Performing Arts

The Healing Magic of the Archival Box
This essay discusses the archival boxes in Jess Dobkin's Wetrospective as a version of what Cvetkovich calls “an archive of feelings” and explores the magic powers of the material artifact and its storage systems. The contribution also includes a transcription of a conversation between Cvetkovich and Dobkin about the relation between the magic boxes and healing from trauma.

(Re)Defining ‘Archivist’
Archivists often have to explain what we do and this piece is my definition - one that is radical sacred and concerned with archives being spaces for healing and transformation.

On Touching the Intangible
This chapter reflects on Jess Dobkin's Wetrospective through an examination of the archive as lived embodied and relational. Grounded in my friendship with Jess and our experiences in co-creating and performing archives I attend to the archival trace as both a methodology and a materiality of sorts a means of honoring queerness and other excesses not contained within traditional archives.

Power to the Pause
This interview was conducted with Jess Dobkin during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. The interview focuses on the critical juncture of the pandemic pause and perimenopause a career retrospective a birthday milestone of fifty and themes of aging time and performance-making in a period of intense uncertainty.

Jess Dobkin’s Wetrospective
Constellating performance archives
Taking as its starting point the first-ever retrospective exhibition (2021) of performance art icon Jess Dobkin the book reflects on the internationally acclaimed artist’s playful and provocative practice as performer activist curator and community leader. At the same time it grapples with a question that is vital for art and performance studies: How do archives perform?
More than a discrete showing of a single artist’s work the exhibition including its new staging in book form is a large-scale research experiment in performance curation investigating what it might mean for art institutions to take seriously the embodied and communal nature of performance art in their practices of archiving and museological display.
In Jess Dobkin’s Wetrospective a cast of renowned international performance theorists and artists dive into this exploration alongside Dobkin curator Emelie Chhangur and performance theorist and dramaturg Laura Levin. These contributions appear alongside a riot of full colour photographs providing access to Dobkin’s celebrated artistic productions from the last 30 years.

In Smithereens
The Costume Remains of Lea Anderson's Stage
What happens to contemporary dance costumes when the show is over and their surrounding legacy slips from view? How might costumes be mobilised towards representational repair post-performance? Located within Lea Anderson’s choreographic archive this book charts a series of hands-on interventions with the fabric remains of her companies The Cholmondeleys and The Featherstonehaughs. Centred on practices of Disintegration Preservation Transaction and Display they offer provocative modes of engaging with the physical leftovers of performance the degrading of memory and legacy around pre-digital theatre work and the temporal material transitions of artefacts enduring outside of traditional museological contexts.
How might we regard these mercurial items? As precious relics to be protected in museum holdings ghostly harbingers of residual performance histories or inconvenient detritus? The book travels from props-makers’ studios to auction houses and galleries incorporating film-making artefact handling and curation along the way in lively dialogue with perspectives from dance history material culture sociology and performance studies. The choreographic archive is envisioned as repository of the awkward scattered remains of legacy blown apart into fragments. Smithereens which can if we allow them demand an alternative after-life that disrupts the vanishing inflicted on these costumes and the companies who danced in them.

Obsessions of a Showwoman
The Performance Worlds of Marisa Carnesky
Explores ‘showwomanry’ tracing a trajectory of incredible weird women at work: women who were stone eaters fire walkers women who hypnotized alligators or presented crucifixion shows; women in entertainment who worked for themselves; women that were often referred to as showgirls despite their extraordinary skill and artistry.
Carnesky continues an important lineage of performing women with bombastic theatrical flair and an extraordinary skill that ‘do not work for the management or the man. Showwomen work for themselves and other people work for them”. Carnesky has been a central figure in performance and live art during the last thirty years; her practice as a showwoman promotes alternative visions of matriarchal entertainment utopias and a new relationship to women’s position to power and politics.
The term showwoman introduces a new identity a new kind of performer who does not control or exploit others but opens up a possibility for collaboration that enables ‘shared experiences of visceral euphoria applause loss shape abjection hustle and struggle marginalisation and the fight against patriarchal injustices’ (Carnesky
2019 53). The book will use Carnesky’s work to showcase women working in radical ways treading the margins of cabaret and live art disrupting normative ideologies through the spectacular and opening new lines of feminist enquiry through weirdness absurdity provocation in live art and popular culture.

Incredible Bleeding Women II
This chapter is a conversation between Nao Nagai H Plewis and Marisa Carnesky where Carnesky asks the other artists about their experience working on the show Dr Carnesky's Incredible Bleeding Women. They discuss their involvement and creating performance material. They also talk about menstruation rituals and what it means to be a showwoman.