered politically in the 90s. It protected marginalized artists from market capture. That history deserves respect.
But staying loyal to the romance of disappearance now? It only exacerbates precarity.
We need frameworks grounded in practice, not nostalgia:
* Repetition is labor.
* Labor is value.
* Documentation is part of the work.
Performance is memory made flesh. It’s Anna Deavere Smith drilling someone else’s cadence until she embodies it. It’s Alonzo King’s dancers I photographed repeating phrases until thought dissolves into motion. It’s rehearsal as research. Documentation as circulation. Labor.
And until institutions stop romanticizing disappearance and start valuing repetition?
I’ll be in the rehearsal studio. Behind the camera. Drilling it. Again and again.
Because that’s not resistance to reproduction.
That is reproduction.
And don’t point to seagull shit and call it philosophy.