Ewjenia Tsanana, Sense of Time in Performance Contexts; comparison of a video recording with a performance text

Comparison of artefacts of a lecture-performance by Ewjenia Tsanana on 7^th October 2011 during the conference Recollecting the Act: On the transmission of performance art in Kaserne Basel 

Artefacts

A) Synopsis of the lecture-performance Zeitempfinden in Performance-Zusammenhängen

The lecture-performance which Ewjenia Tsanana gave on 7^th October 2011 as part of the conference Recollecting the Act in the Kaserne Basel was listed in the conference programme as an ‘insert’, i.e. one of a number of presentations developed by artists during their stay at the model archive. Once Tsanana had arranged her chair, overhead projector and microphone on the stage, she sat down and began her performance with a short, extemporised introduction, outlining the story of the performance’s conception and development. Having had to leave the model archive early, a representative of the artist had given the original talk in her place. This conception would have been repeated at the conference if Tsanana had not unexpectedly been able to return.[1] Subsequently, the artist began to read out the text looking at the different ways she experienced time as a performer and as a spectator at performances. She prepared the ground by saying “I will even regard and define the way time is experienced as the way time behaves. I will turn the tables. No, it is not I that senses [time], time comes to me and gives me a wealth of subjective [notions]. […] I will divide time and order the [different] parts, fit them into moulds or give them faces, personify them and – if I can – give them appropriate names.”[2]

In the course of the 30-minute talk, Tsanana intermittently demonstrated her observations and characterisations of time in the more concrete form of drawings copied on to transparencies. In addition, she emphasised some of what she said with gestures, all the while retaining a relaxed-appearing posture, seated next to the overhead projector and behind the microphone. Some striking elements of the presentation were Tsanana’s carefully structured argumentation and graphic linguistic descriptions as well as the contrasts created between emotional involvement and physical restraint, seriousness and humour, listening and seeing, reading and showing. With these elements and strategies, which Tsanana wove into a precisely configured and subtly balanced sequence of events, only to soon break up their interplay again, she developed a performance which is ultimately based on her own reflection and constitutes this process as an event in the act of performing.

B) Selection of artefact types

From the artefact types available, I selected firstly one of the two video recordings[3] and secondly the performance text with integrated drawings which was published online[4] for closer consideration. In view of the lecture-performance format and the conception of the performance text, which may be regarded as the performance’s ‘score’ in a broader sense, this choice seemed most appropriate. My own experience as the performer’s ‘representative’ at the first performance on 9^th September 2011 links me in a specific way with the text and the drawings[5], further motivating my theoretical interest.

C) Similarities and differences between the artefacts in view of their intensity of transmission

The uncut video recording transmits all the central aspects of the lecture-performance: the performer’s position on the stage and the arrangement of the setting as well as the course of the lecture and its acoustic and gestural configuration. The camera follows the action with steady panning shots and slow zooms; its fixed position at the front of the stage conveys an observer’s perspective, corresponding with the front edge of the auditorium. Event though the video recording does not show the audience, it does provide information about the ambient situation and – via the auditory level – about the audience’s affective participation. Below I will consider the specific characteristics of this lecture-performance and how they are transmitted by the video recording. The close-up shots of the performer, in particular, convey her physical presence, characterised by her relaxed posture, sparing gestures and minimal facial expressions, which altogether signalise cheerful but concentrated composure. Since the sound on the video was recorded via a directed room microphone, Tsanana’s voice remains constantly related to what is visible in the frame. Her voice is manifested as a spatial articulation, integrated in the interplay of gestures, actions and facial expressions. This becomes especially apparent at moments when the camera focuses on the projected drawings and the performer ‘slips’ out of the frame.

Thanks to the good sound quality, the performer’s melodious voice, its tonal colour and her characteristic manner of speech are clearly conveyed. In addition, the background noises which were also recorded – pages of text being turned on a clipboard, the projector being switched on and off, transparencies being placed on the projector – provide a second acoustic structure, the rhythm of which helps the listener to follow the lecture. In this way, in my opinion, an essential conceptual element of the lecture-performance, as a hybrid format at the interface of science and art, is transmitted, namely that it ‘produces’ knowledge.

Moreover, the video recording also gives an indication of the value of the text of the talk and possible future forms of performance: In her extemporised introduction, Tsanana explicitly states that it is nice for her to ‘pass this on’, by which she presumably meant the performance as much as the text of the lecture. From this, one may infer that for the artist, ‘other’ forms of transmission or re-performance are not a less-than-ideal solution but rather that transcription by third parties is intended – an assumption which is also supported by the performance text considered below.

The second artefact type, the performance text, is a retrospectively produced artefact in the form of a purposeful transcription of the lecture-performance. It combines the lecture text with scanned-in presentation transparencies which the artist put together on her website and offers “in two reader-formats […] on the one hand as a website, where the reader to an extent co-performs and ‘places’ the pictures on the ‘projector’ him or herself and, on the other hand, in the somewhat more reader-friendly form of printable text with integrated pictures.”[6] The website is organised into two areas, one of which describes the performance and its inception (titled “über den Text” [about the text] in the menu) while the other contains the above mentioned lecture text and drawings. While the text is organised into chapters and paragraphs, headings are emphasised in a different colour and typography, and individual words or parts of words are underlined, it is not easily consumable in sections but configured as one long, continuous document, which must be scrolled through to be deciphered. At certain points, hyperlinks to picture files appear allowing the corresponding drawing, or its combinations, to be called up in the neighbouring right-hand side area. These links follow the rhythm of the transparencies laid on the projector during the lecture-performance. And they prompt the reader to carry out an action: the picture is only inserted when the link is clicked on and removed again when the reader clicks on “Zeichnung entfernen” [remove drawing] at the end of the section.

