PREFACE

IOPEN THIS BOOK TO THE FIRST ENTRY and read the words “a wrestling match set in an alternate fantasy universe within the monster Rainbow Face’s mind.” This might describe what it’s like to write about performance. I imagine the monster. Her rainbow face.

I open this book to page 537 and read the words “Was Fanon right when he postulated that we are slaving away to become white, while the white man slaves away to become more human?”

One could stay here for a long time. With this question, with all of its implications (or is it explanations) for our current, world-on-fire moment. I listen to my breathing, the regular rise and fall.

I keep reading: “On December 8, 2016, I boarded a plane at JFK Airport headed for Venice, Italy. I was wearing an orange prison jumpsuit with the words ‘FOR WHITES ONLY’ sewn across the back. Once in Venice, I painted my face black and chained myself to a 30lb cinder block. I would remain attached to the block for seven days, carrying it with me wherever I went through the streets of Venice, for around ten to thirteen hours daily.”

I think of Camus’ story “The Growing Stone,” the complicated and uncomfortable racial tensions and views in that tale. I think of “Carry that Weight,” Emma Sulkowicz’s mattress piece. I think of the Venetian ghetto. I think of all the hours and encounters and the little moments between the bigger moments. I try to imagine them. The heaviness and possibility in a work like this.

I open this book to page 297 and read the words, “Following a one-on-one consultation with a city doctor, participants walked away with a personalized set of instructions for how to troubleshoot their urban quandaries and maximize the experience of living in the city.”

I think of all of us in all these cities. How it seems, surely, we must tire soon of them, their dirt, their too-many-rodents-in-a-cage-experiment-ness. And then the feeling of walking down the avenues at almost-night, when the air is that temperature that makes it disappear.

I think of all the people who don’t live where I live. Who have chosen something else.

Performance as container. Book as container for performance. Mind as container for all these things, for everything—except what escapes.

— CLAUDIA LA ROCCO

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.