Book of Abstracts
Performing the Archive: 2015
Book of Abstracts
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1. Archives, the Live and Accessing Meaning
CHAIR:
Ciara Conway
(NUI, Galway)
Tanya Dean
(Yale University & NUI, Galway)
How Live is Live? Considering Theatre Broadcasts as Performances of Archival
Process
Peter Brook famously defined a live performance as, “…an event for that moment in
time, for that [audience] in that place – and it’s gone. Gone without a trace. There was no
journalist; there was no photographer; the only witnesses were the people present; the
only record is what they retained, which is how it should be in theatre.”i In this paper, I
wish to consider how this notion of “liveness” evolves when the act of witnessing a
traditionally traceless event is paradoxically tied to the creation and almostsimultaneous dissemination of a digital archive of performance.
In 2009, the National Theatre initiated their ambitious new project – National
Theatre Live – with a live broadcast of their production of Phédre starring Helen Mirren.
Since then, the NT Live broadcasts have been consumed by over 3.5 million people in
more than 1,100 venues around the world, with transmissions of such criticallyacclaimed productions as War Horse, Simon Stephen’s adaptation of The Curious
Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, and Sam Mendes’ King Lear starring Simon
Russell Beale. The language surrounding NT Live stresses the positive value that the
broadcasts are simultaneously performed in front of a live audience in the theatre space
as well as cinema audiences worldwide (rather than screening a pre-recorded digital
transcript of the production). Host screens for NT Live seem likewise determined to
preserve the notion of theatre as an evanescent artform. For instance, the NYU Skirball
Centre describes their screenings of the NT Live broadcasts as “time-delayed live
screenings,” as if some alchemy holds the London performance suspended in the ether
before it can be realized in front of New York audiences. Why this semantic refusal to
call the screenings “recordings”? The popularity of certain productions means that
repeat screenings are not uncommon (such as for Danny Boyle’s production of
Frankenstein), and online agencies such as Digital Theatre provide a repository of such
digitally recorded live performances. Despite the fact that these “live” events can then
be rewatched at will, the notion of the “live”-screened performance still seems to hold a
certain cultural cachet.
Arguably, the NT Live broadcasts are not, in fact, live; the infinitesimal microseconds that it takes for the digital feed to transmit from the theatre space to the
cinemas worldwide means that the cinema audiences are, in fact, receiving an already
archived performance, one that has already been experienced by their audience avatars
miles and miliseconds away. If, as Peggy Phelan writes, “[p]erformance cannot be saved,
recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of
representations: once it does so it becomes something other than performance;” ii I plan
to examine how the NT Live broadcasts (and their equivalents of the Met Live
broadcasts, etc,) are perhaps creating a new breed of this “something other than
performance” in that they constitute a performance of archive.
Peter Brook. “A Talk with Peter Brook,” American Theater III (1969–70), Martha Wadsworth Coigney, ed.
(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1970), 16–23.
ii Peggy Phelan. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London: Routledge, 1993), 146.
i
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Louise Ritchie
(Aberystwyth University)
Hactivating the archive
The proposed presentation focuses on a collaborative project concerned with creative
points of access to a special performance collection: ‘The Brith Gof ‘archive. Between
1981-2002 Brith Gof developed innovative approaches to theatre making in Wales.
They worked outside of conventional theatre auditoria preferring to perform in
buildings in which a community works, plays and worships: chapels and cathedrals,
barns, cattle markets and disused factories. From 1988 Brith Gof concentrated on
pioneering ‘site specific’ performance.
In 2007, The Department of Theatre, Film and Television at Aberystwyth
University and the National Library of Wales embarked on a series of six public and
participatory events under the title ‘Whwng Cof ac Archif/Between memory and
archive’. The pubic events marked the deposit of this special performance collection
into the National Library of Wales, offering a platform to piece together and evoke
former productions for a contemporary academic, professional and popular audience.
The events provided a platform to draw together the memories of the makers, funders,
critics and witnesses present, in concert with surviving documents and recordings. A
central ambition of these events was to create an oral record of happenings up to
twenty-five years ago.
The presentation will focus on the continued effort to question and reimagine
new narratives and search pathways within the archive and the future development of
resources to enhance creative points of access. Attention will be placed on key
discoveries made and the most recent project titled ‘Pax Uncovered’, which was
performed in the North Reading room as a site based response to the Brith Gof
collection.
Susan Brady and Helice Koffler
(Yale University and Uni of Washington)
American Theatre Archival Project
Established in 2009, the American Theatre Archive Project (ATAP), an initiative of the
American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR), helps active theatre companies to
preserve their legacy. Deploying regional teams composed of archivists, dramaturgs,
and scholars throughout North America, ATAP has been developing a network of
resources and community of practice around theatre archives. ATAP also has created
guidelines and workshops for archivists and information professionals who may be
interested in working with one of these teams, but who may not have experience with
performing arts records.
A critical component of the success of the project has been ATAP’s relationship
with special collection repositories. Some theatre companies may wish to maintain inhouse archives. ATAP assists those companies directly through its Initiation Program
and a DIY manual it makes freely available to guide them through those first crucial
steps. Other companies, however, may want to place their records in a library or
archives. In those instances, ATAP works to connect companies with special collections
repositories that are interested in documenting their local performing arts
history. Some repositories have ongoing and/or past relationships with theatre
companies; others have theatre-related holdings which may not have received adequate
processing or cataloging. The ATAP Northwest team has embarked on several projects
that have encouraged collecting institutions to develop relationships with active theatre
companies. These include: a survey of theatre-related holdings in the UW Libraries
Special Collections (Seattle, Washington) and the on-site processing of the records of
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the Miracle Theatre Group (Portland, Oregon) with the transfer of archival material to
the Oregon Multicultural Archives (Corvallis, Oregon).
This presentation by Susan Brady, co-founder of ATAP, and Helice Koffler, team
leader of the ATAP Northwest team, will provide an overview of the history and
philosophical foundations of ATAP, as well as a case study of the Northwest team that
will introduce conference attendees to the American Theatre Archive Project and its
work with archivists, theatre practitioners, and repositories to promote the
preservation of America’s theatrical history.
2. Manuscripts, Data & Digital Texts
CHAIR:
Kieran Hoare
(NUI, Galway)
Rosemary K.J. Davis
(Amherst College)
The Samuel French Archive at Amherst College
Since 1964, the Amherst College Archives has served as a repository for the Samuel
French theatrical publishing corporation, accepting more than 450 linear feet of
unprocessed materials in the past 50 years. In 2014, the Archives received a grant to
make a vast portion of the French Collection accessible for use.
My presentation examines the French archival processing project at its halfway point:
highlighting items in the collection (dating from 1794-2012) such as play manuscripts,
musical scores, scrapbooks, playbills, photographs, costume design illustrations, and
decades of documentation for Samuel French business transactions exploring areas of
scholarly research that could be enriched by this newly available archive, including the
development of international copyright law and the rise of amateur theatrical
performances at the turn of the 20th century And while the Samuel French collection
will be of incalculable value to anyone researching the history of performance and
theatrical publishing in the 19th and 20th centuries, this project also functions as a
catalyst for discussing: ▪
the urgency underlying archival efforts to “unhide collections” of historical
significance ▪
the particular need to create a culture of transparency, inclusiveness, and
immediacy in regards to making theatrical documentation part of the historical record
▪
how libraries/archives can encourage and augment the labor of theatrical
communities striving to capture the ephemeral nature of performance This talk serves as Samuel French show and tell, archival outreach, and an earnest
entreaty for professional/scholarly engagement to help highlight collections important
to the ever-evolving history of theatre. Lauren Benke
(University of Denver/Trinity College Dublin)
Gesture, Intimacy and the Archive: The Case of Contemporary Artists' Books
The movement toward digitized archives, libraries, and books substantially alters the
kinetic experience of relating to the written word. The gestures of browsing a library,
turning a page, and perusing an archive are to an extent supplanted by the gestures of
manipulating a track pad and pressing buttons on a touch screen. As our embodied,
gestural relationship to book objects changes, there is a corresponding shift in the level
of intimacy with which we relate to these objects; as such, practices that re-embody the
book and facilitate a movement-based relationship to it become increasingly unique and
significant. Book artist Alicia Bailey has spoken of the genre of artists’ books as being
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time-based, non-static, and ontologically capable of producing a gestural intimacy
between artist, reader, and object. Contemporary artists’ books have a unique ability to
create an intimate, kinæsthetic experience. This paper addresses the somatic quality of
artists’ books—the gestures with which the reader relates physically to the book’s
construction— as well as the potential application of the genre to archival practices.
Specifically, evaluating the gestural qualities of artists’ books by Maureen Cummins,
Alicia Bailey, and Elsi Vassdal Ellis reveals a significant nexus between embodiment,
movement, and intimacy in the genre.
Consequently, artists’ books have a unique relationship to the archive: though
they are housed in the archive, the reader’s intimate and physical experience of reading
them presents an archival difficulty similar to that of other gestural arts. The somatic
experience of reading artists’ books is both central to their ontology and difficult to
preserve in an archive. Thus, the case of artists’ books provides a unique and generative
space for theorizing the archive. Like archives of live performance, artists’ books are
sites of intimate, but often problematic, intersection between the material document
and the performing body. Artists’ books also suggest a potentially effective model for
archival practice; this paper imagines a method for constructing a gestural archive—
using the construction of contemporary artists’ books as an example—in order to
archive gestural art forms like dance and theatre. If the archive itself can facilitate an
intimate, gestural relationship for its reader, the gestures of the original performance
may be more successfully preserved.
Jennifer Roberts-Smith, Kathryn Harvey, Liza Griffen
(University of Waterloo, University of Guelph, Stratford Festival)
Reconfiguring Archival Catalogue Metadata
In this paper we explore the theoretical and practical possibilities for reconfiguring
archival catalogue metadata and interfaces to a) be more responsive to theatre history
research conducted by artists in producing theatres; b) be more driven by researchers’
needs than by historic archival practice; and c) maintain essential contextual
information regarding the collection itself; while also d) seeing if we can make visible to
researchers or even allow them to engage in the interpretive nature of the act of
cataloguing that current database or index structures, while not intentionally hiding, do
not make manifest.
At present, there is a palpable division between the typical archivist and the
typical researcher, the root of this being the perceived difference in nature of both
parties’ activities. The act of academic research is generally acknowledged as an
interpretive act, while the act of archival cataloguing is not perceived in this way
outside of—or even until quite recently from within—the Archive sector. Part of this is
due to historical theoretical conventions held, particularly by “Old World Archivists,”
regarding idealized (and no longer – if ever – practical) non-intervention in “making the
Archive” (Jenkinson, etc.) which make any choice intellectually questionable. The
structure of a typical archive catalogue reinforces this by appearing as a single,
hermetic, non-self-reflexive “authoritative” monolith that does not clearly reveal the
decisions made by the archivist in its creation. It implies that the given structure of a
collection is immutable, like a Platonic Ideal in archival shape, unaffected by choices
made by creator or arranging archivist. By looking at how a catalogue’s metadata might
be differently structured, and how its interface might reconfigure researchers’
interactions with the archive, we want to explore whether it is possible to make
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manifest the act of intellectual arrangement in the Archive in a way that bridges the
division between researcher and archivist.
We are currently exploring two avenues to accomplish this goal: one is the use of
authority records to allow extensive inter-relation of records; another is the design of
an interface that can be populated by researchers with multiple records selected,
arranged, and perhaps even interpreted by researchers themselves. Our approach
troubles the notion of archival “authority,” especially in theatre archives, that
necessarily privilege access over preservation, and also imagines a scalable model that
might make possible a corpus of interoperable, remediated digital theatre archives
connecting not just the community of practicing artists in one theatre but also a regional
or national community.
Nic Leonhardt
(Ludwig-Maximilians University, Munich, Germany)
“I need a programmer, methinks…”—Theatre Research in a Digital Age
The digital revolution is said to bring big challenges, devious threats and beneficial
blessings to both theatre practice and research. Most contemporary theatre productions
play with and creatively embed digital technology that allows for realizing old desires
for immersion, illusion and virtuality. Recent research projects in theatre studies and
cultural history could not be undertaken without digitization and the willingness of
libraries and archives to make source material, magazines and newspapers accessible to
the public. Be it via a restricted or an open access, IT experts help us in developing
databases, visualisations and georeferential tools for fostering an understanding of
complex theories, networks of actors or mapping theatrical sites and trade routes.
Recently, Digital Humanities have entered the stage, and their methods and tools turn
out to be assets for theatre practitioners, scholars, and the audience alike: not only do
DH serve the scholarly operations of creating knowledge on theatre and performance;
they also emerge as a suitable way of sharing memories and expertise on an art form
that can be considered a commons.
So far so good. Yet how do we cope with this seemingly inexorable “digitization”
of theatre practice and research? How do we handle asymmetries in digitization
processes on an international scale? How do we preserve digitally produced parts of a
production, i.e. what can be saved as tangible traces of a theatrical performance? What
digital and media literacy is needed for scholars, practitioners, instructors? Do we all
need to be progammers now? Or do we need to hire one?
Based on selected research and database projects as well as on interviews with
theatre practitioners, curators and scholars operating in the field of dance and drama
education, my paper addresses the “threats”, “benefits” and “challenges” we have to face
in theatre research in a digital age.
3. Access, Collection, Exhibition and Education
CHAIR:
Tracy Davis
(Northwestern University)
Jane Gallagher
(University of Kent)
Performing at the Crossroads
The University of Kent holds important Victorian & Edwardian Theatre Collections,
including two major Dion Boucicault archives. I am working to bring this archive into
the University community and beyond, by collaborating with key academic staff and
encouraging student use. I propose presenting a short paper on the pioneering work I
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have been undertaking in collaboration with the University’s Drama Department
culminating in a performance of the archives in student curated exhibitions.
I propose to discuss the development of this opportunity, exploring on the
challenges, lessons which we have learned and the significant success which this
module has achieved. Now firmly embedded in the curriculum, it is a popular course
amongst both students and staff and has created many new opportunities, including
bringing the archives to the wider community. I will address some of these
opportunities – including a rehearsed reading – in brief.
I will consider the use of digital materials and the impact of the physical – as well as the
impact of students upon the physical items. As employability becomes increasingly
important to demonstrate through University education, this access to archives is
equipping students both with skills for research but also with skills for future
employment. Finally, I will explain the long-lasting impact upon the students involved
which has been significant, from volunteering to research, to use of archives as
inspiration for performance.
Liza Penn-Thomas
(Swansea University)
National Wales Theatre Archive
This paper examines the archaeological exercise that uncovering a nation’s unwritten
theatre tradition has been. The launch of National Theatre Wales in 2010 saw
tremendous media attention focussed on Wales’s first English language national theatre
company. It also gave new opportunities for experts and interested parties to repeat the
oft repeated “Wales had no theatre tradition before the 1950’s” and the equally sombre
realisation that “Wales didn’t have a professional theatre company until the mid 1960’s”
It is my proposal that the non-existence of a Welsh theatrical tradition prior to the end
of the 1940’s is not evidence that Wales was therefore bereft of quality theatre. It is
rather that the story of our theatrical tradition has not yet been written. A rich vein of
indigenous drama is to be uncovered by looking beyond the mainstream definitions of
what constitutes dramatic work of significance. As National Theatre Wales’s first artistic
director John McGrath has stated “There has been a lot of theatrical activity in Wales
that doesn’t necessarily fit with the idea of the well-made play or the English version of
playwriting.” My work contributes to the ongoing process of revealing this body of
work. Uncovering this unwritten narrative during the course of my PhD has relied
heavily on archival material that both rediscovers neglected theatre writing, and reassesses the contribution of celebrated authors to Wales’s theatre tradition.
