Presented by Professor Heike Roms

Reconstructing and re-enacting, exhibiting and curating, mapping and walking – increasingly theatre and performance historians are leaving the archive and engaging in forms of research that have a distinctly artistic-performative and often public character. At the same time ‘traditional’ methods such as archival research and close reading practices are considered as performative acts that not just reveal but actually create and figure evidence.

This presentation will examine what is at stake in approaching historical evidence as an event. Do such approaches signal a productive shift in our understanding of how we produce knowledge, especially knowledge of theatre and performance, and of who participates in that production? Or are they mere indicators of a new knowledge-economy for which it has become imperative to be seen to be ‘performing’ research? The presentation will draw extensively on Heike’s own current research on the history of performance art in Wales in the 1960s and 1970s, which uses a range of performance-based methods.

Heike Roms is Professor in Performance Studies at Aberystwyth University. She has published widely on contemporary performance practice (particularly on work emanating from Wales), the history of performance art in a British context, performance historiography, documentation and performance archiving. Heike is director of What’s Welsh for Performance?, a major research initiative devoted to uncovering and archiving the history of performance art in Wales. The project was funded by a large Research Grant from the British Arts and Humanities Research Council AHRC (2009-2011) and won the David Bradby TaPRA Award for Outstanding Research in International Theatre and Performance 2011.
www.performance-wales.org

photo credit: Daniel Ladnar