EDITOR’S NOTE

WHAT DREW ME TO EMERGENCY INDEX INITIALLY, and what I continually return to, was something Yelena said here in the editor’s note back in Vol. 2. Referencing the process of making performance, she said, “What an enormous responsibility: to construct an experience that others will undergo. I’m always on the verge of giving up.” It struck me not solely because I identified with the ways in which creating performance art—or any experience that others will undergo—often feels like a Sisyphean undertaking, but more importantly because her sentiment, while at first glance unnerving, offered up lasting hope. She seemed to say, it’s OK to be on the verge of giving up. And in doing so, pointed to that verge—that slippery edge between exhilaration and exhaustion—and said—as if in a disintegrating dream, herein lies the threshold.

In what seems to be an increasingly hostile world filled with unimaginable violence, inequality, and loss, we will likely, at some point or another, find ourselves on the threshold of giving up. What matters is not whether we manage to avoid that threshold but rather the way in which we choose to occupy, or narrate, that space once there. If I’ve learned anything from performance—and from the process of reading and editing and re-reading the performance descriptions within this book—it’s that our realities are not fixed. While we may not have control over our external worlds, we do have something akin to control when it comes to the ways we choose to frame and respond to them. How we want to define performance, and more importantly how we want to use performance, is something INDEX offers up for its contributors and its readers to decide. Perhaps performance, and Emergency INDEX, in presenting alternative ways of being, allows us—if only for a fleeting moment—to more fully and openly see and be seen.

As you find yourself amidst the fifth (!) volume of Emergency INDEX, my hope is that you allow whatever comes up—confusion, frustration, inspiration, fatigue, curiosity, and/or everything in between—to lead the way.

Happy 5th anniversary…. cheers to meeting at the threshold.

— KATIE GAYDOS, CO-EDITOR
september 2016

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.