Tsanana describes situations, or moments, from which she develops ideas on the nature of the corresponding time(s). These gain physical contours and appear as female figures, sensory stimuli, bodily sensations or three-dimensional structures. The ‘language images’ which the artist formulates prompt associations within the (audio)-visual and physical-affective field. The text often switches from sensations to observations, from factual report to characterisation; it describes the simultaneously concrete and fluid-transitory character of time. There is a succession of apparitions of time; the future past, remembered present and anticipated future are unrolled to the reader and briefly halted, or defined, in the drawings. The reduced, stylised drawings underline the humorous, anecdotal character of Tsanana’s text, by no means diminishing the seriousness of her analysis but rather accentuating its subjective urgency.

D) Analysis and transmissions

On considering the conceptual configuration of the lecture-performance and analysing the selected artefact types, questions of authorship and the kind of transcription intended by Tsanana are inevitably raised. These questions in turn touch on aspects of transmitting a specific event and releasing lecture-based content. The video recording examined here conserves one particular staging of Tsanana’s performance. Although a second, ‘creative’ and interpreting personality is tangible in the recording, Tsanana’s position as the author of the text and the drawings, as the lecturer or performer, remains undisputed. Particularly for the genre of lecture-performance[7], which has experienced something of an upswing in the last twenty years and which combines elements of lecture art with those of scenic performance practices, this form of subjective, not-quite-static video recording represents an interesting model for transmission. The cameraman or camerawoman’s focus remains on the lecture and the action on stage, ensuring that at least one of the constituent elements is present in every take: the person giving the talk and the content presented, consisting here, in Tsanana’s work, of both drawings and read-out text. The parallel organisation into ‘lecture’ and ‘performance’, the simultaneous talking and showing and the way these are staggered in space, are transcribed in the video recording in a focussing movement in space and time. The panning shots, for example, are directed by the cameraman’s subjective interest and so place their own emphases without ultimately allowing the course of the lecture to fall out of view.

The performance text published online, in comparison, is intended as a transcription. As such, it is detached from the performance in question in October 2011 and brings the independent, performative process of the individual reading to the fore. In this sense, anyone who reads the text aloud or silently, deciphering or interpreting it, produces it anew and puts their individual stamp on it. This form of appropriation is intensified by the constant use of the first person in the narrative situation and gains further impetus from the ‘possibilities for interaction’ integrated into the narrative flow. It seems appropriate here to refer to Lilo Nein’s observations on the translatability of performance texts and the resultant “shared authorship”: With reference to Walter Benjamin’s remarks on literary translation, Nein posits that “each text is […] exposed to several ‘movements of afterlife’”.[8] In this way the text loses its putative autonomous status and becomes more like musical notation, which is always subject to a certain form of interpretation. Pursuing this idea further, a connection may be made between the author and Roland Barthes’ provocative argument against the dominance of the author. Barthes claims: “…a text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author.”[9]

The above observations on Tsanana’s intentions concerning the transcription, or appropriation, of her performance text correspond with these theoretical arguments. Interestingly, the text itself contains indications that it was conceived as a fragmentary fabric of interrelation between a writing ‘author’, the act of writing and future reading. In this sense, to illustrate “the nature of time at the moment of performance”, the artist creates a picture of a long tube through which air flows upwards during the performance[10]. Reporting in this section from the perspective of the audience, she describes herself as being linked to the surface of the tube by threads which can transmit the intensity of the performance to varying degrees according to how taut they are. The tube moreover has chambers, “interpretation and projection spaces”, which according to Tsanana are “either opened by the performer him or herself, or by me, the observer, or by the prevailing atmosphere.” But this is not an immutable situation, since “if personal feelings (like flashes of insight, affective agitation, embarrassment etc.) and thoughts or influences from without distract or even disrupt my attention, the tube gets kinks.”[11] Although the artist describes these “gaps in attentiveness” in an otherwise compelling performance as moments of frustration, in my view, analogies can be drawn between the activities surrounding the fluid, partially interrupted and extended spatial structure of the performance and the process of its (intended) transcription in the form of auto-reading, or auto-performing. These in turn raise questions of authorship. Just as every performer assumes a responsibility as the author of their own concepts and ideas, the reader shares in the responsibility through the act of reading and ‘performatively’ translating the text. This idea of shared responsibility, Nein sets out, ultimately reflects the conception of a “shared authorship”, in which responsibility is divided up among the parties involved but without halving or devaluing it.[12]

In the comparison of these two artefacts, two different methods of transmission come to light. The video recording of Tsanana’s lecture can be regarded as an independent transcription. This is articulated as the receiving, interpreting transmission of a specific talk and its content. The performance text, on the other hand, operates as a motor for the performance’s continual ‘rewriting’, which is generated by the individual act of reading, by which its content is also released.

Irene Müller, May 2012