Using case studies from my research, this paper shows how archival material has
been used to view surviving texts as theatrical expressions of the age in which they
were created and the performance conditions of that age. My work tries to look at
elements that shaped the text as a performance piece including the development of the
works from inception to production, exploring the significant input of producers,
directors, and actors from within a thriving amateur theatre movement. Tapping into
archival material has provided insights into the journeys, and often the struggles, that
Welsh writers creating for the stage prior to 1950 had to face.
Michael Pearson
(Aberystwyth University)
The preservation of digital archives in the National Library of Wales
The National Library of Wales has among its collections the archives of the Welsh
experimental theatre company Brith Gof and one of its artistic directors, Clifford
McLucas. Both collections are classic examples of what are referred to as ‘hybrid’
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archives, comprising both traditional analogue (including audio-visual) and born-digital
material, and have presented the Library with a number of complex issues regarding
preservation and access. In particular, there is the potentially serious danger that
digital material, specifically that held on ageing media carriers in obsolete formats, may
be lost forever if it is not captured and preserved in perpetuity.
In November 2012, the Library started a project looking at ways of extracting
these digital files from their carriers to preserve them and eventually provide access to
researchers. This project, called MabLab, intends to inform the way all born-digital
material offered to the Library is ingested, preserved and made available.
Methodologies and workflows will be shared among the archival community, and the
MabLab team are already discussing with academics and students in Aberystwyth
University how they would like to see digital and multimedia archival material
presented.
This presentation will give a brief overview of the problems faced by the MabLab
project and how the team are using a mixture of state of the art hardware and software
and legacy equipment to safeguard the digital parts of these two important collections,
as well as other born-digital archives received by the Library, and eventually make
these available to researchers. It will also show how the Library has collaborated with
Aberystwyth University’s Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies over the
past 9 years to facilitate research, teaching and a number of external events by using
both analogue and digital material from both archives.
4.
How Archives Perform: At the Intersection of Performance and Research
CHAIR:
Chris McCormack
(NUI, Galway)
Janine Cowell
(University of Bristol/University of Exeter)
Someday just began: Meeting, making and mounting memories in the field
This performative presentation begins to examine and respond to both written and
recorded data collected during a fieldwork residency at the Arts Educational School,
London. Taking place throughout October and November 2014, the ethnographic
fieldwork undertaken focused on observations of the BA (Hons) Musical Theatre course,
and was the first of two residencies at the school (with the second scheduled to take
across May and June 2015).
This exhibition homes in on the experiential journey of my fieldwork, inviting
spectators to become interactive participants. Fusing personal archival material with
recent ethnographic evidence, I re-perform experiences, memories and documentation,
investigating a need not only to deal with both new and existing relationships and
findings within the field but also to negotiate my own identity as performer, researcher,
and now, curator. Framing this blurriness between my own history as a performer-intraining and the insights obtained as a researcher at ArtsEd results in a performance of
curated fragments. It allows an insight into a hidden process that precedes many
performers’ careers and into a history that remains etched on the body and mind long
after training is completed. Questions to be explored include: can we breathe new life
into documents and objects through our interaction with them?
How can we
investigate corporeal memory in practice? Could encountering material in an
alternative form (which juxtaposes digital files, ephemera and bodies in/as live
performance) offer a different understanding to that of a formal paper? And can we get
any ‘closer’ to (understanding) training by experiencing it in this way?
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Steven Paige
(Plymouth University)
The Ties That Bind: Reusing Online Archival as an Interdisciplinary Artist
In The Archaeology of Knowledge (2002), Michel Foucault writes that the archive
‘emerges in fragments, regions, and levels’ and ‘between tradition and oblivion, it
reveals the rules of a practice that enables statements both to survive and to undergo
regular modification’. This paper will explore Foucault’s statement by analysing two of
my hybrid video/performance artworks: The ties that bind me to my brothers are not
wrapped around my wrist but rather fastened to my heart (2012) and Moral
Development (2013). In particular, it will discuss ways in which performative reenactments of archival sources may counter or extend the content of digitised online
archives in order to animate cultural histories. Both works are based on existing films
available through online archives that were used to create re-enactments. The ties the
bind… takes a scene from a gay porn film and explores the verbal interplay and banter
between the two male characters rather than the sexual liaison the focus of the reenactment. In Moral Development Stanley Milgrim’s infamous experiment ‘Obedience to
Authority’ is re-performed to camera to explore the particular moments of poignancy
between the subjects believing they were shocking the ‘learner’. These two artworks
are used to interrogate the relationships between artefact, body, digital space and
performative scenarios through a practice as research methodology. This entails a
mapping of the critical and embodied processes of searching, extracting, and reusing
archival material as an interdisciplinary artist. As a result, the paper will consider how
and why art may be shaped by the current social understanding of the historical
records, and how approaches to cultural documentation are governed by ‘rules of
practice’ of the archive itself – that is, its hierarchies and topographies, omissions and
deletions.
Emma Meehan
(University of Coventry)
Revisiting Lunar Parables: The Archives of Dublin Contemporary Dance Theatre
This paper explores a practice-based research project to revisit and develop sections
from 'Lunar Parables' (Project Arts Centre/Edinburgh Festival, 1983) choreographed by
Sara and Jerry Pearson with Dublin Contemporary Dance Theatre (DCDT), the first state
funded contemporary dance company in Ireland. The production was interdisciplinary,
combining contemporary dance and the literary texts of W.B. Yeats, with traditional
Irish music and multimedia projections. However, due to the lack of critical attention to
the company’s work, this danced heritage could be lost without re-visiting the
production and its cultural significance.
Thirty years after the production, I was funded by the Arts Council of Ireland
bursary award to work in the studio with the original dancers and company members to
revisit sections of this work, to remember its content and context. We also have been
reflecting on how past choreographic approaches inform current practices and how the
material can also inspire new perspectives, ideas and dance material. Schneider’s
notions of ‘performing remains’ informs this project, with an emphasis on traces,
ephemera, and embodied archives, linking with the proposition that ‘the place of
residue is arguably flesh in a network of body-to-body transmission of affect and
enactment – evidence, across generations, of impact’ (100, 2011). Working with the
dancers has also raised the personal difficulties around revisiting their archives, and I
draw on Eddy’s (2015, abstract) question of ‘what is the legacy to be remembered, and
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in what form, by whom?’ An ethics of care and responsibility has also emerged within
my own role in relation to the legacy of DCDT, aligned with how Roms (2012, 48)
‘reconceive[s] of the archives as a collaborative effort of caring for an artist’s legacy.’
Key issues that I will take forward in my research include the lack of time and finance
within a dance artist’s career to reflect on past choreographies, the limited resources to
digitize contemporary dance archives for wider consideration by a new generation of
artists, and the concern of dance artists about the release of such archives from their
own collections without the embodied and historical context of the work. 2014 also
marked the 25-year anniversary of the closing of DCDT due to funding cuts, and is
therefore a relevant moment to consider both dance legacies and futures in the current
economic climate.
5.
Archives and the City
CHAIR:
Ian Walsh
(NUI, Galway)
Stanislava Slavica Stojan
(Institute for History of Croatian Academy)
Records of the Criminal Court (1550 – 1800) and Performing Theatre
The records of the Criminal Court of the Dubrovnik Republic are kept in the State
Archives in Dubrovnik, the study of everyday life being mainly based on the records
from the period 1550-1800. Among the trial accounts of this time frame it is possible to
trace authentic testimonies in Croatian, although Latin and Italian were the official
languages of the then Dubrovnik Republic. The records written in Latin and Italian
contain the scribe's summary of the statements given by the plaintiff, defendant and the
witnesses. In lengthy processes, however, the scribe was known to automatically note
down the testimonies into the register word for word. These true stories and the vivid
language of their protagonists, abounding in a myriad forms of popular rhetoric and
emotion, mirror the historical reality in its intimate genuinity. The accounts cast light on
individual fates, their social, economic, family and love relations. The setting of these
events, like a true Theatrum, most commonly were the streets and squares of
Dubrovnik, shops and artisan workshops, fish market, taverns and butcher's shops,
paths and roads, fishing spots and the ferry boat, but also private spaces of the Ragusan
houses and palaces, villas, gardens and tenants' cottages. The central stage of these
true-to-life performances was the main street, the Placa. It witnessed nobles and nonnobles, carriers pushing their way through with the goods, it staged business contracts,
money counting, payments of debt, and the interception of debtors. The statements
given in court, often naive yet cunningly conceived at times, tended to have a tragicomic
overtone. Despite stereotyped behaviour patterns, since it concerns testimonies before
the court, as well as fragmentarily portrayed protagonists who display specific
attitudes, spiritual preoccupation and archaic language forms, this world of injustice,
adversity and imperfection with its life stories, experience and relations (sexual
configuration), with its simple unofficiality can serve as excellent dramatic inspiration
either as authentication of the historic plays or as dramatic improvisations themselves.
Marina Ni Dhubhain
(NUI, Galway)
What Makes Oral History Performance Different?
Alessandro Portelli, in his influential 1979 essay What Makes Oral History Different
listed the relationship between interviewer and interviewee as one of the key attributes
which helped define oral history as a distinctive genre of historical practice. Recorded
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oral testimonies are, as Portelli describes ‘not found but co-created’. A performance
based on oral history testimony will originate in material that has been created in
relationship of trust between interviewer and interviewee. Della Pollock writes of the
staged performance of the oral testimony as a ‘re-performance’ in which the dynamic of
the primary interview is expanded to include other listeners. However, the innovative
use of ‘recovered’ oral history archival material has begun to feature in Irish theatre and
performance work as artists and theatre makers become alert to the rich potential of
this material.
Academic interest in the area of oral history performance has focused
overwhelmingly on the work of researcher/artists who have themselves been part of
the initial ‘exchange of gazes’; co-creators who have been embedded in the process from
the research design stage through the interview and interpretation, and ultimately the
presentation of the testimony as performance. The revolution in digitized oral history is
currently making online oral history archives accessible on a mass scale. The transition
to this networked age has presented enormous challenges to oral historians, but many
have argued that making full content available online offers the best protection against
potential re-contextualisation or misuse of the oral testimony.
In the paper I will interrogate the perceived special status of oral history in the
archives. I will also begin to consider some of the ethical and ideological challenges
specific to a performance praxis in which archived oral history testimony is recovered
and reimagined.
Ellen Murphy
(Dublin City Library & Archive)
Collections, Performance and Exhibition: Case-Study of Outreach Activities at the
Irish Theatre Archive
The Irish Theatre Archive held at Dublin City Library and Archive contains over 270
different collections from theatre companies, actors, directors, writers, critics, costume
designers, theatre fans, and others which reflect the development of theatre in Ireland,
and in particular Dublin over the past 150 years. Once each collection has been
processed, and a descriptive list produced by the archive service, the next step is to
raise public awareness of the collection and encourage engagement with the material by
researchers, academics, and the general public.
The paper will focus on case-studies of outreach activities undertaken by Dublin
City Library and Archive and the interface between new collections, performance and
exhibition. The first case-study relates to the Vernon Hayden Collection and the
outreach event “The Best Baddie in the Business”. This was a vaudeville performance
commissioned by Dublin City Library and Archive, and inspired by the by the life and
work of Vernon Hayden. The unique piece was written and preformed by Valerie Coyne
after examining Hayden’s personal papers and gathering stories from those who
remembered Vernon on and off the stage. The second case-study relates to a
photographic exhibition titled “Anna Manahan Remembered”, which was accompanied
by a series of talks and unique video footage of actress Anna Manahan, and which
toured throughout Dublin and Waterford. The final case study relates to an exhibition
celebrating the life and work of Christopher Casson. The exhibition was accompanied by
performances of the production of ‘The Harp that Once’ which was preformed by his
daughter Glynis Casson and harpist Cormac De Barra, and the use of song, poetry,
drama and music from the harp, alongside archival material to illustrate the life of
Christopher Casson.
Performing the Archive: 2015
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The case studies will demonstrate that by collaborating with both depositors and
performers an archive service can develop an effective outreach program. It will also
illustrate the benefits of using the collections themselves as a stimulus for creativity to
enable theatre archives to become more accessible and meaningful to a wider public
audience.
6.
Contesting Race and Ethnicity in/through the Archives
CHAIR:
Catherine Cole
(University of California, Berkeley)
Rhona Justice-Malloy
(University of Missisippi)
The Chicago Defender and Archival Research
My current research agenda aims to bring to light the lives and works of African
American vaudeville performers from 1890 to the 1930’s. A fascinating and largely
ignored documentation of this era of black theatre history can be found in the editorials,
reviews, gossip columns, society pages and miscellaneous articles in the Chicago
Defender. This African American owned and operated newspaper provides a unique
and unknown perspective on the way black show people navigated, performed and
prospered in the competitive world of entertainment within a culture rampant with
racism and bigotry.
My access to the Defender is through Proquest’s digital archives. Retrieval
methods using digital archives presents new challenges not encountered with
traditional archives. Digital archives allow the historian to interact with the archives in
a non-linear, flexible fashion and as such they offer the researcher the choice of what to
read and how to read it. However, this form of research is greatly limited by one’s
current knowledge and experiences. The historian may be tempted to construct their
interpretations based on their own subjective knowledge and, at least in part,
influenced by their historical methodologies and biases. This dilemma is present in all
forms of historical enquiry but I believe in this particular instance it is more acute and
problematic.
To further complicate things the subject of the archive, the Chicago Defender, had
its own agenda. It clearly, even militantly, championed for equal rights and the fair
treatment of blacks. One can find in its pages vivid reports of lynchings, rapes, Jim Crow
disenfranchisement and racial inequalities featuring sensational headlines and lurid
descriptions.
The attempt to construct a dependable teleology of this invaluable information is
confounded by the fact that the primary information comes in the form of several
individual’s opinions, aesthetic preferences, and personal and professional prejudices.
As ever, for the historian, there is the nearly unrepressable impulse to take whatever
evidence is at hand and create an engaging historic narrative. When we find something,
we are compelled to “do something” with it. This impulse is especially compelling when
there are so few similar archives.
How do we consider and responsibly situate this information given the attendant
biases? What can reasonably be deduced? How much currency does this information
carry with its accompanying partiality and prejudice? If we reduce this history to
subjective archival organization, political and social agendas, and even gossip and
anecdotes will we hazard silencing, or at least reducing to a whisper, voices the are
always already compromised and suspect? What are the ethical challenges in
determining what “truth” to tell and what to put aside?
Performing the Archive: 2015
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April Sizemore-Barber
(Georgetown University)
Queering ‘Coloured’ and Colouring Queer: The Sequins, Self, and Struggle Project
and the Miss Gay South Africa Pageant archives
My paper will reflect on the politics of representation within community archives in
postcolonial space, drawing on my experience as a collaborator in the AHRC-funded
project “Sequins, Self & Struggle: Performing and Archiving Sex, Place and Class in
Pageant Competitions in Cape Town.” This multi-year research project looks at the
intersection of race, gender, and sexuality in beauty pageants in primarily “Coloured”
(mixed-race) communities in Cape Town, from 1980 to the present. While the larger
project focuses on archiving the intricate relationship between two annual events—the
South African Textile Worker’s Union’s Spring Queen Pageant and the Miss Gay South
Africa Pageant—this paper is particularly interested in the way Miss Gay South Africa
has been treated differentially in the two main archival collections on which the project
draws.
