El archivo vivo: Documentación de las arquitecturas efímeras en el Arte Escénico

The performing arts are living disciplines, originating from an idea that can be transformed during a long period of rehearsals, until its final conception is performed for a short time in front of an audience that receives a sensory experience. Is it possible to archive an experience? A series of plastic strategies conditioned by formal, technical and functional decisions influence the senses and appeal to the emotions of the audience through the materialisation of other realities. What set of documents defines the ephemeral? This article raises the debate on the need to conserve the living arts once they have been performed, through their transfer to a documentation in which the document itself becomes a representation of the performing work. First, the necessary characteristics of this type of archive are set out; next, the essential information to be added to this historical archive in order to preserve the event; and finally, an example is drawn from the author’s experience at the Teatro Real.