Transcript Performing arts as a field for conceptual modelling

Performing Arts as a field for
conceptual modelling
Heraklion, 8th FRBR/CIDOC CRM Meeting,
October 25-27, 2006
Patrick Le Bœuf,
Bibliothèque nationale de France
• "Performing arts" = a generic phrase that covers both:
(i.e.: sound recordings & animated images)
• and:
(i.e.: live theatre, live ballet, live music, artistic
“happenings”…; main feature: no carrier)
Which performing arts?
• No different in essence from books, paintings,
drawings…: they consist of a carrier + a content
• They do not call, in my opinion, for a specific modelling
in CIDOC CRM, FRBRER, FRBROO…
"Frozen" performing arts
• The absence of an enduring physical carrier is a
challenge:
– No carrier => can there be any "content" at all?
– How can memory institutions (libraries, museums, archives)
"hold" and share information about live performing arts?
– If the performance is both the medium and the message, does it
imply that an occurrent (the performance process) can also be a
perdurant (the content of the message) at the same time?
"Live" performing arts
• Some institutions do hold theatrical (operatic,
choreographic, etc.) archives
• There is no internationally agreed standard or good
practice about how to deal with such materials, just
empirical local policies
• Institutions need a sound theoretical approach in order to
improve their local policies and transform them into
international standards
"I'm a practitioner, why should I care?"
• USA: Dance Heritage Coalition's authority records for
choreographic works
– Syntax: Title of ballet + form qualifier ("choreographic work") +
choreographer's surname used as a qualifier + other qualifiers
as needed
– Can be used as subject headings in bibliographic records
– Serve to collocate descriptions for all the physical "traces" left by
a ballet (notation, videorecording, props, costumes, press
clippings…)
Two examples of practical achievements (1)
• France: BnF's Department for Performing Arts: "notices
de spectacle" (records for stage productions):
– Syntax: "ordinary" bibliographic records, except that they do not
describe a "publication," but a performance:
Title of show / Name of stage director (choreographer, etc.) ;
Name of playwright (composer,n librettist, etc.) ; Names of main
performers. – Place : Name of Theatre, Date. – (etc.)
– Serve as a target for links from bibliographic records describing
any material related to the stage production
– Provide a contextualisation for the materials described in such
bibliographic records
Two examples of practical achievements (2)
• What should the "notice de spectacle" describe at all?
– just one performance? (a unique event)
– a run of performances? (an "abstract event," in Allan Renear's
terminology)
– a set of concepts common to all performances of the same run?
(a conceptual perdurant)
• What about tours and revivals?
– Currently, we're creating as many records as there are tours and
revivals
– We're wondering whether that's wise, and whether it wouldn't be
better to create just one record that would cover the initial run and
all of its revivals (focussing thus de facto on a set of concepts)
• => "Looking for a sound conceptual model, desperately…"
Some issues we're confronted with at the BnF
• Keir Elam, The semiotics of theatre and drama (1980,
2nd edition 2002):
– 1931: Otakar Zich refuses "to grant automatic dominance to the
written text, which takes its place in the system of systems
making up the total dramatic representation" (p. 5)
– 1977-78: Gianfranco Bettetini, Marco De Marinis and Franco
Ruffini "virtually rule out the dramatic text altogether as a
legitimate concern of theatrical semiotics proper" (p. 3)
• => The linguistic text is just one element of the whole,
and should not be regarded as predominant
Semioticians' viewpoints
1: status of the text of the play
• Keir Elam, The semiotics of theatre and drama (1980,
2nd edition 2002):
– 1940: Jiři Veltruský affirms that "All that is on the stage is a sign"
(p. 6)
– 1968: Tadeusz Kowzan insists again that "Everything is a sign in
a theatrical presentation" (p. 17)
– As a consequence, the audience "perceive the performance as a
network of meanings, i.e. as a text" (p. 10)
– Keir Elam terms that kind of text "performance text" in order to
distinguish it from the linguistic text produced by the playwright
Semioticians' viewpoints
2: the performance is a text
• Keir Elam, The semiotics of theatre and drama (1980, 2nd edition
2002):
– "Sources of theatrical information" (p. 31-33) =
• the dramatist
• the director, "whose decisions and instructions determine to a considerable
extent the choice of transmitters, the form that their signals take and the
encoding of the messages" (p. 33)
• the set designer
• the lighting designer
• the costume designer
• the composer
• the stage manager
• technicians
• actors, "in their capacity as decision-makers, initiative-takers and funds of
ideas."
– "The spectator will interpret this complex of messages ― speech,
gesture, the scenic continuum, etc. ― as the integrated text" (p. 33)
Semioticians' viewpoints
3: theatrical information is utmost complex
• Keir Elam, The semiotics of theatre and drama (1980, 2nd edition 2002):
– 1968: Tadeusz Kowzan "provides a preliminary and approximate typology of
some thirteen systems" at work in a performance text (p. 45):
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Language
Tone
Facial mime
Gesture
Movement
Make-up
Hairstyle
Costume
Props
Décor
Lighting
Music
Sound effects
– Others could be added, and the boundaries between some of the above are
fuzzy
Semioticians' viewpoints
4: a typology of information systems
• Keir Elam, The semiotics of theatre and drama (1980,
2nd edition 2002):
– "The dynamism of theatrical discourse ― the fact that it must, by
definition, remain in progress ― makes its effective
examination highly problematic. It cannot (unlike, say, film) be
interrupted or frozen for purposes of scrutiny and, still more, it is
necessarily unrepeatable, since the precise internal relations
established in one performance will differ, however subtly, in
the next." (p. 41)
Semioticians' viewpoints
5: the basic trouble with
"performance texts"…
Our concern
• Is not to design a "semiotic model" of theatrical
discourse, although we can draw on semioticians' efforts
in that direction,
• But to conceptualise the "performance text"
– as a perdurant, within the framework of CIDOC CRM/FRBROO,
– and in articulation with related occurrents:
• individual performance
• run of individual performances
• "life cycle" of tours and revivals
• I would like to distinguish between "micro-differences"
and "macro-differences" that affect the performance text
– "Micro-differences" are involuntary, uncontrolled, aleatory,
inevitably bound to the "unrepeatability" of each individual
performance
– They are "errors" against the overall pattern of the "archetypical,"
"ideal" performance designed by the stage director
– They can be regarded as negligible, at least in library practice
(perhaps also in a conceptual model)
– "Macro-differences" reflect a voluntary act on behalf of the stage
director
– They can be regarded as determining distinct versions of the
performance text
How many "performance texts"
for a given "stage production"?
Run of
performances
member of
Individual
Work
realises
Individual
performance
conveys
Complex
Work
realised in
"Ideal" Self-Contained
Self-Contained is an
Expression, impossible
Expression alteration to witness in any
of
individual performance
"should convey"
In FRBROO terms…
• A performance is more a process of perception than a process of
creation/production
• You never read twice quite the same book: each individual reading event
is unique and unrepeatable: why should it be different with performing
arts?
• Similarly, you never look twice at quite the same painting: in the meantime,
the varnish has grown dirtier, pigments were altered by oxidation…
eventually, the painting was restored, and the image you look at is
objectively different
• … Which does not prevent us from regarding the content of the book and
the image carried by the painting from being instances of Persistent Item,
not of Temporal Entity: why should it be different with the content of
performances?
• My reading or writing = an occurrent // What I read or write = a perdurant
My performing = an occurrent // What I perform = a perdurant
In my humble opinion…
Unless…
• … Unless we adhere to the ontological view that nothing
in the world is a Persistent Item, but the Universe
consists exclusively of Temporal Entities…