PREFACE

There’s a certain way in which reading Emergency INDEX is like time travel. This has historically been true—each volume is published roughly a year after the last performance that it documents first took place—but this year it seems especially noticeable. Editing and indexing performances from 2019 has offered a window into a not-so-distant past that has slipped further and further from memory as the days go by. Several of these performances include large numbers of people gathering indoors, a practice that seems impossible today, and some occurred in venues that have now been closed for months.

I keep coming back to something Katie Gaydos, the editor who first introduced me to INDEX, said in the editor’s note of Vol. 5. Back in September 2016, on the eve of a US election that would generate a number of performances over the next few years, the world did not seem any more secure. Gaydos wrote: “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.” A single volume of Emergency INDEX records a single year—the performances that took place, the words their creators chose to describe them—but not in the way that a newspaper does. No, INDEX is a record of the ways hundreds of people from all over the world chose to respond to the world around them, a record of people constructing and sharing their own realities.

These realities, as varied as they are numerous, are ready to be explored by you, the reader of Emergency INDEX. This book has always been a collaborative project—between artists who find each other around the corner of a page turn, between the editors who read, edit, re-read the performance documents, between the volunteers without whom none of it would be possible. In this particular volume there is evidence of a cross-temporal collaboration, a collaboration between volumes of INDEX. In September, a number of artists gathered at Jam Handy, in Detroit to select and reinterpret performances from Vol. 7. “Thursday with a Plant” by Christina deRoos in this volume was inspired by the 2017 performance “Sunday with a Pine” by Annette Arlander, an artist who continues to contribute to the pages of this periodical.

Perhaps, as you are leafing through the pages, you will find a piece that strikes a chord of inspiration, and your next—or first—performance will be a partnership with the past. The simple act of reading the descriptions of these performances, some of which were performed in front of no-one, is a sort of collaboration with the piece itself. The role of the audience in varying genres of performance is well documented, not least by Emergency INDEX, and by opening this book you become an audience member. Both “audience” and “participation” are terms in the index at the back, both leading to ample performance documents. As you hold this volume in your hands and take a journey into the past, the choice of whether to participate, and if so, how, is yours.

— ZOE GUTTENPLAN
October 2020

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.