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3 Sketching an intersection: language and theatre documentation

Theatre studies has had an uneasy relationship with language. In the western academic tradition, theatre studies has been defined by a progressive rebellion against literature and philology (Jackson 2004).

There are two key movements in the 20th century that were a reaction against the text as foundation of theatre:

• A wide array of artistic movements encouraged creative practices that did not originate in texts. This began with the avant-garde experiments of early 20th century and extended to the movement-based, actor-driven and process-based performance practices of the mid-twentieth century, for example in the work of Grotowski, Brook, Mnouchkine, Eugenio Barba and later postmodern or postdramatic theatre practitioners such as Heiner Müller and Peter Handke.

• A more sustained engagement with non-western theatre traditions. Such as theatre anthropology (Barba and Fowler 1995) and certain variants of performance studies (Conquergood and Johnson 2013; Schechner 2006).

Although this resistance is historically justifiable, it has led to a blind spot in performance archiving. Best practices for theatre documentation could find inspiration in linguistic documentation. We agree with Arps and Soeroto (2016) that there is still a place in performance studies for language research and even a "philology of performance". Arps recognizes the point made by Shanon Jackson, that the 19th century academic practices of philology were ill-suited to the study of 20th century performance, but he proposes a multimodal approach to performance philology that we believe has the potential to impact future scholarly practices (Arps and Soeroto 2016, 31-33). Besides this philological analysis, there are other areas where linguistic methods can prove useful:

• Documentation of endangered performances (this requires robust sustainability and interoperability policies, otherwise the efforts would be useless).

• Analysis of geographical distribution of performance traditions (this requires robust metadata practices and clear guidelines for depositors).

Of course language is still a concern for many performance scholars, even if it may not be the primary concern or the only one. Any effort to extend documentation and archiving in performance must then account for both linguistic and non-linguistic aspects. However, we also recognize that there are some methodological challenges, grounded on the different epistemological assumptions of language documentation and theatre studies:

• Theatre studies is most often concerned with the study of "exceptional" artistic practices. There is a bias towards unusual, counter-conventional practices in academic studies of theatre.

• Language documentation often studies language in more general contexts (and arguably in a range of different contexts or genres), rather than exemplary artistic productions of language and linguists are interested in identifying general patterns.

• Language documentation is concerned with spoken language much more than written manifestations.

These epistemological differences have a bearing in the archives that are generally produced. The differences between language and theatre archives are summarized in Table Error: Reference source not found.

Comparison of online theatre archives.

Theatre archives	Linguistic archives
Theatre-centred materials (photographs, videos, scripts, production notes)	Language-centred materials (audio and at times, video, can include transcripts and fieldnotes)
Lack of common metadata standards	Common metadata standards
Exemplary instances	Everyday instances
Records to be used in specific way	Multipurpose, reusable data
Lack of avenues for contributors and depositors	Clear policy for depositors and sustainability

These differences might have implications for appraisal policies. But theatre archives could still learn how to better use metadata standards in order to encourage the reusability of data, as well as larger number of depositions. An example of how this could be applied is described in the following section.

4 The state of documentation in theatre studies

Although theatre scholars and makers now commonly embrace documentation (Molloy 2014), they do so with a certain carefulness. It is no wonder that Peggy Phelan's remarks on the ontological impossibility of capturing performance are still often quoted (eg Parker-Starbuck 2011). Although as Ben Spatz notes, it is not only theatre but life in general that resists documentation (Spatz 2015, 2017).

The advantages of documentation are widely celebrated, and some engagement with documentation is now part of the normal workflow of both creative and scholarly practice. In our discussion of documentation, we follow Toni Sant, who identifies documentation as making records available for long-term access and usage, distinguishing it from "unreflexively produced traces" (Sant 2017, 9).

