CfP: Documenting ephemeral heritage: performance in times of crisis

Call for chapters for an edited book

We, Monica Mottin, and Barbara Čurda, are still looking for some contributions to the publication project outlined below, which emerged from our panel Documenting performance-based cultural heritage in times of crisis at SIEF congress in Brno (2023). We are inviting early career, mid-career, and established scholars to submit an abstract on the topic:

Documenting ephemeral heritage: performance in times of crisis

Heritage and crisis connect in multiple ways. We are living in unprecedented times of crisis, uncertainty and swift social changes. Performance, be it dance, theatre, music, rituals or other live events that cross boundaries often embodies and reflects such sociocultural changes. This is also the point of view of the UNESCO, which views living heritage as threatened in a variety of ways, by negative attitudes, demographic issues, economic pressure, decontextualisation, environmental degradation, weakened practice and transmission, cultural globalisation, new products and techniques, loss of objects or systems. Yet, in moments of crisis communities turn to heritage in order to cope with crisis (UNESCO 2003).

Documenting performance-based cultural heritage is therefore crucial as heritage connects communities and places to their history and identity. In contrast, its erasure impacts on communities’ sense of belonging and resilience. However, performance is intrinsically inconstant – as Marcia B. Siegel pointed out, „dance exists at the perpetual vanishing point“ [and is] „an event that disappears in the very act of materialising“ (1968). But then, as performance-based cultural heritage is by nature aleatory and impermanent, what does it mean to document it? This is the question that is being addressed in this book, which will address some of the challenges posed by performance documentation.

Documenting potentially includes many practices and many perspectives. As a matter of fact, it can only capture partial aspects of phenomena. It may differ according to the purpose of documentation, e.g. whether the focus is placed on aesthetics, on body movements, on social relationships. Furthermore, documentation is by necessity a socially and culturally situated act, that is dependent on the perception of the person who is documenting. And it has, by itself, an impact on what is to be documented. Discussions on preservation and reconstruction of dance performances, notably in Eastern Europe and the US, have highlighted how documentation practices are bound to be recreations (Thomas, 2003). Therefore, documentation is also a creative act. It can mean reconstructing a performance, thereby contributing to the re-creation, re-shaping and re-birth of cultural heritage. It also means making sense of history and politics, tracing or bringing back to the present different “versions” of performances that may or may not be considered as relevant or acceptable any longer. And furthermore, in an age saturated by social media, the tools for documentation, but also, the actors who may be documenting, have changed. These facts pose crucial questions regarding performance documentation: in which ways do modalities of documentation alter practices? What effect does this have on communities, but also, on the ways the concerned performances are perceived? What does it mean to document heritage performance in an age saturated by social media? Who should document?

This book addresses the need for literature focusing on documenting performance-based cultural heritage, a need to look beyond guidelines produced by international organisations and beyond a national or regional focus. In this edited book, we want to look beyond genres, to include any type of performance-based cultural heritage, across regions and categories. We invite papers that engage critically with the challenges of documenting performance-based cultural heritage. We welcome both theoretical and ethnographic studies from any geographical region.

Book themes
– Questioning the documentation process as an active intervention on performance
– Analysis of specific cases of performance documentation
– Relationship between knowledge transmission and documentation
– Issues of ownership, belonging and authenticity

Possible focus areas
– Documentation produced by communities to safeguard performances and institutional knowledge
roduction
– Archives and repositories, community archives, citizens’ archives
– The repertoire
– Sensory documentation
– Multimodal ethnography

Submission guidelines:
Please send an abstract of maximum 500 words, including the title of your paper, your name and affiliation to: monica.mottin AT hcts.uni-heidelberg DOT de, barbara.curda AT gmail DOT com
Please send your abstract as a Word attachment. On the subject line, please put: Documenting performance in times of crisis.

Submission schedule:
– Deadline for submission of abstracts: 20th of December 2024
– Notification of acceptance of abstracts: 31st of January 2025
– Submission of final articles: 30th of June 2025