PREFACE

AT THE FRONT of old dictionaries, you will find a list of words entering the lexicon for the first time that year. Traveling along this road of words, you are able to trace the development and expansion of the English language. Emergency INDEX offers a similar temporal snapshot—Vol. 1 is full of the Occupy movement, Vol. 4 saw a sharp rise in pieces addressing police brutality, and every year more performances concerned with climate change are indexed.

However, the book in your hands is so much more than a dictionary or encyclopedia. INDEX is also a rhizome, a net connecting performers across the world. In Guadalajara, Kiyo Gutiérrez stains her white dress with tomatoes in honor of women who have been victims of femicide. 6,000 miles away and three months later, Mariana Rocha creates an environment that portrays her own body in a context of violence against women.

Of course, you can look back at previous volumes, and find other artists addressing this topic. You can do so either by cracking each spine and leafing through the pages until you find the index in the back or—thanks to digital editors Brian McCorkle and edward sharp—by clicking through the cumulative index of terms in the online edition. The new online edition of INDEX, made possible by a grant from the New York State Council on the Arts, is the product of many years of dreaming and much labor over the past few years. The online version of INDEX will continue to grow and change as we create the best possible digital home for our expanding archive of performances. Already, our online readers can discover new work from a randomly generated carousel of images, cite a performance document with a single click, search across contributors, locations, and titles—and that’s just the beginning.

While editing this volume, with all this newly accessible wealth of information at my fingertips, it was tempting to alter the way this publication is constructed. I played with the idea, for the sake of future indexers and digital editors, of drawing the list of terms for Vol. 8 from the terms that appeared most often across the last seven volumes. Should we, I wondered, use these new technological resources to create a fixed, streamlined and consistent list of indexed terms? Tempting, sure, but it would have been anathema to the spirit of the print edition of INDEX which is, at its roots, a document of a specific year in performance and a bottom-up catalog of the terms performance-makers are using that year.

As always, Emergency INDEX relies on your vital participation, whether in print or online, as a place to document your own performance work or as a platform for reinterpretation. INDEX is a community as much as a publication, and by picking up this book you are part of it. The online edition offers new opportunities for collaboration and creative response, and will continue to evolve over the years, acting both as experimental sandbox and library of indexes past.

In 2011, as the first volume was being edited and indexed, founding editor Yelena Gluzman wrote: “though the Internet boasts ease of access, a book, trapped in its physical body, is unchanging and durable. Since performance is exactly the opposite—ephemeral and in flux—it is important that the documents will endure, and will keep their place among the other performances made in the same year.” Here you will find each performance in its place, contributing to the story of 2018. When you pick up this volume again in years to come, each performance will be just as you left it. At the back of the book you will find the index of terms—which offer a glimpse into what and how performance-makers were thinking and working in 2018—and I promise you some of them are brand new.

— ZOE GUTTENPLAN
September 2019

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.