The early archive of NTA was represented by project records, heaps of photos, videotapes, and traces of performances locked in a storage closet, without much order or framing. We didn’t know what to do with all this data, so it became the starting point for Infinite Record, which led to our current explorations. We asked ourselves: What is the legacy of NTA? What do the principles of archiving have to do with the ephem- eral arts and an education that seeks to explode traditional patterns of learning? Is our archive something to organize, care for, or forget? We realized that at some level we were asking, as contemporary theater mak- ers, what we had to do with history, and what history had to do with us.
So we invited resident artists and institutional partners to help us answer these questions by explor- ing the dynamics of memory and archiving in their own works, as a way to enter into the next chapter in our development as an academy responsible for its own legacy. This book is a reckoning and reflection on the three years we spent investigating our archival impulses. This book does not serve as a history of NTA, but rather offers a collection of findings on developing approaches to archive, memory, and performance. The accumulated research found herein — our “listening”— has been very informative in guiding subsequent ways to map our own history as a school as we approach our twenty-year celebration in 2016.
The archive as a phenomenon of reckoning, storage, and engagement with time is a crucial obsession for many theater makers. What we mean by “archive” is complex: we at once refer to the marking of history, the trace of things, and also to any values that trouble us in our march towards death and disappearance. Memory plays a crucial role in how we process our practice. For instance, an actor brings to his or her train- ing embodied histories, legacies, and circles of relation. Through exchanges with the public they shed old bodies and acquire new identities. A scenographer develops new spaces in response to what is there and what is not there. Both artists are working in dialogue with the demands of time, history, and the politics of shared space. Texts play a decisive role in what we consider to be our inheritance as makers. Texts are per- forated. They are breathed, spoken, eaten, changed, and exchanged.
This book documents a collective effort to approach memory and archive — a complex matrix of dis- course — by means of diverse, opposing, and conflicting methodologies. What NTA values most in the ar- tistic research paradigm is the invitation to interfere with hierarchical knowledge systems. Michel Foucault, in a 1972 conversation with Gilles Deleuze, defended art as a valid and independent form of knowledge that need not obey traditional scientific methods.1 Foucault’s case holds up because artistic forms have the abil- ity, through their diversity, to evoke “other” knowledge, even knowledge that challenges the preconditions of knowledge. This is relevant to our pedagogy at NTA, as we train theater artists using sometimes serpen- tine, non-traditional processes, while inviting other disciplines into our spaces in order to challenge theater conventions. We often ask theater to resist or critique its own history, including the aesthetic and cultural power structures of the avant-garde.
Artistic research processes in Norway value experimentation, juxtaposed relations, and live encounters as proven values for spending time and resources. This is an alternative to familiar modes of marketable academic production. The act of critical reflection is therefore an essential part of our artistic research processes, where theory, expression, and other grammars arise out of a myriad of digestive mechanisms used to engage work (including work that is perhaps impossible to digest). An example of this is when we invite unfinished ideas from our seminar processes to be presented and explored publicly. This symposia situation is a collective learning experience where failure is welcomed, if not consciously invited. It is not just a “knowledge market.” Artistic research and critical reflection might also mean dreaming together, without objects or objection. But this dreaming follows a trajectory or thread; it has a structure and a direc- tion, a flow. Infinite Record, in its book form, is yet another framework for gathering these threads together. It is a situation, a network of human relations, and a reflection on encounters with time.
You can access the first pages of the publication online here.
You can receive the publication by request by sending an email to sage.canellis@hiof.no