Abstract

What happens to live shows when they are over? After-shows started from a desire to collect intimate performance histories and re-present them, publicly: to examine what live performance events become, or might become, after they have formally ended, with particular attention to the personal histories associated with them. How to touch the absence of something that was once there and attempt to understand something about it, to inhabit a version of it, to interpret it, to make something else with those interpretations?

An interdisciplinary inquiry into methods and implications of researching, collecting, re-representing, reperforming, creating with, and (arguably) translating personal histories and memories connected to past live performances, After-shows encompasses: 1) oral history interviews with 16 performers and former performers, centered on memories of once-live shows; 2) performance research sessions with nine performers trained in different forms (circus, dance, music), experimenting with reinterpreting and creating off of fragments of memories collected in phase 1; 3) an event re-presenting variations of those reperformed memories, open to the public; and 4) a series of post-event spectator interviews with eleven attendees of that evening, held between four and ten months after they attended, and focused on the ways they remembered the event.

Throughout these processes, this hermeneutically inclined research-(re)creation project examined how the question of untranslatability — or "the energy of the untranslatables" as per philologist Barbara Cassin — might be applied both as a dramaturgical motor and/or as a research lens in considering the re-representations of performance memories.

Written both in and about the aftermath of a live performance event, this thesis echoes its on-site research-creation counterpart in considering untranslatability within representations of performance memories, drawing on oral history and research-creation methodologies, and looking across multiple interdisciplines including translation studies, memory studies, and performance historiography.

Keywords: performance historiography, research-creation, translation of/and/as performance, intersemiotic translation, memory studies, oral history, spectator studies, interdisciplinary dramaturgy, untranslatable memory