The District Six Museum, a community museum that takes as its mandate to represent the history of one mixed-race neighborhood decimated during apartheid, has
been internationally recognized for performing South African history in microcosm.
GALA (Gay and Lesbian Memory in Action) is celebrated as the only organization on the
continent that archives the histories of LGBT Africans. Yet tensions exist within the
archives’ collections: despite its efforts towards inclusivity, District Six contends with a
conservative, often anti-gay Muslim constituency; GALA’s collections reflect a larger
trend in South African historiography that simplifies the country’s multi-racial
demographics to white and black, with its Coloured and Indian populations as a
footnote. In this context of archival erasure, my paper will examine “Sequins, Self, and
Struggle” as an attempted archival intervention as well as argue for the rituals and
repertoires of Coloured drag performance as embodied “acts of transfer” (Taylor 2003).
Jennifer Shook
(University of Iowa)
Ghosts Dancing in the Archives: Remains of NAGPRA and the Carlisle Indian
Industrial School in Native American Drama
The study of Native American dramatists generates compelling relationships between
traumatic memories, archives, and digitality. Mary Kathryn Nagle connects theatrical
representations to legal realities, declaring “the absence of [Native] voices… nothing
less than a constitutional crisis.” Yet Native playwrights’ current output rivals if not
surpasses both 1830s Stage Indians and the 1970s Red Renaissance. The disconnect lies
between their creation and their circulation in production and print. Currently, recent
Native plays can be more easily found on YouTube than in books, as more playwrights
write portable pieces for non-conventional settings. Playwrights like Nagle and LeAnne
Howe also continue their work online in blogs and social media campaigns. Such
differences in production yield different production archives. Can digital media foster
polyvocality and collaboration, or does its instability threaten more archives than it
cultivates?
On a practical level, digital historical archives like the Newberry Library’s address
the erasure of Native peoples, as do the many plays that restage history from an
indigenous perspective. Attempts to recuperate earlier dramas by Lynn Riggs and
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Hanay Geiogamah have included electronic efforts like the North American Indian
Drama Database, while Spiderwoman Theater and others found a home in the Native
American Women Playwrights’ Archive. Yet the former limits access by paid subscription,
while the latter hosts several broken links. Meanwhile, philosophically, addressing past
Native losses hazards reinstating voyeuristic hunger for “vanishment” tragedy. Might
reigniting old archives reinscribe old traumas?
This paper will explore the potentials and limitations of archives and databases,
particularly in addressing the repercussions of the residential boarding school system.
From N. Scott Momaday to Annette Arkeketa to Howe, Nagle, and Suzan Shown Harjo,
playwrights transform archival material into performance, and their interventions not
only perform, but reenvision those archives. Why and how does the trauma of the
boarding schools continue to matter? What new archives do these performances
engage? How do the forms of print and digitality affect the possibilities and
repercussions of those engagements?
7.
Moving body as site, choreographic knowledge, data and evidence in the
body archive: Leeds Beckett University
Rachel Krische
The Body As Archive
We perhaps understand a traditional archive to be a repository of artefacts and
documents - a collated, preserved and fixed body of evidence. With live performance,
we immediately meet the established debate and obvious challenge of capturing and
therefore archiving, as we are left with a document of the performance, not the work in
itself. That the document may be a poor piece of evidence, as it is lacking the unrecordable, kinaesthetic resonance of the live encounter. So how does one begin to
approach and consider a performance archive in order to understand how it can be
useful and relevant in the ‘now’? How do we realise that we can connect to another
source of ourselves, that is shaped by the history and culture and activity surrounding
us, through learning about the past within its’ material remains? Can we utilise an
archive, not just for purposes of faithful reconstruction, but as a bank of information to
feed future development – can we call it compost? Therefore, let us also consider that
within dance and choreographic practice, an archive is also more than a building or
‘facility’ that contains the evidence of Dance Works as captured documents. Data
(choreographic) resides both within the human being, as well as within a container
without a pulse, and that both ‘houses’ as such, can be called archive.
In the co-authored performance project Table of Contents, produced by Siobhan
Davies Dance, six artists wanted to meet notions of Archive and more pertinently,
consider the body as a portable repository of creative and choreographic information - a
library or ‘human hard-drive’ of unfixed documents to be accessed in real time. We
wanted to consider the body as a living, embodied, archive and we wanted to find out if
it was possible to carry our archive into the space and make it available to an audience –
for the body to be understood explicitly as a living document, and for the audience to
meet our bodily and historical archive, with theirs. This paper will discuss how this was
practically explored within the making and performance of Table Of Contents.
Lisa Kendall
Sawing the Legs Off Chairs
Performing the Archive: 2015
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This part of the panel paper will consider the challenges of articulating and evidencing
the archive and archival possibilities/potential of the moving body as site, making
specific reference to performance company Reckless Sleepers project, A String Section,
a work identified by its director/choreographer Leen Dewilde, as being in essence
“...about women sawing the legs off chairs: that is what it is.” Dewilde 2014
As one of the cast of women tasked with sawing chair legs off since 2012, I will
consider how the performative moving body as site (myself), is spontaneously and
simultaneously archiving and revisiting archived materials, experiences, and situations,
during live improvisational performance, responding to the complex and shifting
environment of this specific archive-full performance arena. It is proposed that the
moving body as site re-visits and re-presents experience(s) in pursuit of a lived and
credible present and presence, whilst constantly amassing and appropriating new
experience(s) from the lived and credible present(s) and presence of each live
encounter.
The paper will further consider how the moving body as a living site for archive,
is in a constant open-ended state of a-fixability and transience. The documenting and
documentation of the live performative event, both contemporaneously by the moving
body as site, into or onto itself as document, and retrospectively through postperformance reflective documentary processes in or on documents of process as
appendices to the sited moving body as document, presents the opportunity for
conscious reflection upon existing and newly formed archival processes and
experiences to be pursued. It is suggested that this embodied knowing of the living
archive amassed by the moving body as site, allows for moments of transformation and
exchange, and the passing of thresholds, never picking up from a place of beginning but
from a mid-place, a point of transient suspension impacting upon how the archive-full
moving body as site spontaneously and simultaneously devises and revises its
contribution to the archive specific to itself as contributor, and to Dewilde’s work A
String Section itself.
8.
Traces of the Audience: Embodiments of the Archive
CHAIR:
Conor O’Malley
(Dept of Arts, Culture and Heritage)
Blake Morris
(University of East London)
Walking the Archive
There has been a recent increase in the number of artists who walk as a primary part of
their practice. The Walking Artists' Network (2015), a digital community interested in
'walking as a mode of art', has over 400 members, and walking was the focus of ‘Walk
On’ (2014) a major exhibition that recently toured the UK. Often considered a resolutely
analogue practice (Nicholson 2008, p. 169), walking has seen increased engagement
with the digital archive. Building on Rebecca Schneider’s (2011, p. 28) argument that
archival documents, which once ‘seemed to indicate only the past, are now pitched
toward the possibility of a future reenactment as much as toward the event they
apparently recorded’, I will argue that the digital archive is an important way to both
record and exchange the embodied experience of walking, particularly within a global
context.
My presentation will focus on Walk Study Training Course 5 (WSTC 5), a sixweek walking course I conducted as part of my practice-based-research at the
University of East London. Developed with the New York City based Walk Exchange,
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WSTC 5 focused on the walk as a point of exchange between participants in London and
New York City. The exchange of walking exercises was facilitated through a participant
created digital archive, which housed reflections on individual walks, as well as specific
exercises to be shared between both groups of walkers. In this way, WSTC 5 can be seen
as a model for the use of the digital archive as a way to facilitate the exchange of local
walking practices within a global context.
Florence March and Benoît Larbiou
(University Paul-Valery Montpellier and
Cultural Service of the Frontignan Council)
The Spectator as a Living Archive
Organising and building the archives of theatre and the performing arts is a hard task,
as it a priori aims to fix a dynamic process and to make permanent transient events. The
very topic of the conference, "Performing the archive", is a challenging invitation to
reconsider archival material in the light of the processes of construction, circulation and
transmission from which they are inseparable, and to reevaluate their nature and
function in the artistic and socio- cultural fields. Just like the artistic medium it attempts
to capture, archival material on performances is characterised by its hybridity and
heterogeneous nature, ranging, inter alia, from texts to iconographic documents, sound
files, photos and audio-visual records. Yet, unlike the creative process behind
performances, spectatorship is less often considered as eligible archival material. As
Helen Freshwater points out, "almost no one in theatre studies seems to be interested in
exploring what actual audience members make of a performance" (Freshwater 2009:
29). This paper postulates that the spectator is a living archive and will explore
possibilities of collaboration between researchers and spectating communities.
Focusing on two case studies, two international South France festivals of popular
theatre: the Avignon Festival and the Printemps des comédiens in Montpellier, founded
respectively in 1947 and 1987, it will attempt to show how spectators articulate
individual and collective experiences to contribute to the construction and transmission
of the memory of live performances and the history of cultural institutions, what kind of
archival material they produce, and how it can be exploited. Qualifying as Foucaldian
heterotopias – that is, localisable utopias taking place here and now in a festive
atmosphere, alternative or "third" spaces which open up a critical, discursive space –,
the festivals under study promote both the development of a committed and
"emancipated spectator" (Rancière 2007) and the building up of spectating
communities, of which the Mirror Group of Avignon festival-goers is a case in point. The
Mirror Group is currently in the process of sponsoring the "Miroir d'O" in Montpellier,
where festival-goers have already produced more embryonic and informal archival
material which pave the way for the experiment.
Aletia M. Badenhorst
(Leeds Beckett University)
Making Archives Live
In an ephemeral age, using archives to create work that reflects and comments on the
history of ideas contained within them seems the most discerning way of keeping them
alive. My research, a performative exploration of the Richard Demarco archive, is
necessary in promoting it as a research tool for scholars, artists and art historians as
well as generating awareness of this abundant resource of inspiration which houses the
work of some of the most successful and recognised artists of the last fifty-five years.
Richard Demarco has spent his life promoting cross-cultural links, presenting
foreign artists within Scotland and establishing connections for Scottish artists abroad.
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His archive contains the work of leading practitioners such as Joseph Beuys and
Tadeusz Kantor. Whereas artists featured in the archive were connected by Richard
Demarco, my research re-establishes interfaces between them; verifying the archive as
living source of inspiration.
My research questions relate to the role of innovative performance techniques in
inspiring new work, the forms and methods applied to create participatory engagement
in performance and how these are influential in the creation of new work. Employing a
Practice as Research methodology, I use ideas, inspirations, philosophies and creation
techniques from the archive to explore how new work can be generated in response to
the work housed there. Creating work in this way provides particular insight about the
practitioners and their work.
Erin Grogan
(Texas Tech University)
Digital Anxiety – Multimedia Scenography in Fire Island
Multimedia in theatre has been explored and developed since the twentieth century.
Technology on stage has the power to act as a performer of its own, interact with other
performers and the audience, and represent clear emotions. In this paper I seek to find
out how multimedia scenography in 3 Legged-Dog’s (NYC based) production of Charles
Mee’s “Fire Island” represents and performs anxiety.
Using psychology and digital theatre studies I will create my definition of
anxiety, how it can be presented and created, and how it is evidenced within the
production. I will use psychological case studies to provide a foundation for ways in
which anxiety is manifested in romantic and social situations. I will then apply that to
the dialogue between various couples in “Fire Island” and find moments and situations
where anxiety within a character is clearly presented. I will examine the ways
performers can physically create anxiety through their body and how multimedia
projections can embody a person’s inner turmoil, as well as project feelings of anxiety
onto the audience. I will compare the script of “Fire Island” with 3 LD’s archival footage
and information about their production and discover the changes between the two. I
will use my findings to discover motivation behind the digital projections used. This
motivation is important given that the script does not call for any particulars when it
comes to what is projected, leaving the production team in charge of finding catalysts
within the script for what they chose to show and when. This proves that the digital
media is essential in creating the atmosphere and emotions 3 LD aimed to enact.
Beyond presenting anxiety, I will also argue that the way multimedia is conferred to the
audience breaks a boundary between observer and performer and encourages a feeling
of anxiety within the viewer as well. Placing the audience in this interactive state
actualizes anxiety even further and helps add to the ‘liveness’ of multimedia’s
performance. This research will provide the groundwork to my theory that anxiety is
represented and performed in “Fire Island” through the use of multimedia scenography.
Screening of Documentary: Performing Scenographic Sense Memories
Hardiman Research Building - Room G011
In Stanislavskian theory, ‘sense memory’ is defined as: ‘The ability to recall sights,
sounds, tastes, touches and smells’ (Carnicke, Stanislavsky in Focus 2nd ed. 224). This
documentary, Performing Scenographic Sense Memories, refigures this concept in
relation to the theatre designer’s work, its sensory nature and issues of memory and
documentation. Placing the work of designers and directors centre stage, it focuses on
how affective atmospheres have been activated in contemporary and historical Irish
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theatre, comprising archival images in addition to the filmed reflections of theatre
practitioners. Noeila Ruiz interviews a variety of contemporary artists on the notions of
temperature and weather in their work: Lian Bell (Set Designer), Denis Clohessy
(composer), Emma Fisher (Set, Costume & Puppet Designer), Kevin Smith (Lighting
Designer) and Conleth White (Set & Lighting Designer). Siobhán O’Gorman offers a
more historical perspective, gathering archival materials, as well as prompting
reflections from established practitioners, Chris Baugh, Joe Vanek, Sabine Dargent and
Joe Devlin on scenography, affect, the elements and landscape.
9.
Shakespeare and the Archive
Elizabeth Jeffery
(Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham)
Puck: A Performance History
William Shakespeare’s ‘merry wanderer of the night’ has taken on many guises over the
centuries, from sweet cherub to mischievous hobgoblin. As one of Shakespeare’s plays
that is most heavily imbued with the supernatural, A Midsummer Night’s Dream readily
lends itself to a myriad of responses as artists interpret and reinterpret the fairy
kingdom juxtaposed to the Athenian court. I will construct a performance history of
Dream as told through artefacts created in reaction to the play: examining the different
and evolving manifestations of the characters and receptions of the play through the
objects manufactured surrounding it, how are audience perspectives orientated and
reorientated; both in terms of character representation and the extent to which they are
the focus of souvenirs or collectables.
This paper will trace the evolution of Dream’s ‘shrewd and knavish sprite’ as told
through the artefacts generated surrounding the play from the twentieth century
onwards. Delving into the archives of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and the Royal
Shakespeare Company, Stratford upon Avon, as well as the private collections, I will
explore the dialogue formed between the different manifestations of Puck, both in terms
of characters and the range of different mediums utilised, from print to pottery. From
the Golden Age of Illustration and Arthur Rackham’s exquisite 1908 illustrated edition
of Dream, described by the designer William de Morgan as, ‘the most splendid
illustrated work of the century’, defining the ‘visual reality of the Dream for thousands
of readers’, to Ford car adverts from the 1940s: what identifies and signifies Dream, and
Puck, in consumer culture at the turn of the twentieth century? And how has that
evolved today?
