Just in time: ‘momentary’ events in the making of Rosemary Butcher’s signature practices

The notions of ‘ephemerality’, of time and loss, are essentially spectatorial, in the case of live performance. For the performance-maker, the work of making “the work”, over time, has never been ephemeral. Spectators’ performances and those of makers are non-identical, not least in terms of performances’ times. The ‘signature practices’ of the mature expert practitioner tend to emerge just in time, and the work is serial, a momentary instantiation in an ongoing creative enquiry, whereas spectating, in the event, mistakes its experience for “the work itself”.
We propose to argue that times, the immutable and the immanent, engage with particular ways of seeing, so as to produce ‘signature practices’, in expert performance-making registers. The processes tend to be punctuated a ‘momentary instantiation’ (Knorr Cetina, 2001): the timely performance outcome that seems initially to end the enquiry, but that will reveal, to the practitioner concerned, a further set of questions to be worked through.