Emergency INDEX

PREFACE

In 2004, I moved to Tokyo, leaving behind my friends and collaborators in New York. It was the beginning of a very slow process of meeting artists and performance makers in Japan. By the late 2000s, I was involved with, influenced by, and regularly collaborating with communities of artists in Tokyo. And yet, over the eight years I lived in Japan, I could never shake my connection to NYC performance, the nagging feeling that I was missing out on something important happening there…

…and that they, in New York—who could not see, hear, feel, or smell the performances I was experiencing—were missing out on something important happening in Tokyo.

The project of Emergency INDEX was conceived during that time, growing out of a need for performance people to know what other performance people were up to. It would be a compendium, an annual publication to gather and cross-index performance documentation from artists anywhere working in any performance genre who made work in the same calendar year. It was, I imagined then, to be a ten-year project, publishing a thick print volume each year for a decade. It was meant to be a durable, stubborn testament to the value of performance, an enactment of the conviction that ephemeral work matters in all sorts of ways.

It was, as co-editor Matvei Yankelevich and I wrote in the introduction to the first volume, a way to deal with the problem—even more pernicious for performance makers—of not being there.

“Acknowledged as being, 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 ephemerality, this does make for a rather unique situation: performance has become a field whose practices are largely invisible to itself.” (vii)

That first volume included 249 wildly different performances made in 2011, across dance, theater, performance art, research, activism, puppetry, poetry, and genres yet unnamed. The back-of-the-book indexes allowed for surprising ways of navigating all this material, inviting readers to make connections, notice trends, or find allies. From 2011 to 2019, we produced a new volume each year. With each subsequent edition, Emergency INDEX Volumes 1–9 have called forth a growing community of performance makers tuning in to each other’s work.

This year, we publish our tenth and (in this iteration, at least) final volume. The book you hold in your hands is Emergency INDEX Vol 10+. The “+” in its title is meant to acknowledge that the book is two years late, delayed by the crisis of a global pandemic. But it is also to signal that this double volume, unlike its predecessors, documents two years of performance instead of just one. The time period covered here includes 2020 and 2021, the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, when restrictions on in-person gatherings were most severe. Vol 10+ chronicles the performances people made in these years to survive.

The Emergency INDEX project began as a response to the problem of not being there, and it has been startling to see so many performance makers grapple with this problem in an unprecedented way during the pandemic. The problem of not being there was concentrated, amplified, and ritualized in much of the performance work that folks made in 2020 and 2021, when compulsory isolation was both a technical challenge and philosophical opportunity. In this volume’s Index of Terms, we see these breadcrumbs. The prevalence of terms like hands and walking and voice and face hint at new performance venues, assembled from the at-hand, the mundane. Other widely used terms suggest an interest in time, distance, and the in-between; they offer to witness or to grieve; they ask questions of home, plastic, and relationality.

This year, with the tenth volume of Emergency INDEX, the words we wrote in 2011 unsettle me: “Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of performances have come and gone, witnessed only by the people in the room, or on the street.” Posed as the negative consequence that Index could avoid, I have come to understand that “being witnessed only by the people in the room” has been the central operating principle of the project all along. That is to say, this compendium of performance documents has been less a stalwart of faithful documentation, and more a proliferating multiplicity of enactments calling forth a community. As Shonni Enelow insightfully observed in her essay, “The Literary Life of Performance” (2013), the performance documents in INDEX do not supplant or even approximate being there, at the “original” show. The page is (provisionally) their stage, and out of each reading emerges a there—and a them.

The communities that have assembled around INDEX are grounded by the community values of the folks alongside me who dedicated (and donated!) their time and labor to produce these ten volumes. Matvei Yankelevich, my co-editor for Vol. 1 and Managing Editor for years thereafter, conceived the distinctive design of the book. Sophia Cleary, who began working on INDEX as an Assistant Editor for Vol. 1, became Co-editor for Vols 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8 (hero!!!). Katie Gaydos began as an Associate Editor on Vol. 4, and joined Sophia and myself as Co-editor for Vols. 5 and 6. Zoe Guttenplan joined Sophia as Co-editor for Vol. 8, and took over the editorship solo for Vol. 9. For the current volume, Katie Stromme took on the role of Managing Editor. With support from a New York State Council for Arts grant that Michael Newton helped us secure, edward sharp and Brian McCorkle built a new website with an open-access searchable archive of our published volumes (emergencyindex.com). So many people volunteered serious labor to INDEX along the way: Abraham Adams, Andrew Ross, Anya Liftig, Esther Neff, Claire LeDoyen, Dominic Finocchiaro, Nick Bell, Steven Chodoriwsky, Emma Clayton, Serena Solin, Rachel Zaretsky, and Lix Zackeroff, to name just a few. Thank you to our beloved board of Contributing Editors, to the staff, volunteers, and Editorial Collective at Ugly Duckling Presse, and to you, the friends, readers, and comrades-in-performance that have assembled here.

— Yelena Gluzman
October 2023