Coupled with this, will be an examination of how Puck performs the
archive: what conversations are occurring between different time periods,
manifestations and mediums through their employment of Puck both as a key signifier
of Dream and as marketing device. Furthermore, what this reveals about the power and
importance of the archive in tracing the evolution of performance history, with
particular emphasis on objets d’art, and how could this feed into performance based
work?
Sally Barnden
(King’s College, London)
Liveness, Photography and the RSC's Dreams, 1954-77
The performance archive of the Shakespeare Centre in Stratford-upon-Avon collects
remnants of performances which staged institutional and national orthodoxy in relation
to a hyper-canonical literary source. It is situated conceptually and geographically at the
fetishized point of origin for that literature. Holding the archive at the ‘Birthplace’
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makes it subject to the potential contradiction between recording individual live
performance events – valorising their specificity and ephemerality – and the
monumental continuity of Shakespeare in Stratford.
In this paper, I discuss the photographic archive holdings for performances of A
Midsummer Night’s Dream in Stratford before and after the founding of the RSC. The
institutional remodelling is reflected in visible changes to the photographic records,
usually treated as evidence of a change in performance style. I will argue that the
change in photographic strategy bears its own ideological baggage.
In the context of theatrical institutions’ documentation and archiving, ‘liveness’
may be deployed not as a spatio-temporal condition but as an aesthetic, stating (and
staging) the institution’s investment in presence and contemporaneity. Photographs of
theatrical productions are always constructed from elements which may include but are
not limited to the conditions of the performance. Photographs are subject to various
logistical inevitabilities which complicate the way they record performance conditions;
they also encode ideologies with which the theatre practitioners hope to align their
productions. The ways in which photographs construct and stage ‘liveness’ have
undergone significant changes over the history of photographing Shakespeare. In the
archives at the Shakespeare Centre, a particularly notable change occurs at and around
the reinvention of the company with the Royal charter in 1961. Though the photographs
often have similar content across a series of productions – actors in costume, frequently
in compositions recycled from earlier productions – they seem to shift their generic
allegiance from 1950s glamour photography to an approximation of photojournalistic
style. I will argue that the photographs encode and perform a politicised aesthetic of
“liveness” related to the renegotiation of Shakespeare’s importance to contemporary
culture in the 1960s and 70s, and reflected in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s need to
make itself relevant to an increasingly left-leaning theatrical culture.
Brittany LaPole
(Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham)
Faster than the speed of light: An evolutionary look at Digital Humanities
through Shakespeare scholarship
In the last two decades technology has rapidly exploded and opened up a new digital
media to the world. With this rapid-fire instant gratification of information, the world of
literature and scholarship has had to speedily adjust its boundaries in order to remain
relevant. This is no different in the line of Shakespearean scholarship. In this
evolutionary process of remaining with the times, many interesting avenues have been
explored to keep Shakespeare relevant in the digital era, this including, but not limited
to, Quartos and Facsimiles being digitalized and placed online by the British Library,
ongoing digitalization of the actual texts by the upcoming Oxford Edition, two social
media led “interactive” performances given by the RSC in the last five years, and an
upcoming BBC driven touch tablet that will be interactive and include facets of
Shakespeare’s life in various theatres throughout the country. With all of this being
produced in such a quick turnaround, it must be asked why this must be done to stay
relevant with a playwright who already has influenced every form of art being done
today. Also, who is all of this digitalization being done for? Is it for the scholarship to
maintain a level of credential with the public, for educational purposes- whether
primary or higher level, or is it simply an effort to create cutting edge ways for literature
to persist in this instant gratification of a digital world?
My paper aims to answer these questions by researching the evolution of the
digital humanities realm in the last twenty years and by seeking out common ways in
Performing the Archive: 2015
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the last five years it has been embraced. Alongside this, I am conducting a practical case
study example of the BBC touch tablet program and how this will be beneficial in all of
the theatres using it as an educational and interesting resource for the public to have
easy access to.
Emer McHugh
(National University of Ireland, Galway)
A shared language: placing and displacing Shakespeare within the Irish national
theatrical repertoire
In April 2014, the Irish President Michael D. Higgins paid a visit to Stratford-upon-Avon
as part of his first state visit to England. In an address delivered at the Royal
Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford, President Higgins addressed the fraught relationship
between Ireland and England throughout history, yet contended that ‘the English
language that we share, if it was once the enforced language of conquest, it is today the
very language in which we have now come to delight in one another, to share our
different and complementary understandings of what it means to be human together in
this world, transacting in the currency of words’ (2014). Taking Higgins’ idea of a
shared language between these two countries as my cue, and drawing extensively on
the Abbey Theatre Digital Archive’s holdings, my paper explores how the Irish national
theatre chooses to represent the Shakespearean output in its repertoire.
I take the early 1970s as my starting point, taking into account the context of the
Northern Irish Troubles, itself a very important watershed in Anglo-Irish relations.
Patrick Lonergan has noted ‘a seeming incompatibility between national theatre and
Shakespeare in Ireland’ (235); thus, is Shakespeare presented as a foreign text on a
national platform, or something as equally and credibly ‘Shakespearean’ as anything
that might be performed at the Royal Shakespeare Company, Shakespeare’s Globe, or
the National Theatre? Through examining programmes and paraphernalia from a
selection of Abbey productions of Shakespearean plays – from 1971’s Macbeth to 2015’s
A Midsummer Night’s Dream – I explore the theatre’s relationship with this most
‘English’ of playwrights, whether it seeks to place or displace his plays within the gamut
of its repertoire. Is the language that the Abbey deploys in presenting and promoting its
Shakespearean work shared with and influenced by English Shakespearean theatrical
institutions, or is it more closely aligned with institutions and companies closer to
home? Moreover, what can these archival materials tell us about cultural attitudes
towards Shakespeare in modern and contemporary Ireland?
10.
Archival Perspectives on The Gate Theatre’s Internationalism
CHAIR: David Clare
(NUI Galway)
Ruud van den Beuken and Des Lally
(Radboud University Nijmegen & NUI,
Galway)
Let’s Give the Mantle of Harlequin a Brush: Stimulating Research on the Dublin Gate
Theatre Archive at Northwestern University
In 2002, Anne M. Pulju published a brief descriptive article on the Dublin Gate Theatre
Archive that Northwestern University (Evanston, IL) acquired in 1973, observing that
“[w]hile its location may concern researchers in Ireland, the high quality of the Gate
Theatre Archive’s organization and maintenance in the McCormick Library make it a
Performing the Archive: 2015
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valuable resource for researchers everywhere”.iii One the one hand, Pulju’s appraisal of
the academic relevance of these materials is unquestionably accurate, to which the
sheer wealth of its contents (as described by Ellen V. Howe in the Archive’s catalogue)
testifies:
The papers of the Dublin Gate Theatre under Edwards and MacLiammóir held in
the Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections consist of 384 boxes, 7
large art folders of drawings, and 69 original press cuttings books. The production
scripts and notebooks, arranged by play title, account for 316 of these boxes, the music
17, photographs 5, lighting plots 3, plans 1. The costume, scenery and miscellaneous
designs by MacLiammóir and others are in 7 oversize folders. The theatre
correspondence and that of Hilton Edwards and Micheál MacLiammóir from 1938 to
1970 are filed in 29 boxes; the manuscripts of Hilton Edwards are in 2 boxes and those
of Micheál MacLiammóir in 10 boxes.iv
On the other hand, however, Pulju’s positive comments about the “organization
and maintenance” of the Northwestern University Library’s holdings might be revisited
in the light of current developments in Irish theatre studies. Indeed, the recent surge of
archival research that the ongoing digitization of the Abbey Theatre Archive at NUI
Galway (2012–2016) has generated also raises no less important questions about the
conservation, accessibility, and relevance of the Gate Theatre Archive.
This panel, then, would serve to take a significant first step towards addressing
these issues and formulating a viable approach to stimulating archival research on the
Dublin Gate Theatre, which has hitherto been largely neglected in Irish theatre studies.
Mary Clark
(Dublin City Library & Archive)
Michael and Hilton Still in Dublin
In 1969, in order to safeguard the future of the Dublin Gate Theatre, Michael
MacLiammoir and Hilton Edwards said farewell to its past, and sold the theatre’s
archives into the safekeeping of Northwestern University Illinois. The tradition
engendered by these two giants of Irish theatre has been sustained and enhanced by
Michael Colgan at the Gate Theatre but it has generally been supposed that all archival
reference to the theatre’s founders has been located in the United States. Over the past
decade, collections from various sources have been deposited with the Irish Theatre
Archive, which complement the substantial holdings at Northwestern.
The ITA collections include the papers of Patricia Turner, who was secretary to
Michael and Hilton for many years, consisting of programmes, posters, correspondence,
stage and costume designs and also the most delightful notes from Mac Liammoir - for
example a panegyric on Tennyson, Yeats and Shakespeare, followed by an order for
lunch: ‘all of them workers. I WILL NOT let life flow away’. Can she ask his cook to
prepare oxtail soup and cold cuts for lunch, with a pureé de pommes ‘we’ll have to put
up with it.’ Graphic design includes several versions of the Harlequin, which was a
preoccupation of Michael’s. Costume designs include Michael O Herlihy’s for the great
production of Hamlet at Elsinore as well as designs by Mac Liammoir for Romeo and
Juliet, The Importance of Being Earnest and The Merchant of Venice. The collection also
includes MacLiammoir’s letters to Hilton, from various far- flung places as he toured
Anne M. Pulju, “The Dublin Gate Theatre Archive at Northwestern University”. Theatre Survey 43.2
(2002): 253-59.
iv Ellen V. Howe, The Dublin Gate Theatre Papers Catalogue (1997, 2007). Charles Deering McCormick
Library, Northwestern University (Evanston, IL):
http://files.library.northwestern.edu/spec/dublin_gate_theatre.pdf.
iii
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with The Importance of Bring Oscar which reveal that he was longing for home. The
Turner collection is joined by the Sheila and Carmel Leahy papers. Carmel was
MacLiammor’s god-daughter and regularly called to the Green Room after school to do
her homework. The collection contains a series of charming and heartfelt letters from
Michael to the Leahy sisters, documenting his views and reactions to many
performances at home and abroad.
11.
Samuel Beckett and the Archives
CHAIR: Trish McTighe
(University of Reading)
Matthew McFrederick
(University of Reading)
Staging Waiting for Godot at 60: The Arts Theatre and the archive
The 3rd August 2015 will mark the 60th anniversary of Waiting for Godot’s British and
English language premiere at the Arts Theatre, London. Several narratives have since
established this performance of Samuel Beckett’s drama in the cultural memory of
British theatre history, with some commentators viewing Godot as the earliest
transformative moment in Britain’s post war theatre landscape. This paper will return
to the landmark production to utilise extensive archival research from the British
Library, the Harry Ransom Center and the Victoria Albert Museum Collections, which
illustrate how the archive can continue to supplement existing performance narratives.
In redressing some of its lesser known histories, this paper will chart the history
of Godot’s genesis to the British stage through the correspondence between the play’s
producers Donald Albery and Peter Glenville to Beckett, which also reveal the obstacles
his drama faced as it emerged in the UK with censorship and casting issues. When the
production was eventually staged two and a half years after its Paris premiere, its
London debut featured a relatively unfamiliar cast in a production staged by a young,
then unknown director, called Peter Hall. It was originally greeted with suspicion by
audiences and actors’ alike, provoking catcalls, walk outs and numerous debates in the
national press, though later transferred for an extended run in the West End’s Criterion
Theatre.
This paper will proceed to focus on this production through the previously
under-utilised archival testimonies of the play’s performers, including Paul Daneman
and Peter Woodthorpe. Interviews and memoirs from these actors offer a unique
perspective into how Godot was staged, interpreted and received in its first English
language performance; perspectives which also contextualise the state of the nation’s
theatre during the 1950s. Furthermore performance histories of Godot’s UK premiere
often neglect its visual interpretation. Through photographs and set designs by Peter
Snow accessed in several archives, this paper will examine where scenographic
interpretations of Godot began at the start of a long and varied association between
Beckett’s drama in British and Irish theatres.
Kristin Jones
(NUI, Galway)
‘Keep An Eye on That Too': Visualising the Archives of Samuel Beckett
Beckett’s handwriting was recently described by Dan Gunn, one of the editors of
Beckett’s collection of letters, as reputedly the worst of any writer of the 20th century.
Anyone that has done any archival work on Beckett would attest to this. This paper
argues that one way to understand and perhaps appreciate Beckett’s terrible
handwriting is that it draws attention to and affirms the importance of visual image in
Beckett’s oeuvre. This paper examines how Beckett archives, including the Beckett
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Digital Manuscript Project, can give us a better understanding of the increasing
importance of images in Beckett’s late dramatic works of the 1970s and 1980s. It will do
this by examining and discussing some of his handwritten drafts as well as postcards in
comparison with 20th century visual artists. What emerges, my paper concludes, is that
considering the visual quality of archival material by Samuel Beckett can deepen our
understanding of his intense engagement with the visual arts, painting in particular.
Niamh Mary Bowe
(University of Reading)
Performing trauma and Samuel Beckett’s Kilcool manuscript
Not I (1972) is one of Samuel Beckett’s most abstract plays. The play features Mouth, a
spot-lit mouth speaking a monologue on stage while vehemently refusing to give up the
third person and the Auditor, a silent cowled figure. Stanley Gontarski and Rosemary
Pountney describe the ‘Kilcool’ manuscript (1963) as an early forerunner of Not I. In
Woman and Ireland as Beckett’s Lost Others: Beyond Mourning and Melacholia (2010)
Rina Kim notes the importance placed on physical place, gender and the depiction of
suffering in the manuscript. Stanley Gontarski describes Beckett’s method in his
movement from ‘Kilcool’ to Not I as an act of abstraction in order to gain acceptable
artistic distance. However, I will argue with reference to the ‘Kilcool’ manuscript and
the drafts of the Not I manuscripts that the evolution of the performative gestures of the
avante-texte presents a rich focus for analysis as a process of ‘distillation’ rather than
abstraction, in relation to the concept of trauma.
Various elements of Not I such as the fractured non-linear narrative, the
depiction of the fragmented body and the refusal to accept subjectivity all accord with
what Doris Laub and Shosana Felman describe in Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in
Literature, Psychoanalysis and History (1992) as the act of ‘witnessing’: the retelling of a
traumatic event through dynamic interplay of speaker and listener. ‘Kilcool’, in
comparison, also contains these key details with more expansive stage directions and
contextualisation. The recent publication by David Houston Jones Samuel Beckett and
Testimony (2011) discusses the issue of trauma and witnessing in Beckett’s work,
however, Beckett’s prose is the central focus. Performance and trauma, in comparison,
have not been substantially discussed in regard to Beckett’s later theatre. I argue that
the issue of trauma as performative gesture through both the content and the stage
directions of ‘Kilcool’ does not begin at theatre rehearsals, it begins at conception in
Beckett’s work which fundamentally links archive and performance.
12.
Theatre Practitioners and the Archives
CHAIR: Tanya Dean
(NUI, Galway)
Catherine Trenchfield
Royal Holloway, University of London
The Kneehigh Archive & The Asylum - archive and 'repertoire'
This paper discusses my PhD research exploring Kneehigh Theatre company, with my
main source material comprising the Kneehigh Archive held at Falmouth University.
