REVIEW ESSAY Performance Matters 1.1-2 (2015): 167-179 • Time-Based History 167 Time-Based History: Perspectives on Documenting Performance

In this review of literature on performance documentation, I aim to highlight strengths and weaknesses of existing scholarship in order to suggest ways in which the field might develop. Although I will be most forthright about my own stakes in this development at the conclusion of this review, I should say that my perspective is oriented toward the fields of performance philosophy and practice as research, while also invested in fashioning a temporal aesthetics, or what I call the time-specificity of performance. This text is positioned a step before a more fulsome elaboration of time-specificity but nevertheless addresses the need for such a concept through its very process of selection. For example, the kinds of literature to be found here are mostly all located after performance. Few take account of the production of documents before and during performance, such as the scores that are a part of much contemporary dance practice or the elements of performance that are being taken up by many in the field of poetic practice. Part of what time-specificity acknowledges is the multiple temporalities of performance: the before, during, and after, and how they persist through time. This review begins with the notion of ephemerality as ontological disappearance, as posited by Peggy Phelan. I also take up the wide array of responses to Phelan from performance theory and practice, while also adding in some perspectives from art history and criticism, philosophy, and political theory. Some of these writings were published before Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (1993) but were not included in that study nor taken up as responses to it. Central concepts that I will explore in what follows are, of course, documentation and performance, but als