Emergency Index

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Emergency INDEX was an annual publication to gathered and cross-index performance documentation and artists. It was a durable, stubborn testament to the value of performance, an enactment of the conviction that ephemeral work matters in all sorts of ways.

Emergency INDEX an annual document of performance practice in pandemic times VOL. 10+  presents performances conducted in 2020 and 2021.

 

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Folks of ground 
Performance
(18 -19 pp)

A small part contains the whole world
Performance
(418 – 419 pp)

This is a bible of performance art activity. And if you are, like I am, a believer in performance art and the value of this ephemeral art activity to change the hearts and minds and consciousness of people, then you need to have this bible in your life. The end.

Martha Wilson

 

Publication Details

Emergency INDEX an annual document of performance practice in pandemic times VOL. 10+
Ugly Duckling Presse
Brooklyn NY
Trade Paperback
6.25 x 8.25 in
600 pp
ISBN: 978-1-946604-10-1
Publication Date: December 01 2023

 

In 2004, I moved to Tokyo, leaving behind my friends and collaborators in New York. It was the beginning of a very slow process of meeting artists and performance makers in Japan. By the late 2000s, I was involved with, influenced by, and regularly collaborating with communities of artists in Tokyo. And yet, over the eight years I lived in Japan, I could never shake my connection to NYC performance, the nagging feeling that I was missing out on something important happening there…

…and that they, in New York—who could not see, hear, feel, or smell the performances I was experiencing—were missing out on something important happening in Tokyo.

The project of Emergency INDEX was conceived during that time, growing out of a need for performance people to know what other performance people were up to. It would be a compendium, an annual publication to gather and cross-index performance documentation from artists anywhere working in any performance genre who made work in the same calendar year. It was, I imagined then, to be a ten-year project, publishing a thick print volume each year for a decade. It was meant to be a durable, stubborn testament to the value of performance, an enactment of the conviction that ephemeral work matters in all sorts of ways.

It was, as co-editor Matvei Yankelevich and I wrote in the introduction to the first volume, a way to deal with the problem—even more pernicious for performance makers—of not being there.

“Acknowledged as being, at best, a conflicted endeavor, and at worst, a betrayal of the very essence of performance, documentation has been problematized while performances have proliferated. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of performances have come and gone, witnessed only by the people in the room, or on the street. And though we can argue about the advantages of ephemerality, this does make for a rather unique situation: performance has become a field whose practices are largely invisible to itself.” (vii)

That first volume included 249 wildly different performances made in 2011, across dance, theater, performance art, research, activism, puppetry, poetry, and genres yet unnamed. The back-of-the-book indexes allowed for surprising ways of navigating all this material, inviting readers to make connections, notice trends, or find allies. From 2011 to 2019, we produced a new volume each year. With each subsequent edition, Emergency INDEX Volumes 1–9 have called forth a growing community of performance makers tuning in to each other’s work.

This year, we publish our tenth and (in this iteration, at least) final volume. The book you hold in your hands is Emergency INDEX Vol 10+. The “+” in its title is meant to acknowledge that the book is two years late, delayed by the crisis of a global pandemic. But it is also to signal that this double volume, unlike its predecessors, documents two years of performance instead of just one. The time period covered here includes 2020 and 2021, the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, when restrictions on in-person gatherings were most severe. Vol 10+ chronicles the performances people made in these years to survive.

Yelena Gluzman – Preface ( Excerpt)