ABSTRACT
In this chapter, Philip Auslander argues that the performance experienced through documentation is the performance, not a secondary reproduction of it. Performance events are reactivated—or restaged, so to speak—through documentation. While Auslander acknowledges that the experience obtained through documentation is not the same experience as the one to be had by participating in a live event, he still understands it as an experience of the performance. Even though we know these events occurred at another time and in another place, we experience them as performances in the here and now, with ourselves as audience. Ultimately, the ontological relationship between a performance and its documentation is far less interesting and significant than the phenomenological relationship between the document and the beholder who experiences the performance from it.