From 2010-13, I visited the archive, analysing 93 boxes including production notes,
evaluative reports, arts council reviews, programmes and other performance artefacts.
During these years, alongside visiting the Kneehigh Archive, I attended every summer
season at their home venue the Asylum (a multi purpose tent). My reflections on using
archival sources along with performance, have been informed by other commentary on
archives including Diana Taylor, Peggy Phelan, Foucault and Derrida.
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This paper will discusses my experiences of working with performance and
archive, raising issues concerning the tensions of working with these forms of source
material. The paper offers the proposal that an 'experiential' archive, containing
attendance and/or participation in the live performance, film recordings, programmes,
reviews, and materials purchased during the performance, can be collated to present
elements of the performance 'experience'. Just as Pine and Gilmore in The Experience
Economy (1998), suggested that merchandise purchased at a show can continue the
'experience' long after the event has passed, these materials can also contribute
valuable resources to documenting and representing the performance experience. The
paper will discuss this notion in light of the difficulties experienced by other
practitioners and theorists to document and record performance.
Varvara Sklez
(Theatrum Mundi, Independent Theatre Lab)
Archive as Performance: Historiography of Grotowski
Peter Brook has once made a productive observation about Grotowski: while a close
look into his practices gives one the impression of something constantly developing and
vitally important, the same practices seen from the distance present themselves as just
some kind of mysterious activity. Scholarship on Grotowski – or rather its certain part –
leaves one with a very distinct sense of dealing with something inaccessible and nonreproducible. I use the term archive here to describe а whole body of accessible sources.
What is this theatrical archive, or in other words what defines its internal dynamics?
This feeling is justified by lack of material, be it filming of practices and pieces or texts
bу those really deeply involved in Grotowski's creative process. Well-known
restrictions on both access to his pieces and documentation of those were imposed by
Grotowski himself (though do's and don'ts varied). In his theoretical works Grotowski
insists on the necessity of leaving certain things unvoiced – or at least on
problematizing conceptualization of such things.
In this paper I'm going to argue that the aforementioned features of Grotowki’s
archive should not be considered a drawback by one attempting to create some
“complete history of Grotowski’s theatre” but on the contrary, as a chance to revise the
possibilities of writing history when it comes to theatre. While permanently sneaking
out of conceptualization in spite of all the efforts made by its writer, history of theatre
puts historian again and again face to face with a problematic nature of his subject. One
can possess just any amount of sources in an attempt to reconstruct particular theatre
piece: none of those will allow anyone to have a specific theatrical experience.
Many texts written by the eye-witnesses of Grotowski’s practices give us
precisely the same impression: it is more than once emphasized by their authors that
the most astonishing part of experience they had was just ineligible for expression or
description. Despite this notorious voicelessness, analyzing different discursive
strategies used in these texts proves that a great variety of ways exists in which these
attempts may take place. Texts by some of the witnesses of Grotowski’s practices (as for
example, Eric Bentley’s reaction on the Theatre’s American tour in 1969) may be
regarded not as examples of refusal to express overwhelming experience – but more
likely as attempts to find one of a kind way to describe such experience and even
transmit it. This perspective helps to revise the discursive strategy of Grotowski’s own
writing. We may then consider the dynamic nature of the theatrical archive as
structured by means of experience breaking the subject-object relations between text
and reality. Breaking – and performing itself out.
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Natalya Baldyga
(Tufts University)
The Accidental (Digital) Archivist Considers Carlo Gozzi
In the summer of 2012, I and three colleagues received federal funding for our new
translation of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Hamburg Dramaturgy (1767-69). The project
was awarded a three-year Scholarly Editions and Translations Grant from the National
Endowment for the Humanities not only because it will provide the Anglophone reader
with the first complete and annotated English translation of Lessing’s seminal work, but
because of the NEH’s interest in the field of digital humanities. Routledge Press, which
will publish the print edition of our work, agreed to allow us, after a series of
negotiations, to “pre-publish” our work online through MediaCommons Press, making
our work-in-progress available for open review. After several years negotiating
traditional scholarship and a new digital platform, I find that my approach to archival
research has shifted. This paper therefore represents a first attempt to consider how I
might apply my experience with the Hamburg Dramaturgy to my research on the
eighteenth-century Venetian theatre, which includes a new translation of Carlo Gozzi’s
King Stag.
What has shifted, fundamentally, due to my introduction to digital publishing, is
my view of the archivist as a solitary figure who encounters, collates, and analyzes the
material she encounters, before offering it to the world in the form of a single-author
monograph. In short, before my work on the Hamburg Dramaturgy, I never would have
considered rendering work-in-progress visible to anyone with access to the Internet.
Our MediaCommons site allows comments to be attached to individual paragraphs, to
whole pages, or to an entire document. Online readers are able to comment on
annotations as well. As of this point, the comments we have received have ranged from
the highly useful to the inane but innocuous. Nothing malicious or scathing has
appeared. I am left wondering whether more traditional publishing methodologies
privilege territoriality and fear over an openness that might, arguably, produce better
work than one might manage on one’s own. What happens when we invite others into
our encounter with the archive? Granted, my translation of The King Stag is an
individual rather than a group effort; any errors, flaws, or imperfections would
therefore be solely my own, which makes me slightly more hesitant to allow the same
level of access that we have provided to the readers of the Hamburg Dramaturgy. Yet it
seems that the “crowdsourcing” benefits that derive from its open platform might apply
to translation of Gozzi as well.
13.
Discovering British Archives
CHAIR: Barry Houlihan
(NUI, Galway)
Rachel Foss and Stella Wisdom
(The British Library)
Collaborative Creativity: Archival Personae at the British Library
This paper explores the dynamics of collaboration between creative practitioners and
cultural heritage institutions through comparing two case studies centred on recent
creative residencies at the British Library. Both residencies were pilot studies exploring
the potential of working with writers and performers to animate the archives, in order
to enrich visitor experience, to communicate the potential of our collections to creative
users and the creative industries, and to allow staff across all areas of the Library to
develop their understanding of the specific needs of these audiences.
In 2012 the Library hosted Artist-in-Residence Christopher Green, a theatre
maker whose project investigated the interconnections between stage hypnotism and
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hypnotherapy across the library’s collections. This project was a highly entertaining
vehicle for engaging with a large number of people both in and beyond the Library,
culminating in his creation of the character of ‘The Singing Hypnotist’ and a stage show
premiered at a public event at the British Library in 2013, and subsequently featuring in
the Barbican’s Wonder: Art and Science on the Brain season in March 2013 and at
Latitude Festival in July 2013.
The second case study is that of Rob Sherman, the British Library’s Interactive
Writer-n-Residence for our In The Ice exhibition. This exhibition, which ran from
November 2014 to April 2015, displayed material relating to Arctic exploration
expeditions, including John Franklin’s ill-fated voyage to find the Northwest Passage in
1845. In a hybrid physical and digital creative writing installation called ‘On My Wife’s
Back’, Rob Sherman created a fictional character Isaac Scinbank, who is commissioned
to search for John Franklin’s missing expedition. In addition to the creation of a new
digital interactive narrative created using the open source Twine platform, the
residency included live events, encouraging in-person and online visitors to be actively
involved in the story writing process and putting flesh on the human stories behind the
displayed artefacts. It is hoped the findings of both case studies will be insightful to
other libraries, archives, museums and performers who wish to share their content in
immersive new ways.
Erin Lee
(The National Theatre)
The National Theatre of Great Britain and the International Stage
The National Theatre of Great Britain is expanding its horizons to the international
stage. Here we take a look at how the Archive is rising to the challenge of providing
access to its collections for audiences in London, the regions of the UK and
internationally.
Ramona Riedzewski
(The Victoria and Albert Museum, London)
Discovering local, national and international performance in the Theatre and
Performance Collections at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London
The Victoria and Albert Museum London is the UK's national collection of the
performing arts and one of the largest of its kind in the world. This reflects the vast
extent of theatre and live performance taking place across the UK, past and present. It is
also important to consider the shared history between the UK and Ireland, which is
strongly evident in the collection, with many Irish representations across the collection,
such as playbills and programmes relating to Irish venues or material relating to Irish
actors, playwrights and other theatre professionals. Latter includes correspondence
from G.B. Shaw; theatre management documentation from Bram Stoker from his time as
Henry Irving's stage manager at the Lyceum Theatre, London; theatre plans and
drawings by Tipperary native Sean Kenny or photographs relating to Wicklow born
dancer Ninette de Valois.
Ramona Riedzewski, the Archivist and Conservation Manager responsible for the
Theatre and Performance Archives will explore the depth and breadth of the collections
in a local, national and international context. And most importantly on how the museum
attempts to match up the collections with its users, ranging from undergraduate
students to academics, genealogists, theatre enthusiasts, industry professionals, media
organisations and fellow collection managers.
Academics will have an opportunity to get obtain an overview of the extent of the
collection and its strengths, which may encourage a future research visit to the V&A or
Performing the Archive: 2015
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potential collaborations between their institutions and the V&A. Information
professionals might find stimulation from the challenges encountered by the V&A in
managing such an extensive collection relating to intangible heritage and perhaps also
some inspiration when returning to their own collections.
14.
The Unmarked in Irish Theatre Archives
CHAIR: Emilie Pine
(University College Dublin)
Ciara Conway
(NUI, Galway)
Staging Absence for Digital Historiography
In setting out principles for a digital historiography of performance, Sarah Bay-Cheng
has called for “a more nuanced consideration of the roles that such [digital] records play
not only in the documentation of performance but also as performative fragments
themselves.”v This paper seeks to explore how such records are used in performing the
absence of particular women in Irish history. In doing so, such records summon into
being not the ghost of a person but a network of constitutive parts. It is this network
that the audience encounter, and historicize.
This paper draws on two recent productions in Ireland, The Colleen Bawn Trials
(Limerick City of Culture 2014) and Between Trees and Water (Painted Bird
Productions) to explore these ideas. It argues that the binary between archive and
repertoire, once so dominant in the analysis of performance and historiography, is
problematized by shifting the focus to the network of records. It also asks if such a mode
of historiography is inherently feminist. In exploring the network of records that are
used to produce, report on and archive the work, ghosts become something less
corporeal while the women of Irish history become ever more powerfully present.
Brenda Donoghue
(Trinity College Dublin)
Performing the Archives: tracing the presence of female playwrights in the cultural
memory of the Abbey Archive 1995-2014
In this paper, the role of the Abbey Theatre’s digitised and traditional archives in
relation to studies of female playwrights is considered. Often discussions on the
underrepresentation of females within the ranks of playwrights, both in a
contemporary and a historical context, are encumbered by debates around the true
nature of women’s representation. It can be difficult to establish a clear picture of the
situation. While anecdotal and qualitative evidence is freely available in an Irish context,
studies on female playwrights in Ireland often lack a significant quantitative dimension.
This study aims to address this gap in the literature by accessing the Abbey online
archive to conduct a statistical analysis of women’s representation within the ranks of
playwrights produced in the Peacock and Abbey theatres in a twenty-year period from
1995-2014. While the overall percentage of productions of new writing by women there
averages at 15% of the total, the percentage of revivals is found to be unusually low at
just 7%. In many ways, this figure seems counter-intuitive, especially as studies by
scholars such as Cathy Leeney, Anna McMullan, and Melissa Sihra have established that
a tradition of women writing for the stage in Ireland already exists. In light of such
research, this paper investigates the reasons for such a low rate of revivals of plays by
women at the Abbey. Looking back over the selected period and using information
Bay-Cheng, S. “Theater is media: some principles for a digital historiography of performance.” Theater
42.2 (2012): 27-41.
v
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available in the archives, it analyses the type of plays written by women that are chosen
for revival, and particularly what kind of plays tend not to be revived.
This paper is an illustration of the intrinsic value of archives for scholarly
investigation. Information and documents available in the Abbey digital and traditional
archives on the selection of a location for female playwrights’ work, the length of run,
whether it was new writing or a revival and if it toured, facilitate a rounded and
nuanced analysis of the presence of women playwrights at the Abbey over the past
twenty years.
Mark Phelan
(Queens University, Belfast)
“Digital examination (rubber gloves)”. Archives, Absence and the Anus of Roger
Casement.
This paper explores the partial (in both senses of the word) nature of archives as well as
the limitations of exclusively empiricist approaches to the past by suggesting such
positivist purviews of the written wor(l)d cannot represent or recuperate performance,
silence, or absence.
These ideas will be investigated from the perspective of queer historiography
through an appraisal of the gay sexuality of nationalist figures of the Irish Revival,
specifically between Roger Casement and Northern nationalists involved in the Ulster
Literary Theatre. In this period, subversive republicanism and homosexuality were
illegal activities: both were conducted clandestinely; thus researching the sexuality of
gay republicans is doubly difficult. This paper explores the ethical and empirical issues
arising from these historiographical difficulties to challenge the reticence of historians
to examine (or even acknowledge) the homosexual identities of leading figures in Irish
cultural life: a collective coyness that reflects an institutional and methodological
conservatism that performance studies can help redress.
15.
The Matter of War – Panel from the University of Reading
CHAIR: Ann Folino-White
(Michigan State University)
Teresa Murjas
Surviving Objects
In order to frame all three panel papers, I will discuss three practice-led projects
connected to my research/teaching on conflict and representation. My paper will
consider the process of generating these projects, their relationship to each other, and
how they have been shaped and conceptualized, through engagement with
object/paper-based archives and collections, museums and galleries. The projects have
in a common their focus on war-related matter, their use of artifacts/ephemera and
close-up imagery filmed with a macro-lens, and an interest in fragmented narrative
style, using recorded storytelling voices and typographical on-screen text.
Surviving Objects is a cross-medial performance combining video projection with
live performance, and drew on auto/biographical models of practice and a small
personal archive belonging to a WW2 child refugee. The performance was staged in the
Minghella Building, Reading (2013). Based on this work, I was invited by MERL
(Museum of English Rural Life) and Reading Museum to develop two ACE funded
projects, using the Huntley & Palmers and the Evacuee archives, as part of an overarching collaboration entitled Reading at War.
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The first, The War in Biscuits, was inspired by a collection of ration biscuits from
the Huntley & Palmers archive. They were originally produced by the company, a
Quaker enterprise, were subsequently artistically modified by diverse WW1 soldiers in
the trenches (through painting, inscription, collage and/or framing) and mailed back to
their families. Our mixed-media installation was mounted at Reading Museum last year,
and is due to move, in a reconfigured form, to the Minories Gallery, Colchester (May
2015). Both James and Sonya assisted with this project.
The second, the Evacuee Archive project, is currently under completion and
explores the archive’s origins through conversations with its founder Dr. Martin
Parsons. The archive is the largest holding of WW2 evacuee-related material outside
London’s IWM. This project takes multiple forms, including an on-line presence, telling
the story of the archive’s origins through focus on a selected number of objects, and
using formal elements key to the previous projects within a digital space. Sonya’s
practice-led PhD also falls under the umbrella of this strand of the work.
Dr. James Rattee
Reading the Biscuit Town
My paper will examine the process of creating the museum and art-based installation
The War in Biscuits, a project conceived in response to material stored in the Huntley &
Palmers collection at Reading Museum and MERL. I will explore some of the key
developments in the staging of this installation by looking at how an archive can be
opened up through digital and multimedia-based practice.
