Moving Performance to Text: Can Performance Be Transcribed?

originally presented in performative form. In its highest aspiration, it would be the attempt to record transparently and objectively in writing every significant detail of a performance, including the tone and emphasis, pacing and synchronization, and momentum and intensity of events, in the order in which they occur. A transcript differs considerably from a script—even a script with actor's and director's notes. A script is an outline, a prescriptive guide, for the production of a performance—for what a performance may be. It mandates an indefinite number of possible performances. A transcription, by contrast, is a record of a specific performance event. It is, in this sense, a kind of historical document whose purpose is to record every detail of something that has already actually occurred. One might say that a script prescribes the performance, the performance interprets these prescriptions in playing them out, and the transcription attempts to detail the result in writing. Because a transcription records actual rather than prescribed events, it aspires to be the ultimate form of entextualization of performance. It is interesting, then, given the quality and uniqueness of famous performances, that transcription is regarded as an inferior genre among the many literatures that relate to performance. The bookstores of the National Theatre, the Barbicon, or the Globe bulge with scripts, commentaries, and histories relating to great performance pieces, but no transcripts. My main purpose in this paper is to explore the production and use of this orphaned form of performance-related text and to consider what kind of a representation of a performance a transcript is.