In the third special report on topics addressed at the ICAF Festival in Rotterdam in March and April 2023, Sophie Hope and Owen Kelly talk to Kerrie Schaeffer, who gave two presentations on documenting community performance processes.

According to the festival programme Kerrie set out to “examine the documentary form itself, its history, the relevance of new technologies from film and radio to documentary theatre, as well as political and ethical debates relevant to documentary theatre, film and digital media. Whilst paying close attention to practical examples, questions such as how video and film documentaries narrate aesthetic and social processes, whose voices are or aren’t presented, and how power relations between social actors involved in collaborative making practices are or aren’t presented, will arise”.

In this discussion Kerrie, Owen and Sophie examine some of issues that arose in the presentations and question the nature of documenting as an activity and the many ways in which the act of documenting can interact with, and interfere with, the process of creating community art.