what is taking note(s)?

taking note(s)_performing care is a research project and performative documentation work by Jen Archer-Martin of Massey University College of Creative Arts, presented as part of Performing, Writing and The Performance Arcade 2017 in Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand. The taking note(s) blog is an online archive of ‘notes’ on ‘caring labours’ or ‘small acts of care’ performed by others (human or non-human) over the duration of these events. 

*Taking Notes will be going live on the 10th of March (this Friday)

taking note(s) proposes to act in service of the Performing, Writing symposium and The Performance Arcade, by way of noticing, documenting and archiving the many ‘small acts of care’ that will occur over the course of the events. Taking inspiration from Stephen Bottoms and Matthew Goulish’s Small Acts of Repair: Performance, Ecology and Goat Island, the work seeks to both acknowledge and perform small acts of care through reading and writing the relationships between site/situation, text/performance and people/actors. Like Bottoms and Goulish, taking note(s) “happily participates in the failure of documentation to capture or codify the ... performances... that it makes reference to,” positioning documentation as a performative practice in its own right that does not attempt to remain faithful, but rather to procreate and proliferate.

Shifting from a notion of ‘repair’, which presupposes an existing state of disrepair, the proposed work intends to appreciate the acts of ‘care’ that often go unnoticed. Carol Gilligan states that “a feminist ethic of care begins with connection” between people and between public and private labours. Witnessing, or taking notice, of these affective labours that occur in the private realm, or behind the scenes, is in itself an act of care that begins to reconnect and make visible the ecologies of care that underscore any activity. In compiling an archive of ‘notes on caring labours’ the work attempts to make a case for a spatio-temporal practice of caring, and to begin to inscribe a space for this practice that sits somewhere between private and public – being present without taking up time and space; being in service without losing self; acting alongside rather than under or after. It also asks – who or what are the performers of these small acts? – remaining open to the possibility of the actor being a non-human agent such as an insect, object, or room.

Methods of ‘note-taking’ will not be prescribed. Ways of reading the site/situation may include ‘listening to’, ‘watching’, ‘sitting with’, ‘participating in’. Ways of (site-)writing may range from scrawling in a notebook or inputting notes into an iPhone app, to making audio-visual recordings of recalled and re-performed acts.

The taking note(s) blog will be compiled over the duration of the Performance Arcade and the four turns of the Performing, Writing symposium (on Live, on Site, on Score and on Voice), taking note(s) of sites and situations through a set of immersive and embodied practices that give voice to the small acts of care that underscore, rather than score, the event(s).