Why Some Theatre Experiences Need to Be Written Down

Every performance disappears.

The audience leaves. The lights are turned off. The space returns to what it was before. What usually remains are photographs, posters, a recording if one exists, and scattered memories carried by those who were present.

Yet much of what makes a performance possible is missing from that archive.

The conversations that changed the direction of a project. The ideas that failed. The questions that remained unanswered. The rehearsal that unexpectedly transformed everything that followed. The doubts, revisions, and discoveries that never became visible on stage.

For more than two decades, Saye Theatre has worked across different forms of performance. Theatre, choreography, durational work, site-responsive projects, international collaborations, publications, workshops, and research have all become part of our practice. Looking back, we realized that while many performances were documented, very little was written about the process that produced them.

This journal begins with that absence.

It is not intended as a news section, nor as a promotional platform for upcoming events. Social media already performs that function. What interests us here is something slower: creating a space where ideas, working methods, unfinished thoughts, and artistic processes can remain accessible long after a performance has ended.

Performance is often described as an ephemeral art. We value that quality. We do not believe that everything should be preserved, explained, or translated into text. Some experiences belong only to those who shared a particular place and time.

At the same time, every artistic practice develops its own memory.

Without that memory, each new project risks beginning from zero. Questions disappear. Experiments are repeated without knowing they have already been attempted. Failures are forgotten together with the knowledge they produced.

Writing cannot replace performance. It can, however, preserve the path that led toward it.

Some of the texts published here will follow the development of specific projects from their earliest sketches to their public presentation. Others will reflect on books that have shaped our thinking, conversations within the group, encounters with artists from different contexts, or questions that continue to accompany our work without reaching definitive conclusions.

We are especially interested in the spaces between research and performance, between rehearsal and presentation, between the archive and the living body. Much of our work has grown precisely within those in-between spaces, where artistic practice becomes a form of investigation rather than the execution of a predetermined idea.

This journal is therefore less concerned with documenting results than with documenting movement: how an idea changes, how a method evolves, how a project discovers its own form through time.

Many of these texts will remain incomplete, just as the projects themselves remain open to revision. We see no contradiction in that. Finished works are only one part of artistic practice. The unfinished, the uncertain, and the unresolved deserve attention as well.

Perhaps these pages will become useful for artists, researchers, students, or collaborators interested in independent performance practices. Perhaps they will simply become a record for ourselves—a way of remembering how and why certain decisions were made.

Either possibility is enough.

If performances are where our work becomes visible, this journal is where some of its invisible structures may gradually appear.

Welcome.