1998: 8 7 ). Again, much performance is now being written in different scripts
which better capture embodied practice, for example, in dance, by the use of
movement scripts such as Labanotation (Farnell 199 4 ). But, fundamentally, much
performance cannot be written down. It is unwritable, unsayable, and unstable.
And that is its fascination: it is a living demonstration of skills we have but cannot
ever articulate fully in the linguistic domain.
Phelan and Blau’s emphasis on a traceless effectivity can, of course, be taken
entirely too far. In truth, it applies only to certain forms of performance. Many
forms of performance leave many kinds of traces dependent upon the time frame
that is chosen as a register, what counts as effect, and so on. The break that Phelan
and Blau sometimes seem to identify between the immateriality of performance
and the materiality of everything else includes within it the danger of reinserting
a romantically inclined distinction between the artistic immaterial and the gross
material which they are at such pains to deny. In particular, they tend to downplay
the power of objects taken not as brute signs but as events that unfold to a different
rhythm with which I want to end this chapter (see Phelan 1998).
But whatever the nature of performance, there is no doubt that an extra-
ordinarily diverse archive of forms of performance has been built up – especially
in the later twentieth century – which now constitutes perhaps the single most
important contemplation of the time-spaces of now that exists. It is a contem-
plation which values improvisation and encourages attunement to emergent form.
It ranges from formal and experimental theatre to formal and experimental dance,
to all kinds of performance art, as well as to various forms of musical performance
(Frith 199 7 ). Then there are all the kinds of events which have tried to get closer
to ‘everyday life’ by performing in its spaces, the ‘happenings’ of the 1960s and
early 19 7 0s (Sandford 1995), the radical street performance that has flourished
from the 19 7 0s onwards (Cohen-Cruz 1988), and so on.
What is particularly noticeable about this resonant archive of practice – so little
touched on by so many in the social sciences and humanities and yet so impor-
tant – is the amount of attention paid to practical means of organizing space
and time as a means of heightening receptiveness, stimulating involvement, and
evaluating and (not least) undermining authority (see, for example, Tufnell and
Crickmay 1990). Yet remarkably little of this work has ever made its way into
the wider literature on spatiality which now, as a result, presents (or rather pasts)
us with a kind of tomb, full of dead, dead, dead geographies.^23 In the next sec-
tion, I therefore want to start to examine this archive by placing an emphasis
on dance.
The shapes of change
The body is not something I possess to dance with. I do not order my body to bend
here and whirl there. I do not think ‘move’ and then do move. No! I am the dance;
its thinking is its doing and its doing is its thinking. I am the bending. I am the whirling.
My dance is my body and my body is myself.
(Fraleigh 198 7 : 32)138 Part II