EDITOR’S NOTE

ONE OF THE MORE TIME CONSUMING STEPS in editing Emergency INDEX is compiling the index of terms, that funny list at the back of the book that catalogs words, concepts, historical and conceptual references from hundreds of pages of text; terms are extracted and lined up neatly, each with their modest tail of page numbers extending outwards. In our case, it isn’t indexing software doing the extracting, but a human reader, scanner, disambiguator, gleaner, CTRL+F-presser, copy-and-paster who selects words that the author might have thought to be key to their project, or that some future reader might seek out. Indexing software cannot accomplish this, and, perhaps, even a human indexer is far from perfect.
If you index a monograph, or a single-author book, chances are that the author uses terms in particular ways, within a specific context that makes each appearance of the term a point connecting to a larger argument. In our case, for an annual book that documents more than 300 performance events, an index of terms is not what it appears to be.
Take, for example, agency: In our index, “agency” is a term used by six different authors. For Nancy Popp (p. 43), the agency of the artist is materialized through the literal insertion of the artist’s body into the actual and projected architecture of the museum-in-construction. Popp uses agency to mean her own decision to scale the scaffolding of the museum, while also suggesting that the self-determination of the artist is what lays the foundation that makes a museum possible. Shey Rivera and Jason Curzake use a similar sense of self-determination when they refer to their audience as “active agents” (p. 621), and Maya Weeks (p. 609) posits subjective agency as something limited by systemic sexism. Similar (but different) is “The Camouflage Closet” (p. 237), which documents LGBT experiences in the US military and uses “agency” to refer to the “creative agency” granted to military veterans who participated in the project. Meanwhile, Benjamin Lundberg and Marika Kent (p. 169) describe a performance in which an audience is invited to alter the performer’s body so as to make it more Colombian; instead of taking agency to mean self-determination, they invoke agency to highlight the material and oppressive effects of “perceptions of other(ed) bodies.” Alex Young’s “Earth Man Earth” is a rejection of agency, an argument against the legitimacy of the individual agent who constitutes authorship (p. 327).
What does it mean when these six texts are nestled in the indexical shadow of the word “agency”? I recognize (after hundreds of hours of building, wandering, and admiring this index-city) that the word itself is not a stable brick upon which we build, but a provisional space that emerges through its use. It is a space of contradiction, and it might present us with problems. Take the case of agency: If agency is defined by its effects on others, what sort of act is the recognition and naming of these effects? How can agency be conceived as self-determination and also be simultaneously granted? What is a byline in an argument against agency-as-authorship?
Dear reader, you probably see my point. I’m thinking about the way that terms and concepts emerge from their use; I’m thinking about how they emerge as already-contested, problematic and in-contradiction. This is the crux of the matter, not only about the index, but about Emergency INDEX itself. We, the makers and laborers of this volume, do not begin with an idea of what performance is or what performance does. Rather, we hope the vast collection of works described herein will offer an emergent, problematic, and provocative notion of performance, as it was variously described by hundreds of people who are making, living, and thinking through performance.

— YELENA GLUZMAN, co-editor
october 2014

HOW TO READ THIS BOOK

FOR MORE THAN 30 YEARS, one of the most hotly-disputed issues in performance has been that of documentation. Acknowledged as, 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 such a condition, it does make 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 perceived quality. All performances were eligible, as long as they identified themselves as performance and were performed in the year of publication.
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 surprising document of performance in the late 1970s. Famous works appear alongside one-offs, celebrated artists next to unknowns. From this democratic hodge-podge 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 simple descriptions would be opaque to those who are not familiar with the histories and problems of a particular field. So 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.
Each yearly volume contains hundreds of performance descriptions. For all we know, the pages of Emergency INDEX may provide the only print documentation of some performances described herein; certainly, for most, 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 through their self-identification 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 misrepresent, we have decided to cheerfully use the materiality of language itself to provide yet another channel of information.
That is why the back-of-the-book index is a salient feature of this book. By cross-referencing and indexing 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.
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.