Jealousy, Transmission and Recovery

Recovery is a performance project by Natalie Cursio and Shannon Bott that premiered in Melbourne, Australia in late 2015. In the credits I am listed as ‘Director / Choreographer’ but I was not involved at the beginning of the project and nor did I see the premiere. My relative absence from Recovery has led me to conceive of my relationship to it as being that of a jealous lover. In turn, I ask how the experience of jealousy may be useful in re-negotiating the role of the choreographer—and choreography—through time. The writing evokes the biological metaphor of 'spillover' to help imagine a work's persistence beyond performance (and related considerations of annotation and archive), and proposes that the idea of stewardship helps to recognize the limited role of the director/choreographer in how performance is transmitted through time. This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Performance Research on 26 November 2015 available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/13528165.2015.1111061