During WW1, Reading town was home to one of the country's largest and most
prestigious biscuit manufacturers, Huntley & Palmers. Today, Reading Museum and
MERL hold the Huntley & Palmers Archive, which includes materials relating to the
company’s role during the First World War. The objects that form the centre of The War
in Biscuits installation are a set of 100-year-old Huntley & Palmers ration biscuits – a
staple of the British Army's diet. The objects have survived partly because soldiers
customized them. Some were inscribed with political statements, others with humorous
comments mocking the taste of the biscuits themselves, and many were mailed home to
loved ones. These objects therefore hold interest on multiple levels: they highlight the
experiences of individual soldiers as well as revealing some of the wider industrial
processes at work during the war. I will consider how, in its combination of three interlinking films, text and audio content, The War in Biscuits seeks to explore a number of
perspectives on these objects, including through highlighting the biscuits’ material
qualities, as well as engaging with paper-based items such as photographs, recipe and
leger books, letters, documents and marketing imagery.
Building on Teresa’s introduction to the project, my paper will reflect upon some
of the key creative decisions involved in animating the collection in this way. I will
consider how the installation was conceived in order to engage audiences in two very
different spatial contexts. I will also reflect on how the project was developed through
building collaborations between different institutions, as well as between historians,
academics and museum and art professionals.
Sonya Chenery
Remediating Traces
My practice-as-research PhD concerns MERL’s Evacuee Archive, the largest of its kind
outside London’s IWM. The project was developed in the wake of Teresa’s performance,
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Surviving Objects. It is distinct from, though in dialogue with, the work that my Reading
colleagues are conducting on the evolution of the Evacuee Archive.
During my ongoing training in collections-based research and engagement with
the Evacuee Archive, I have encountered a range of primary sources concerning the
experiences of individuals during WW2. I have become very aware of the dynamic
between those archival and published documents in which memories of experience are
retold after many years, and other documents such as letters, diaries, and drawings that
were created at the time when the experiences took place.
In my paper I will refer to examples of material from the archive, particularly to
reminiscences written later in life by former evacuees. I will also consider the ways in
which these are informed, corroborated or contradicted by earlier letters and diaries,
and other material traces of these individuals’ wartime experience. I will also draw on
my contextual research into stage and screen practices that have engaged with related
archival holdings of documents that describe personal experiences and memories, and
were produced during times of conflict. I will explore the interplay between material
traces and abiding memories, and consider its implications for practitioners engaged in
their remediation. Relevant case studies include: Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy and
its stage and screen adaptations, with a focus on the relationship between the types of
written material that informed the narrative; Stephen MacDonald’s recently restaged
theatre piece Not About Heroes, particularly his approach to interweaving primary
sources with imagined events; TV producer Susan Horth’s and screenwriter Joe Barton’s
2014 BBC 3 docudrama series Our World War, specifically the methodologies employed
therein for tracing, selecting and remediating primary sources.
16.
Community, Folk Theatre and the Archive
CHAIR: Marina Ni Dhubhain
(NUI, Galway)
Daithí Kearney
(Dundalk Institute of Technology)
Seeking Inspiration, Reliving Lives: The Role of Archives in Irish Folk Theatre
Siamsa Tíre, The National Folk Theatre of Ireland, developed from a local initiative in
1963 and is based in Tralee, Co. Kerry. It is, in many ways, a unique cultural experience,
presenting Irish folklore and folk culture through the medium of theatre involving
music, song, dance and mime but invariably no dialogue. The initial material for the
performances was developed from memories of the founding artistic director, Pat
Ahern, which involved various tasks and social aspects common in rural north Kerry in
the early twentieth century. A fiddle player himself with a strong interest in the Irish
song tradition, Ahern combined music, song and dance with theatricalised
representations of Irish rural life.
In this paper, I focus on more recent productions by the company that are
developed from and inspired by archives and archival research. In particular, I consider
the production Oiléan, based loosely on the stories of the Blasket Islanders, and the
revival of Fadó Fadó, the original ‘Siamsa’ production that drew on the company’s own
archives. Through a critical evaluation of the creative and devising process through
which these productions were developed, including interviews with directors and cast,
the methods involved in identifying material and reshaping it for use in Irish folk
theatre is explored. A central focus will examine challenges of access to archives and the
skills involved in interpreting material for use in folk theatre productions.
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Mary Elizabeth Lange
(University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa)
Applied Storytelling in post-conflict community museums: District Six and Free
Derry
The complexities of remembering a traumatic past whilst looking to the future have
been emphasised in both South Africa and Northern Ireland. District Six and Free Derry
Museums strive to readdress historic skewed top-down official state narratives and
media by utilising a community-focused approach. Community participation includes
Applied Storytelling in the form of visual culture and personal narratives for the
recording and dissemination of the past towards building a better future. Applied
Storytelling, a subsection of Applied Theatre is a form of communication for
development that includes not only oral but also visual narrative.
This paper will share the initial research findings of the author’s PhD research.
The objective of the research thesis is to critically analyse and compare if and how the
spirituality of the individuals, community, site and the events are incorporated in the
Applied Storytelling of District Six and Free Derry museums and if and how Spirituality
relates to Memory and the Future and thereby well-being. The broad objective of the
research will be to provide a comparative study that can inform museums globally re
Spirituality and storytelling participatory communication mediums and methodology.
This will be specifically regarding Sites of Conscience that not only remember the past
but also consider implications for the present and future.
Lauren Graffin
(University of Ulster)
BT Portrait of a City Archive
Northern Ireland is a region in transition which is reflected in the archives we are
creating. The BT Portrait of a City archive, created as part of the UK City of Culture
2013, acts as an online photographic archive created by people from the city who
contributed the photographs. The archive acknowledges the city’s turbulent past,
however, it also re-maps the city in acknowledging moments of the everyday. Archiving
the banal becomes a political statement in a city which has traditionally been
represented as a city of conflict. Meanwhile, the social media site Instagram acts as a
postmodern archive in real-time for the city, continuing to document everyday
experiences in the present using the hashtag #Derry, #Londonderry and the City of
Culture hashtag, #Legenderry. This paper argues that the people of Derry/Londonderry
are being enabled, through archiving practices, to document their city in a way which
acknowledges the multiplicity of experiences which happen there. They are building a
palimpsestic representation of the city, adding layers of experience to a city that is
traditional represented in through images of conflict. These new archiving practices are
re-mapping and re-imagining the city of Derry/Londonderry by the people who inhabit
it.
17.
Tracy Ryan’s Strike! (2010): Archiving, Memorialising, and Performing an
Irish Response to the South African Anti-Apartheid Movement
Shelley Troupe and Tracey Ryan (Maynooth University and University of Sussex)
This panel is dedicated to Brendan Archbold (1947-2014), former Mandate union
official and organiser of Dunnes Store anti-apartheid strike (1984-1987).
19 July 2015 marks the thirty-first anniversary of the Dunnes Stores anti-apartheid
strike when Mary Manning refused to sell banned South African produce at the Dunnes
Performing the Archive: 2015
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store on Henry Street in inner city Dublin. Drawing on public and private archival
materials, Tracy Ryan wrote Strike! (2010), a semi-fictionalised account of this small
group of workers who struck out against the Irish grocery store chain when instructed
to sell South African produce that had been boycotted by their union, the Irish
Distribution and Administrative Trade Union (now Mandate). This full-length panel
seeks to provide an overview of the original project, excerpts from the piece, and a
conversation with striker Karen Gearon—all of which will be followed by a question
and answer session with the audience. By doing so, this panel examines how Strike!
archives, memorialises, and performs Ireland’s response to the South African antiapartheid struggle.
The panel consists of three twenty-minute segments followed by a public
question and answer session. First, a short introduction by Dr. Shelley Troupe will
contextualise the strike within its historical period, 1984-1987, and will illustrate how
Strike! memorialises that event for audiences. That brief talk will be followed by a
conversation between Dr. Troupe and Tracy Ryan to investigate the impetus of the
show, to illustrate the use and importance of archival material to the construction of the
piece, and to reveal plans for the show’s revival in 2016. Excerpts from Strike! will be
performed by actors to showcase archival materials in performance. The third and final
component of the hour-long panel will be a conversation with Karen Gearon, the
strikers’ shop steward at the time of the industrial action, led by Ms. Ryan and Dr.
Troupe.
18.
European Perspectives: National Memory and the Archive
CHAIR: Rhona Justice-Malloy
(University of Mississippi)
Monika Meilutytė
(Kultūros braai)
Ethics of Representing Archival Materials in Exposition and Performance: The Case
of Lithuania
Various similarities and differences might appear in our mind when we start to think
about exposing archival materials in an exposition or during a performance. The
performance creators seem to be freer to interpret the facts and stories that archival
materials testify, while the exposition created by the curators seem to be more
authentic, and so on. But in both cases, the choices are being made: what documents
should be presented and which ones could stay in a shadow, which form should be
applied to represent archival materials in the exposition and performance and which
one should not, etc. The process of selecting – including and excluding – as well as
creating a narrative and a particular form of representation for the exposition or the
performance usually requires responsibility of creators and curators, and often
confronts the ethical issues. Here it is important to mention that the thinkers of
contemporary ethics and performance ethics emphasize that the political, social and
cultural contexts strongly determine the understanding of what appears to be the
ethical issues and what ethics is itself. As Zygmunt Bauman states, “there is no
uncontested and all-powerful social agency which could… forge the universal
principles… There are instead many agencies, and many ethical standards, whose
presence casts the individual in a condition of moral uncertainty from which there is no
completely satisfactory, foolproof exit.”
During the past few years, several Lithuanian performances based on archival
materials provoked some important discussions concerning the ethics of the
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representation of historical documents, while the expositions presenting more or less
the same materials continued to be almost unnoticed. So the aim of this paper is to
explore what are the ethical issues of the representation of archival materials in
Lithuania and how they differ when the documents are presented in the exposition and
in the performance.
Claudia Madeira
(FCSH-New University of Lisbon)
An excessively noisy silence: relationship between art and colonial war in Portugal
Most of the voices that have been raised to speak of the Portuguese Colonial War
emphasize the silence that has fallen on the topic. In every new museum, monument,
research essay, newspaper, book or art project, this discourse reemerges. However,
when we begin to analyze the records that have been established, this question
becomes paradoxical in that not only do they continue to expand but the collection
assembled is of a significant dimension. We only need to consult the bibliographical
databases, such as those in the Library Museum of the Republic and Resistance
(Mascaranhas, 1996), or at sites with the records of books, films and documentaries,
e.g., the 1961-1974 Colonial War site, to realize this fact. This discourse is joined by
another, which refers to this silence as a unique Portuguese characteristic. And yet, a
review of the literature produced in various parts of the world on the topic of postmemory shows that this is not so. What then makes this discourse endure?
At the moment, the discursive field on the Portuguese Colonial War has been
expanded, especially via new evidence, both by those who have been affected by the
experience of war and by those suffering the after-effects of the war, within their
families, the so- called Children of War, or generation of post-memory. This does not
mean that this discussion is confined only to the framework of the family or that, even
when there is an affective relationship or "intergenerational latency" (Gumbrich, 2010)
on the part of the children with this issue, the discussion could not arise in the first
instance as a concern about structural issues and sometimes ethics regarding the
collective memory of the Portuguese. This creative and imaginative investment reveals
itself in the production by this new “generation after” (the generation of postmemory
Hirsch: 2012) of new representations about the war, about artistic form or the form of
theoretical production, where post- memory is to be seen as a kind of repertoire
consisting of recursive, impressive, fragmentary, hybrid and dynamic as well as
speculative and imaginative memories that are mainly established within the primary
interaction system, but whose impact ultimately affects, and is also reflected in, society
as a whole (Diana Taylor, 2003). Its emergence, however, seems to be a symptom of an
excessively noisy silence and of the need to take action on it, thus contradicting
Wittgenstein’s phrase "What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence"
(1995:7).
Magdalena Rewerenda
(Adam Mickiewicz University)
‘Archive re-thinkers’ –Strategies of performing the archive in Polish contemporary
theater- ‘Archive re-generation’?
Polish theater has been influenced during the last few years by creative use of archived
material, including the “memory boom” and the Derridian “archive fever”. Trends in the
way performances reflect the theoretical considerations in the archive process can be
considered as changing phases confronting the theater and the archive. The aim of the
paper is to indicate non- obvious functions of the theater archive (such as unveiling of
deceptiveness and abuse of the institution or revealing symptoms of particular social
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situations) that have evolved from performances. The processes of engagement with the
archive proposed by Uriel Orlow (U. Orlow, Latent Archive, Proving Lens, in: Memory, ed.
I. Farr, 2012) form a framework for discussing the trends. Progressing from “archive
makers” (collecting objects, data or narratives), to “archive users” (exploiting
documents, also subversively) and “archive thinkers” (deconstructing the concept of the
archive itself by using its own mechanisms). This paper will explore this evolution and
suggest an emerging trend discussed as “archive re-generation”.
In Poland visual arts “archive makers” dominated until about ten years ago when
theater repertoires exploded with works of “archive users”: whereby artists re-examine
history – constructing its alternative variations and making use of documents in order
to discredit the official versions of war or totalitarian history. The works include Small
Narration by Wojtek Ziemilski and Transfer! by Jan Klata. This phase was superseded by
“archive thinkers” (e. g. theater director, Weronika Szczawiń ska or conceptual artist
Anna Baumgart), who started to make projects ostensibly rooted in the archive but
thematizing its limitations, telling about what is missing and what is forgotten and, in
fact, contributing to a larger commentary on the concept. Through this evolution in the
archive process the collective response of the audience has its own influence. “Archive
re-generation” is constituted of performances where directors intentionally refer to the
theater archive but unintentionally they revealed the power of audience's collective
imagination and subconsciousness capable of displacing archive's contents and
constituting new memory (withdrawn premiere of The Undivine Comedy. Remains by
Oliver Frljić ).
19.
Theatre in Northern Ireland through the Archives
CHAIR: Barry Houlihan
(NUI, Galway)
Eilis Smyth
(The Shakespeare Institute, Birmingham University)
The Bard in Belfast: Staging Shakespeare During the Troubles
The Bard in Belfast: Staging Shakespeare During The Troubles
My paper will focus on
the negotiation between Shakespeare and a particular space, variously called Northern
Ireland, the North of Ireland, and Ulster. This multiplicity of names is reflective of the
duality of the Northern Irish state, a region which is both Irish and British, and of which
the political story is a colonial story. In any post-colonial space, Shakespeare,
inextricably tied as he is to the history of British imperialism, becomes a site for political
and artistic negotiations with empire. Anne McClintock writes that, “the issues which
cluster around Shakespeare and his status in Ireland assume a heightened intensity
north of the border”. This paper will consider these issues broadly, focusing on the
decades that are commonly labeled with that anodyne term “The Troubles”. Research
on Shakespeare in this time period and place is sparse, and so the direction of my
research will necessarily develop alongside archival exploration in the theatres of
Belfast.
I will be looking at the series of Shakespeare productions that were staged at The
Lyric Theatre in Belfast between 1954 and 1997 (22 productions in total), as well as at
the RSC’s involvement with the Lyric and the Belfast Theatre Festivals during those
years. I will situate these productions of Shakespeare in the larger context of the radical
political theatre that was, in effect, staging The Troubles in West Belfast during those
years. Theatre practitioner Joe Reid writes that, “Ireland, among all of its many rich
contributions to global culture, stands also, through the aegis of The Troubles and its
Performing the Archive: 2015
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community theatres as the locus of one of the most significant periods in post-war
European political theatre history”. The relationship between, or perhaps the
opposition of, Shakespeare and this radical political theatre can be reflective of the
political and religious violence that characterized The Troubles.