Theatre scholars are still trying to figure out how to deal with the archive and their imagination of the archive is still dominated by creativity and suspicion. For example, (Nash and Vaughan 2017, 159) emphasize the role of imagination in the archive, which they describe as "an important post-facto ’voice’ in the discursive archive". They emphasize that the users of an archive "will need to use imagination to bring the work to life" (Nash and Vaughan 2017, 159). The archive is thus theorized as an almost fictional construct that requires the creative input of users, necessary co-creators of the meanings of archival records. This approach is very different to the way information scientists talk about their work. For example, Monteith (2010) tackles a similar question but does not phrase it in terms of imagination, but on the need for contextual materials.

Theatre discourse is still framed by some level of distrust in the archive. Several recent discussions on documentation deal with test cases that resist archiving, such as the work of artists who consciously set their work in opposition to the archive (Dekker et al. 2017; Debra Levine 2017). Many works that deal with archiving are concerned with how to challenge the archive while making archives. It is important to recognize this as we propose a way going forward. We identify a lack of intersection between technical and conceptual discussions of theatre documentation and we suggest that the lack of intersection can be in part due to the fact that technical discussions rarely take into account the contested aspects of theatre documentation.

For example, Dekker et al. (2017) in an excellent chapter, talk about the impossibility and difficulty of documenting performance. However, they but make no mention of metadata standards. A carefully detailed book chapter by Pendón Martí nez and Bueno de la Fuente (2017) sits on the other end of the spectrum. It is a detailed account on ontologies for theatre, rich in technical details, but it does not mention any of the potential problems surrounding documentation, such as those raised by Phelan (1993) or Taylor (2003).

Both these chapters are found in Sant (2017), a contribution of exceptional value (as a disclaimer, one of the present authors has contributed a chapter to that edited volume). However, despite the best efforts of the contributors, the lack of intersection between technical and conceptual matters is still palpable in the book. We interpret this to be indicative of a larger problem in the field. And in this we agree with Sant (2017, 4), who says that "the precision, commitment and discipline of information science rarely cross the minds of performance scholars or practitioners". Theatre scholars suffer from a deeply knowledgeable obsession with the philosophical limits of archiving, but they have yet to embrace the benevolent technical nitty-gritty of archive-making.

In 2004 Thieberger exhorted his linguistic colleagues in similar ways: "We need to participate in broader initiatives in the Humanities that are leading to the development of the necessary infrastructure to house our research outputs in the longterm" (Thieberger 2004, 169). In the 13 years since the publication of that article, language documentation has achieved technical maturity, with Thieberger himself at the forefront of such effort. Although more work needs to be done, robust, growing and sustainable archives are now common in linguistics (as detailed in the preceding section). In theatre, we have yet to reach that state of affairs. As Sant notes, if we fail to use best practices from Information Science, theatre documentation projects run the risk of making current archives inaccessible in the near future. This also severely limits the possibilities for interactions with other areas, such as GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) or fields such as linguistics. Reusability and sustainability are the hallmarks of previous academic outputs (scholarly monographs and articles) on which our current work hinges. These qualities are also important to justify the long term viability of the investments (time-related and financial) that go into making archives.

This observation echoes Molloy (2014), who studied the documentation practices of UK-based theatre makers. Molloy interviewed several UK-based artists and her conclusions are that, although the artists consider documentation essential to their artistic work (both to obtain funding and inspiration), they seemed almost completely unaware of the best practices for data curation. None of them had a workable plan for sustainability and digital curation in place.ⁱⁱⁱ Molloy's study is limited to artists, but these observations can be extended to the work of many scholars, as evidenced by our observations above. As Bollen (2017) notes, few theatre archives use data models that comply with metadata standards.

Bleak as this prognosis might be, the time is ripe to rethink practices of documentation and archiving. Recent articles attest to the growing interest in digital historiography (Bay-Cheng 2017) and quantitative methods derived from the digital humanities for theatre studies: network analysis of collaborations (Caplan 2017), video processing for theatre videos (Escobar Varela and Parikesit 2017), analysis of playbills (Vareschi and Burkert 2017), and geotemporal analysis of touring companies (Bench and Elswit 2017), amongst others.