In Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, New York and London 1993, p.146, performance studies scholar Peggy Phelan wrote that:
Performance’s only life is in the present’; that it ‘cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so it becomes something other than performance.
For Phelan, a work of performance art only exists as long as the exact duration of its staging. Repeat performances are different because they do not share temporality (time), the bodies who engage in it are different (older/younger, different cellular composition, different audiences, etc.) and that any documentation – any translation into mediated forms – can only retrospectively gesture toward that which once was, but is no more.
Phelan draws this ontological line in the sand because, for her, this is the value of performance. How we share it becomes more highly valued because the richest experience is that we cannot capture it and that we only have a relation to it later in our memory. The fact that it is made only to disappear makes the moment even more vital for all (performers and audiences) who experience it. It also cannot be later revised to be used for different purposes. Phelan writes:
‘Without a copy, live performance plunges into visibility – in a maniacally charged present – and disappears into memory, into the realm of invisibility and the unconscious where it eludes regulation and control’.2 Because it vanishes, performance has the power to short-circuit the normal functioning of the art market’s profit-motive and to escape the power of mastering narratives.