Live performance lacks the durability of art practices such as photography, film and
painting, and so definitions of ‘live’ acts have traditionally been formulated in terms
of ‘transience’ and ‘disappearance’. In this context the archive and archival documents
are often described as the antithesis of performance’s ontology. An archive’s primary
function is to preserve material for future, undetermined uses, whereas a live event is
temporary and cannot endure as ‘itself’ outside of the temporal-spatial zone it unfolds
in before an audience. Yet archival documents are intimately imbricated in the
creation of live acts. This can be seen in all performance practices, from written plays
in the dramatic theatre, to the assemblage of materials used in devised performance, to
the ways sites are framed as sources of historical knowledge in performance reenactments.
By examining the role documents play in performance practice I argue
that archival materials have the potential to act as the genesis for live acts.

The archive’s generative function makes performance a potential method of historical
research, where documents can help engender an interactive reciprocity between
spectators and the past. The archival mode of performance practice I advocate in this
thesis requires spectators to become participants inside the performance sphere, just as
historians participate in the writing of historical discourses in the archive.