John Riddell
(Theatre Projects Consultants)
The Archive and the lost spaces of Belfast’s Arts Theatre
Having worked extensively in theatre production in Northern Ireland and more recently
as a theatre consultant designing, refurbishing and equipping performance venues of all
types, I have brought this experience into academic research bringing a new perspective
to the study of theatre space in Northern Ireland. Being well placed to examine and
assess the functioning of a theatre space, I have made extensive use of existing theatre
archives and recorded numerous interviews with older practitioners to collect
information on existing and lost theatre spaces in the province. There is good
information about the well known spaces and those still in use. However, for lesserknown venues or those that are no longer in use, much relevant material is missing
from the archives. Good records of the artistic programme may exist in the form of
playbills, newspaper clippings, photographs and promotional material, and detailed
accounts of governance and strategic planning from board minutes are frequently
found. However, architectural drawings and building design detail is typically missing
as is evidence of production design, set and lighting plans, prompt scripts and running
plots.
Taking the Arts Theatre Belfast as a case study, this paper demonstrates how
lack of evidence limits our understanding of theatre spaces, but also shows how theatre
space researchers can use available information to piece together a picture of a missing
theatre space. Gathering the limited existing evidence of the buildings that housed the
found spaces of the early Arts Theatre and drawing information on seat count and
building format from written accounts, it is possible to create new drawings that
propose a layout of the space. This paper shows how this approach can be used to fill in
the gaps in our knowledge of these lost theatre spaces providing a context that frames
and informs our understanding of the work presented there. The paper also considers
how the curation of theatre archives places the focus on artistic programme and
leadership and urges researchers and archivists to include theatre space drawings and
production information in collections.
Conor O'Malley
(Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht)
Performing the Troubles at the Lyric 1970 -1981
Although the Lyric was founded in 1951 the period 1970-81 is distinctive. It coincides
with the influence of the theatre’s co-founders, Mary and Pearse O’Malley which waxed
and waned in this period and which ended definitively in 1981. The combination of
artistic personnel were drawn from the North, the South and the UK. Many actors were
“naturals,” not formally trained in dedicated drama schools, but rather through the fitups, amateur drama, musical societies, and the Ulster Theatre Group. In this era too
most theatre goers would have acquired the habit of theatre going before the era of
television and mass communication. Due to the loss of other venues, the theatre scene
in Northern Ireland was dominated by the Lyric Theatre. The artistic policy of the
founders – A Poets’ theatre, is crystallised in its motif, symbolising Life, poetry, music
and the arts: the vision being primarily aesthetic rather than political. The Lyric
promoted an independent outlook as the Troubles raged all round. While the inherent
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Irish identity of the founders meant that the limit of sight would not end at the border,
the physical location of the theatre within the UK and with much of the population
seeing itself as firmly located could not be ignored either.
In that period there were 123 productions, averaging about 10-11 a year,
running for a month, 6 nights a week. Audiences averaged in the range 50% - 70%.
There were 23 new plays in that time. Eight involved The Troubles as subject matter. By
“new plays” are meant those premiered at the Lyric, those recently presented for the
first time outside the North, and now receiving their first outing in N. Ireland. A notable
feature of the key plays show a preference for gritty stories, replete with clear dramatic
conflicts, a preference for naturalistic, strong characterization and pithy dialogue.
Those initiated by the Lyric itself draw on expressionism, music hall, brechtian
elements, and are influenced by the work of Joan Littlewood. Form and structure were
important in their composition. In his book based on the Phd subject O’Malley [A Poets
Theatre, (1988)] O’Malley draws conclusions about the nature of Ulster Protestant
negation at this time. The author interrogates these conclusions afresh in the light of the
passing of time and the more information sources now becoming available to
researchers.
20.
Performing the Jewish Archive: Looking Forward through the Past
CHAIR: Stephen Muir
(University of Leeds)
‘Performing the Jewish Archive’ (www.ptja.leeds.ac.uk) is a new research project
funded under the AHRC’s ’Care for the Future’ theme until March 2018. The project is
motivated by the urgency of recovering and engaging anew with archives of Jewish
music and theatre that were affected or suppressed by experiences of Jewish
suppression and displacement, from the private family archives of musicians fleeing
pogroms and the rise of Nazism in the early twentieth century, to the rediscovered
archives of theatrical and musical works written during the Holocaust itself. In some
cases the works will be recovered and performed in their existing form; in many others,
however, archives will form the basis for new creations and adaptations, posing
practical, scholarly and ethical questions regarding the exploitation of the fragmented
archives of the displaced, and similar issues. The panel will feature three papers: two
case studies from members of the ‘Performing the Jewish Archive’ research team, and a
contextualising summary from one of the project’s key partners, The National Archives.
Kate Wheeler, Collections Knowledge Manager, ‘Archiving the Arts’,
Why Arts Archives?
National Archives Archives may appear static, with their ordered structures and
hierarchies, but archives are also about activity and about people. Archives tell the story
behind activity and in this case, behind arts practice. In my paper I will look at why arts
archives are important and inspiring, with particular reference to the collaboration
between The National Archives and ‘Performing the Jewish Archive’. I will explore why
we should ensure that arts archives are actively collected, well cared for and made
meaningfully available for research and creative re-use. I will also address the following
questions: What is the relationship between archival collections and artworks? What
about related objects and artefacts? Do these distinctions matter beyond the archives
and related professions? For archival audiences, are findability and access—having the
right information and searchable sources to hand—more pertinent? How do we serve
our audiences equally, whether from different heritage disciplines, or different arts
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disciplines? Should collections support research, or should they also be there to inspire,
provoke and entertain, like the arts sector itself? These and other considerations form
the basis of my paper.
Dr Lisa Peschel, Department of Theatre, Film and Television, University of York
Performing the Historical Context of a Cabaret from the Terezín/Theresienstadt
Ghetto
In my paper I analyse a performance that took place in the Czech Republic in 2011: an
adaptation of a cabaret written in the Terezín Ghetto that came to light during my
research in 2006. Terezín is renowned for the cultural life that sprang up on the
initiative of the prisoners themselves. Musical compositions and works of visual art
created in the ghetto have been widely performed and exhibited, but the script, as well
as being a recent discovery, presents new challenges: how can audiences best be given
the ‘insider’ knowledge that will enable them to understand the many Terezín-specific
references in the script? The adaptation, which was written with the intention of
providing that knowledge without the aid of programme notes or a pre-show lecture,
was performed in a renovated attic in Terezín itself for an audience that included
several survivors. In this retrospective analysis of the development of the adaptation
and the performance itself I engage with the following questions:
How effective was our incorporation of historical context into a script that was
originally written for the ultimate ‘insider’ audience – that is, a script full of inside jokes
and references to events that only the inhabitants of the ghetto would know? How can the voice of the historian function in a dramatically effective way as
the voice of a character? What are the advantages of trying to recreate the original performance style,
versus finding a contemporary or cultural equivalent that might be more accessible to
today’s audiences? What does it mean to the audience to see this performance in the former site
of the ghetto itself, especially since many aspects of the original performance conditions
cannot and should not be reproduced? Dr Simo Muir, School of Music, University of Leeds.
Between Two Worlds and Performances: S. An-sky’s The Dybbuk on Stage in
Helsinki’
My paper focuses on a new adaptation of S. An-sky’s The Dybbuk – Between Two Worlds,
which was staged in Helsinki in December 2014 by a Yiddish amateur theatre group.
Eighty years had passed since performances of the play at the Finnish National Theatre
in 1934, which were interrupted owing to growing anti-Semitic pressure at the time.
The performance of The Dybbuk in 2014 was preceded by extensive research of
archival material. This research served as an inspiration for the adaptation of the play
and the results were published as several articles in the theatre program.
In my paper I analyse how the archival founding shaped the adaptation of the
play and analyses which aspects and dimensions of the 1934 performance could be and
were meaningfully transmitted in 2014. I also try to assess how the audience perceived
the continuums between the two performances and times. Anti-Semitism, which at the
beginning of the process seemed not so relevant, became suddenly topical with rising
anti-Semitic incidences during 2014. Performing the Archive: 2015
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21.
Visual Archives: Photos, Images and the Repertoire
CHAIR: Justine Nakase
(NUI, Galway)
Rachel Emily Taylor
(Sheffield Hallam University)
Photographic Documentation Foundling Museum
This paper presents film and photographic documentation of a case study undertaken at
the Foundling Museum. The research is part of an AHRC funded PhD entitled Heritage
As Process: Examining the Construction of Personhood Within Museum Collections. The
project focuses on the Foundling Museum’s Tokens: poignant objects from 18th century
Britain, used by parents to identify their children separated from them when put into
care. Through practical exploration, I have been examining how art practice can
illuminate or challenge heritage as a "process" (Harvey 2010, p.320). Heritage is not
inert; “people engage with it, re-work it, appropriate it and contest it (…) it is part of the
way identities are created” (Bender 1993, p.3). My proposed method of working with
archives explores this view of the heritage process, and it may offer new ways of doing
‘heritage’. Heritage itself has been described as a multilayered performance (Smith
2006: 3); and during the PhD project the Foundling Museum has become a ‘theatre of
memory’ (Smith 2006: 46).
I will discuss how heritage practices activate and construct the lives embedded
in artefacts through the interpretation of material objects. Through object reading
reminiscent of the Victorian séance, I will perform the archive, trying to establish a link
between person and object. Stanislavski described the relationship between the actor
and the object as one of “spiritual intercourse” (Stanislavski 1924: 262), the
transference of one’s own feelings whilst absorbing the character of the object. The
term Heritage has been synonymous with the ‘inheritance’ of manifestations from the
past “to make the spirit live in oneself” (Derrida 1994: 136). This act can be compared
to mourning, when objects are used in the “reclaiming and rehousing (making homely)
the remains of a life now gone” (Gibson 2004: 297) to let oneself be “inhabited in its
inside, that is, haunted by a foreign guest”. (Derrida 1994: 3). I will conclude the paper
with discussions on future developments planned for the PhD project, including further
studies at the Foundling Museum, such as group workshops.
Allan Taylor
(Falmouth University)
From Presence to Performativity: What the still image does
In Auslander’s paper (2006) on the performativity of photography, Auslander suggests
that is possible for the photographic document to perform and yet does not fully place
‘the performative’ within the context of the word’s disseminated academic history. In
fact, casual usage of the word ‘performative’ between academics and scholars is used to
mean ‘performance-like’ instead of its original context set out by J L Austin (1971) to
mean ‘a speech act’ or ‘an utterance that enacts something’. If we are to describe
something as performative, what we are saying is that it is a linguistic construct, and
this is problematic for live and visual artists since there is often an absence of visually
or verbally available language in photographic documentation.
In this paper, I will analogize performance as the 'speech act' and photography as
its transcription, which is then cited on its visual reception by its audience. Using ideas
from Austin, Derrida (1982) and Butler (1993), as well as work from Azoulay’s (2008)
book 'The Civil Contract of Photography', I will place the performativity of the
photograph within the historical context of the term and explains how, through
performative citations, the photograph asks its audience to encounter it as a co-
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temporal addressee – something that ‘does’ in the now it is viewed rather than
something that ‘has been’ in the past, importing a sense of 'the live' into our encounter
with the photograph. Using examples from practice, I will question ‘what’ the
performative function of the image is in order to illustrate the photograph surpasses a
mere ‘performance’ of its own representation.
Jihay Park
(Indiana University, Bloomington)
Still/Moving: Blending the Archive and the Repertoire
The heritage museum is transforming into an arena where the material culture and the
embodied performance are experienced together. This changing concept of the heritage
museum experience seems to be an answer to the challenge museums in general were
facing since the 1970s-- an issue of split personality between ‘its traditional role as a
temple’ and ‘its potential as a forum.’ And considering the recent re-theorizing of
‘heritage’ as a ‘performance’ or ‘performative process’, the heritage museum’s move
towards a ‘museum theatre’ seems reasonable. A new paradigm concerning heritage
museum refuses material culture as the only constitute of heritage. Rather, it consists of
the ‘act’ of using those material things that makes them heritage. As Marilena Alivizatou
states, the new concept of museum-as-theatre shows how the museum is transformed
from a ritualized mausoleum/temple into an ever-changing theatre scene. And, as Susan
Bennett examines, the museum practice has turned its direction from display to
experience, from tableaux to performance, and from quiet contemplation of
authoritative interpretation to active participation that implies the collaborative
production of meaning(s).
This paper is a case study on The Mathers Museum of World Cultures’s
exhibition titled “Still/Moving: Puppets and Indonesia,” an exhibition put on with an
attempt to reflect in a museum display the cultural heritage museum’s changing goal: to
build a relationship between the archive and the repertoire. Perceiving Indonesian
puppet shadow theatre wayang kulit as a performance, the aim of the exhibition was to
explore on the idea of ‘theatre in museum’ and the issue of ‘presentation and
engagement’ through the use of Indonesian shadow puppets in/as performance, thus
put theatre and museum in conversation. The entire process from brainstorming to the
finishing touches was accompanied by three major concerns: staging the ‘ephemerality’
of theatre in a museum context, enhancing visual-persuasiveness through ‘representation’ and invigorating the texture of audience ‘engagement.’ This paper
specifically focuses on the section “Dalang on stage,” and proposes ‘in-context’ approach
to the puppet display and a ‘dioramic re-presentation’ of a ‘static snapshot’ of a
particular scene as effective methods to introduce archival materials in/as performance
in a museum context.
22.
Archives and Popular Performance
CHAIR: Ian Walsh
(NUI, Galway)
Elspeth Millar
(University of Kent)
Establishing the British Stand-Up Comedy Archive
This paper will explore the establishment of the British Stand-Up Comedy Archive, the
challenges that establishing such an archive might face (particularly in terms of
digitisation and digital preservation, access and encouraging re-use), and project
progress. The paper will be structured into three sections:
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a. The establishment of the BSUCA and aims: The paper would discuss the
establishment of the BSUCA at the University of Kent, discussing the initial deposits,
how the material fits with existing University of Kent Special Collections, and the
‘Beacon Project’ funding which the University of Kent has awarded the archive as part of
the University’s 50th anniversary celebrations. The paper would continue by discussing
the aims of the BSUCA. These include preserving the records of stand-up comedy and
make them available for teaching, research, and enjoyment by as wide an audience as
possible; and the establishment of standards, workflows, and policies (with regards to
digitisation, digital preservation and deposit negotiations) which aim to inform the
future collecting activities of the University’s Special Collections & Archives department.
