Term · Method
Performance as Disappearance
Peggy Phelan's influential argument that performance exists only in the present and is changed by being recorded.
In Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (1993), Phelan argues that performance cannot be saved or documented without becoming something else, and that its disappearance is part of what makes it distinctive and politically resistant to reproduction.
Other scholars, notably Rebecca Schneider in Performing Remains (2011), have challenged this, arguing that performance also remains — in bodies, gestures, and re-enactments.