Project summary

Transformance is a process of artistic exchange and creation, in which live performance, documentation and transformation meet. In this three day workshop we seek to blur the lines between live performance and documentation and to generate a hybridised live practice by creating and responding together. Through practical exercises and discussions, we will explore creative responses to live performance, and the ‘translational’ relationship between performance and its documents, which may lead to their mutual transformation in both form and content.

We are inviting artists who have a passion and interest in exploring what remains (and does not remain) of a performance, and in questioning the seeming contradictions between the ephemeral and the fixed. Together, we will examine modes of subverting conventional expectations of performance documentation. We aim to conceive of the documentary process as a creatively responsive tool, a performative artwork of its own.

Documentation Action Research Collective (DARC), 2018.

https://www.dance4.co.uk/artists/documentation-action-research-collective-darc/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2fSKCFEXZQ

The workshops and conversations held by Live Art Devleopment Agency and the Documentation Action Research Collective at Dance4 in Nottingham, was an opportunity to scrutinize and asks questions about the ontology of documentation in regards to live art and performance. The task presented was one in which the group were led to scrutinize the notion of representation and instead  present an alternative in the form of an embodied interpretation. The entire task was proposed as a form of metamorphosis, the confusing complexity of the actions issued were necessary in order to draw forward feelings of the scrutinization of the documentation. This task was one of positing many moving parts into a task so as to camouflage and reinterpret where it was that the documentation was located if it all it could be.