Digitising Performance as Practice Research
by Jayne Batzofin
On the 18th April 2021, a devastating wild fire swept across Cape Town’s Table Mountain. While no human lives were lost to the flames and smoke, there was a profound sense of loss that was soon to be mourned – the Jagger African Studies Reading Room at the University of Cape Town had been destroyed. Archival and published print collections kept within the Reading Room were consumed by the flames. These included the vast majority of the African Studies Published Print Collection (approximately 70 000 items), the entire African Studies Film Collection on DVD (approximately 3 500), alongside other significant publications, manuscripts and archives. This is not merely an institutional loss for the University of Cape Town, this is a global loss of significant African archives and memories.
Perhaps this will advance the urgency for researchers to prioritise the digitisation of their various research materials, whether they be text or non-text based. While text-based data is still the predominant source of academic research material, there is a new advance within the Digital Humanities around capturing non-text-based data, such as audio recordings, film, visual and spatial materials. My work as the digital archivist and research assistant in the ReTAGS (Reimagining Tragedy in Africa and the Global South) project is focused around developing the strategy, ethics and standards with which to document, capture and archive the ephemeral performance processes which form part of the project.
Video recordings are only often made of the final performance product, but very rarely is there an extensive and longitudinal study capturing the process of how the performance is made. There is seldom a comprehensive record made of the collective creative process existing in the living archives and memories held within the individual theatre makers’ bodies and experiences. When theatre academics call the stage and their practice ‘research’, what exactly constitute the datasets they are working with and their methodologies for capturing them? Is there a way to potentially garner a new or deeper understanding of the ephemeral practice-based research, through strategically capturing and coding metadata and keywords? These are some of the aspirations and intentions we hold when developing our thinking around our living and continually growing ReTAGS archive.
To date there have been two productions developed under ReTAGS, Antigone (not quite/quiet) and Ikrele leChiza. But it is not merely the rehearsal process that is being documented for the purposes of the ReTAGS project and further understanding the concept of Tragedy in global South spaces. There are also field research interviews being conducted with theatre practitioners and theatre academics from the global South, in order to generate further conversations and knowledge around adaptations of Greek Tragedies and their relations to African storytelling/performance diasporas. Running parallel to this, is the attempt to capture the various performances of African Tragedies and Greek Tragedy adaptations that have happened in the global South. It is indeed an ambitious project with enormous scope, that I am excited to be a part of.
All of these materials captured as part of the ReTAGS research are being digitised and showcased on UCT’s Digital Library Services online repository, Ibali, according to FAIR data principles, the practice of making metadata about datasets Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable. This digital showcase repository is its own starting point, as it were, whereby the public can engage with, contribute to, and build on top of what they discover there. In this way the online repository becomes its own performance space, whereby “the live performer in this context is not the person on stage, but the archive user who controls the keyboard and the mouse. The actions of their searching and viewing, collecting and narrating are their modes of performance. […] These practices enliven the material of the archive through actions of use” (Carlin & Vaughan, 2015: 56).
It is in this spirit that I invite you to explore and become a performer in the ReTAGS archive.
This way to the ReTAGS Showcase repository.
If you would like to know more details about the actual process of capturing and digitally showcasing Antigone (not quite/quiet) you can watch this presentation that myself and my colleague Dr Sanjin Muftić, from the UCT Digital Library Services, presented for the Open Repositories 2020 Virtual Conference.
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Carlin, D and Vaughan, L. 2015. Performing Digital: Multiple Perspectives on a Living Archive. Ashgate Publishing.