from the editors

FOR MORE THAN 30 YEARS, one of the most hotly disputed issues in performance has been that of documentation. Acknowledged as being, at best, a conflicted endeavor, and at worst, a betrayal of the very essence of performance, documentation has been problematized while performances have proliferated. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of performances have come and gone, witnessed only by the people in the room, or on the street. And though we can argue about the advantages of ephemerality, this does make for a rather unique situation: performance has become a field whose practices are largely invisible to itself.

To respond to this situation, we began with a simple idea: to create an annual periodical allowing the people who made performances in that year to document their work in print. We would not curate these entries on the basis of their genre, their popularity, their location, or their success. All performances were eligible, as long as they identified themselves as performance and were performed in 2011.

In its non-curatorial approach, Emergency INDEX is indebted to the legacy of High Performance magazine (1977–1998) and their “Artist’s Chronicle,” a section of the magazine in which performance artists were openly invited to send descriptions of their recent works—the result is a document of what performance art really was in the late 1970s. Famous works appear alongside one-offs, celebrated artists next to unknowns. From this democratic hodgepodge comes a fascinating snapshot of an emergent form.

Emergency INDEX is not, however, concerned solely with performance art. We believe that the broad, confusing field of performance has evolved into a similarly emergent situation, and we hope that our contemporary re-imagining of the “Artist’s Chronicle” can help make visible the breadth of contemporary performance.

Because each annual edition of INDEX will include dance, therapy, poetry, protest, rehabilitation, scholarly research, theater, conceptual art, advertising, and many other fields utilizing performance, we feared that simple descriptions would be opaque to those who are not familiar with the histories and problems of a particular field. That is why we asked authors to articulate not only what they made, but why they made it—to describe the problematics driving their work as well as the performance itself. Instead of focusing on the inevitable misrepresentation of describing the performance as experience, these documents endeavor to describe the choices, tactics, and techniques used to pursue a specified aim.

This volume contains descriptions of nearly 250 performances that occurred in 2011. For all we know, the pages of Emergency INDEX may provide the only print documentation of some performances described herein; certainly, for many, this is the only printed description written by the performance’s creators for no purpose other than documenting the work.

While eschewing traditional curation and designing the book with equal space for every performance, we do not wish to imply that the works documented in this book are equivalent simply because they identify themselves as performance. On the contrary, rather than emphasizing the category, the book aims to underscore the variety of the works themselves. Moreover, instead of being discouraged by the disparity between the descriptions (necessarily reduced to language) and the performances they inevitably fictionalize, we have decided to cheerfully use the materiality of language itself to provide yet another channel of information.

That is why the index is a salient feature of this book. We asked the authors to identify keywords from their own descriptions, and then combined many of these with words identified via a traditional indexing process. By cross-referencing the language used by authors in their descriptions, we hope to leave a document not only of the performances themselves, but also of the language used when talking about performance.

The works here, which elsewhere could be grouped by genre, or nation, or even popularity, are grouped by their place in chronological time. They are shuffled by the index, which allows connections to spring up between apparently disparate works based on shared language. So, read the book from cover to cover, if you like, or start at the index and read all the performance documents that use the word “absence,” “activism,” or “allegory.”

You are holding in your hands a simple, flexible, physical, and time-tested technology. It allows for chance encounters, unplanned adjacencies, sudden epiphanies, as well as casual browsing and concerted searching. We hope that INDEX will serve as a useful tool and an inspiration for those to whom performance matters, to whom it is a persistent thorn, who look to performance as a means or as an end.

In short, we are tremendously excited for you to get lost in the labyrinth of Emergency INDEX and to find many threads to guide you through its pages.

— Yelena Gluzman and Matvei Yankelevich, eds.