The paper would also discuss the relationship between the archive and the School of
Arts, where students themselves are studying and performing comedy (through a BA
module ‘Introduction to Stand-Up Comedy’ and MA Stand-Up Comedy). As the archive is
so closely connected to the work of the School of Arts and students studying stand-up
performance we also intend that the archive will inspire performance as well as record
it.
b. The challenges associated with an archive of stand-up comedy, including:
Managing hybrid collections, the necessity of digitisation and the associated
digital preservation issues. Issues of Intellectual Property Rights associated with performance archives,
and associated challenges. Access to the archives: negotiating access in line with copyright and IPR, and
the challenges of presenting materials through existing digital infrastructures. c. Project progress: The details of this would be determined later in the year
(we are currently three months into the project), but I would present on progress with
cataloguing, digitisation and digital preservation, the exploration of copyright and IPR
issues, use of the material, and new collection developments. Conor Doyle
(Independent Scholar)
Dublin's Theatre Royal
This paper celebrates Dublin’s greatest and still-missed Theatre Royal. The Theatre
Royal (Royal) was the largest theatre in Europe at the time with both Ireland's and the
World’s greatest entertainers appeared on this stage. Names like Judy Garland, Danny
Kaye, Jimmy O'Dea, Gracie Fields, Maureen Potter, Nat King Cole, Noel Purcell, Bill Haley
and the Comets, Sean Connery, Walt Disney, Ruby Murray, Walt Disney, Count John
McCormack plus the entertainers who started their careers there, Frank Carson, Patricia
Cahill, the Batchelor’s, Val Donnican and many more. Stories of the patrons who
attended the different shows and the truth about legends which surrounded many of
the performers are interspersed with news reel clips, photographs, posters, music which were previously thought to be lost – voice recordings and of course some of the
memorabilia from this most famous theatre. The source of the material has been
gathered over many years from the Jimmy O’Dea Collection but also from the following
archives;
The Irish Theatre Archives, Dublin City Council Digital Collection, University
of Lancaster – Jack Hylton Archive, BBC Television, The Irish Film Archive, National
Library of Ireland, Irish Architectural Archive, ITN Source Archive, NEAR FM radio,
MovieTone Archive but most importantly the patrons of the Royal with their stories and
memories.
It also touches on the Catholic churches influence and it’s censorship of the
performers on the Royal.
Finally, it looks at why this magnificent iconic art deco
building which was the heart of Dublin was demolished.
Performing the Archive: 2015
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Sara Benoist
(University
of
Paris-Sorbonne,
France)
Circus research through time: private collections, public archives, the “dedicated
amateur”, and the scholar
As a conclusion to his article “A selected guide to source material on the American
Circus” (1973: 619), Richard W. Flint wrote: “The last fifteen years have seen a great
deal of new research on the circus (...) with a growing interest and increased availability
of source materials, the circus beckons as a ripe and alluring object field.”1 Although it
might seem that Flint only stated the obvious (primary sources have to be available so
that research can be done), his conclusive statement is in fact a bright insight into the
history of circus research, as it sheds light on two aspects that make researching the
circus a specific practice.
First, the very idea of “circus archives” is a fairly recent one. For almost two
centuries (between the birth of the American circus in 1793 and the moment in time
when Flint wrote his article on circus archival material in 1973), circusiana2 has been
shattered across the USA, as it remained in the hands of artists and fans who acted as
collectors, and sometimes as historians. Second, the 1970s constitute a turning point in
the history of circus research. With the increased availability of source materials,
scholars joined the crowd of “dedicated amateurs” (1973: 616) that have been
researching the circus before them, and provided new research (academic research).
Forty years later, how has the situation changed? The “modern” circus of the past
is now referred to as “traditional” or “classical”, as opposed to the “new” or
“contemporary” circus performances. Circus research has expanded from history to
aesthetics, anthropology, and semiotics (among other academic disciplines). Scholars
gather to share and promote their work3. The circus is now a legitimate research topic,
so much so that the term “circus studies” has been coined. This paper will focus on the
circulation of resource pertaining to traditional circus in the USA. I intend to reflect on a
trip I made to the USA in 2012 as a would-be scholar, and share the personal narrative
of my encounter with circus archivists. I will give an overview of the various institutions
that qualify as “circus archives”, tackle the notion of private/public collections, and
question the availability/accessibility of source materials.
23.
Locations/Locutions: Scripting the Archive of Irish Theatre
CHAIR: Niamh Mary Bowe
(University of Reading)
David Clare
(NUI, Galway)
Compiling a New, Composite Draft of Synge’s “When the Moon Has Set”
Dubliner J.M. Synge is often thought of as a writer of "peasant plays" set in the rural
West of Ireland, but the majority of his plays are actually set in Co. Wicklow. The first
Wicklow play that Synge wrote, When the Moon Has Set, was the most autobiographical
of his dramas and provides fascinating insight into his early life, his sensitivity to
Ireland’s urban/rural divide, and his views regarding his own social class. The play was
repeatedly rejected by W.B. Yeats and Lady Gregory, and most critics share their
negative feelings about the work; however, those who have dismissed When the Moon
Has Set as an unsatisfactory “apprentice” piece may have been too hasty. As W.J.
McCormack has pointed out, Synge "never abandoned" the play, and, over the years, he
completed various one- and two-act versions, as well as a putative three-act one. What’s
more, he left behind copious notes related to the play. Since there is no definitive
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version of the text, I compiled a "super draft" from all of the Synge manuscripts housed
in the archives at Trinity College Dublin. The result is a new two-act version, which is
superior to the widely-circulated (excessively truncated) one-act version, or even the
anthologised (wildly sprawling) two-act one. This new version was performed as a
rehearsed reading at Galway’s Town Hall Theatre in 2013, with a cast of professional
actors. In this paper, I explain the aesthetic decisions involved in the creation of this
new version, and discuss how it was received in Galway.
Jenny Rogers
(University College Cork)
Scripting the Archive: A Contemporary Lens on the Past
This paper gives new insight into playwriting and its related activites (drafting, editing,
writing) as a perfomative research method. It will show how the playwriting process
can be used as a creative and innovative way of representing the archive, and bring to
life its many facets and contradictions, in a way that helps us shine a light on the present
- and learn more about who we are today. It will contextualise its argument within the
greater conference debate of Archival Materials In/As Performance. In what ways can a
playwright engage with the past, to shine a light on the present? In this paper, the
researcher will discuss the adaptation process of a contemporary theatre project
“BURN”. Written by Jennifer Rogers the play is currently in development with a view to
staging mid-2016. The paper will describe the context of “BURN” and other events
surrounding the 1920 War of Independence; and describe the issues encountered when
considering what sources to use to inform the playwriting process.
In particular, the paper will focus on three distinct areas: Recorded history,
performance history and the eye witness account. Recorded history includes items
found in books, news papers and other media sources reporting on the events and
happenings of the time; performance history includes performances throughout history
that deal with the same themes and context, and under the heading of the eye witness
account, the researcher will look at original manuscripts and recordings of those who
witnessed events of the 1920 War of Independence first hand. The Methodology is made
up of desk research, workshops and readings. At the core of this project are the
playwright and the dramaturge, who invite actors to workshop each draft. The goal of
the enquiry is to see how the sources, mentioned above, can be interwoven to inform
character, context and action; and create the mood and atmosphere of the piece. It
questions if a source is realiable or unreliable, and what qualities these considerations
add to the form of the play? Indicating the many ways the researcher can learn about
the past, and its archived sources by using playwriting as a performative research
method.
Trish McTighe
(University of Reading)
In Caves, in Ruins: Place as Archive at the ‘Happy Days Beckett Festival’
Setting events within institutional spaces, found sites, local gathering places and natural
formations, the Happy Days Festival exploits the landscapes of Enniskillen and its
environs to great effect. The local geography offers a network of sites which form the
backdrop and inspiration for a wide diversity of events, theatre, music and dance
performances, art exhibitions and so forth. Setting the festival here cites the author’s
biographical connections to the place, through Portora School, but also references the
geopolitical north-south division which came into being during Beckett’s time there. Yet
Beckett’s writing itself tends to refer only obliquely to the specificities of the Irish
landscape (and then more usually to Dublin and Wicklow topographies) so that the
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places of Enniskillen rarely resonate with the work in a literal way, even as they
reference also a broader density of history, geologic and archaeologic, manifest in its
landscapes.
As the festival events add yet another layer of history to an already highly
marked territory, it is necessary to ask questions about the how place is being used,
how historical remnants marking the landscape are brought to the fore. Do festivals of
this nature animate the historical aspects of a place or do they serve to diminish the fact
that the problems of history, such as Ireland’s geographic and cultural divisions, have
not yet been resolved? This paper will address the ways in which place is utilised and in
turn how place ‘performs’ within the festival’s structure, examining how it exceeds the
role of passive backdrop, and functions as sort of geographic archive, feeding a festival
short on built places for performance and hungry for resonances.
Elizabeth Howard
(Waterford Institute of Technology)
Proclaiming the Professional: Red Kettle Theatre Company 1985-1989
In 1973, the Irish government instated a new Arts Act that expanded the discourse
around community arts and prompted the strategic development of arts infrastructure
and organisations through the targeting of a number of regional centres. This targeted
approach facilitated arts and cultural policy to become an instrument of regional
regeneration promoting employment, social inclusion and resulting in greater
democratization of the arts. One of these State-identified regional centres was
Waterford city, which in the 1970s was a place of factory closures, high unemployment
and emigration.
In June 1979 a community initiative called Waterford Arts-for-All was founded
with the aim of canvassing for a Waterford-based arts centre, which led to the
organisation of festivals and arts events held in various spaces around the city. Using a
variety of government support structures including employment and local enterprise
schemes and support from the Arts Council, the Arts-for- All initiative gave rise to Red
Kettle Theatre Company. Red Kettle operated from 1985-2014 as a community and
professional theatre company producing work regionally, nationally and
internationally. The company’s archive is now held in the Luke Wadding Library at
Waterford Institute of Technology.
Between 1985 and 1989 Red Kettle moved from ‘amateur’ to ‘professional’
status, and its Arts Council grant was increased from £2,000 per annum to £51,000 per
annum. This paper concentrates on the material structures of the company as expressed
though its archive during this time. It considers how the political and economic factors
that resonated within Waterford during the late 1980s are manifest within production
artefacts, and how the company exploited its regionality in order to be seen to cohere
with cultural policies of the moment which led to Arts Council funding. Through the
items preserved in the archive, this paper examines how the company manifested itself
in both the public and the political realm as it moved from amateur to professional
status. Little is known about Red Kettle’s development as a regional Irish theatre
company and this paper aims to contribute to the knowledge in this area. It also offers
an informed understanding of the ideologies that shaped Irish cultural policy during the
1980s. This paper will have relevance to national and international scholars of Irish
studies, theatre and culture, arts policy makers and archival researchers.
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24.
Philosophy, Religion and Archival Research
CHAIR: Patrick Lonergan
(NUI, Galway)
Claire Read
(Roehampton University)
Pondering Plato
Plato's Chapter 13 on 'Poetry and Unreality' found in the Republic discusses at length
the distance between performances. These performances vary from the work of the
joiner who manufactures products, a task based performance of sorts; to the painter
who replicates the work of the joiner multiple times over, effectively creating a mass
performance; to the cited originator - God - who conceived of an idea, which is
subsequently manufactured and distributed: arguably, a represented version of the
initial concept. According to Plato, this passage of performance creates a distance
between the mentioned 'original' and the following levels of representation, and
furthermore to assert that the joiner and the painter at their removed distance, know
nothing of the 'original' itself, equalling their performances and representations of work
as mere imitations, therefore undermining the skills and labour of the joiner and the
painter.
Taking Plato's assertions as the basis of my paper, I will discuss the differing
stages of performance, in relation to documentation, writing and archives. I will
consider initially the performative style of writing adopted by Plato throughout Chapter
13, focusing particularly on the nature of the document as performance or otherwise; a
thought which becomes more interesting when acknowledging Plato's dislike of
performance, inferred through his comparison of tragic writers and playwrights to the
joiners and painters of performance, deeming them as mere mimics and re-presenters
of art. Developing this argument further, I later discuss the effect of Plato's document
upon other scholars, who cite and effectively re- perform Plato's work within their own
notes and analysis, namely Jonas Barish who highlights Plato's 'antitheatrical prejudice',
and latterly Helen Freshwater, who compares Plato's prejudice to the strictures which
were put in place upon theatre, courtesy of the Lord Chamberlain's Licensing Act.
In sum, I draw comparisons between the three levels of performance identified
within Chapter 13, the levels of performance found within Plato’s work, and the
subsequent reworking within the texts of scholars and academics. I discuss Chapter 13
as a represented document, tracing its performance and over time, as well as question
the validity of Plato's claims, and ultimately the sincerity of his theatrical prejudice.
Adele Redhead
(University of Glasgow)
The Eucharist and Performance
The celebration of the Eucharist is the pinnacle of the liturgy for many Christian
traditions. Itself being the ultimate act of memory, the celebration of the Mass is
simultaneously a performance, and as re-enactment a renewed writing of the script for
future performances. The liturgy itself provides us with a script, we have ‘performers’
and ‘audience’ in clergy and congregation, and an act which is culturally important and
therefore worthy of consideration for addition to the archive. In the liturgy, we can take
a specific, special act which has been performed and represented across many
traditions over many centuries and examine how what happens has been codified and
represented in art and literature over centuries. How can the story of the Eucharist be
told (and re-told?), and what can the archivist learn of the representation and representation of an act using non-traditional physical material? Can the celebration of
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the Eucharist, Holy Communion, and Breaking of the Bread be viewed as a
remembrance, and if so, can any of the other situations (for example, plays, oral history)
be viewed as remembrances in the same way? Is the Eucharist just another example of
this, or is it by virtue of the commandment to ‘do this in memory of me’, a very
particular vehicle with which to examine the principles of archival theory and directions
of research as previously explained?
Archival theory has much to offer when looking at these questions; how does
archival theory of representation, memory, and authenticity help us to inform our view
of ‘performance’ within this particular context? The Eucharist certainly provides us
with a very particular but relevant context and working model, and an opportunity to
examine how practitioners in allied fields, as well as the archival sphere, can work with
theorists to increase the understanding of all.
Hannah Elizabeth Allan
(Manchester School of Art)
The Fluxuus score as text archive of past and future performance
During the Fluxuus movement of the early 1960s a form of archiving performance
emerged—the text score—that acted as the ultimate reduction of the scripted archival
form, yet also offered additional potential for re-interpretation, repetition and dispersal.
These text scores consist of simple typed instructions for the repetition of performance
pieces, using everyday materials they offered both the opportunity for work to be
documented within the performance archive, and also be freely spread via publication.
I have examined the score as a means by which artists could mark their presence
within the archive, whilst also inspiring future work through these traces. It is a form
which offered the potential for re-enactment by any reader: functioning as
documentation, instruction, and also a piece in its own right. This reading of the score as
trace and its inherent ‘intratemporality’ originated from the work of Paul Ricoeur on
documents. The score offered artists the opportunity to create works through
documentation which might be remade multiple times, by multiple performers. Both the
materials and approach democratised the making of performance works: although the
original author was always cited, they create a precedent where the ‘originality;’ of a
piece becomes increasingly less significant, and the audience themselves are
encouraged to participate or take control of the work’s narrative. Adding to this, the
minimal writing style is open to interpretation beyond the context of any original
intention.
25.
Objects & Ephemera within The Archive
CHAIR: Liza Penn-Thomas
(Swansea University)
Hannah Manktelow
(University of Nottingham/The British Library)
Reclaiming Regional Theatre History with the British Library Playbill Collection
The playbill collection at the British Library is one the largest in the UK, comprised of
over a quarter of a million items that date from the late-eighteenth to the earlytwentieth centuries. Uncatalogued and closed to the public, these documents had been
largely unstudied until 2014, when the Library partnered with the AHRC on a new
project designed to investigate the potential of this archive.
Focusing primarily on Shakespearean performance in the English provinces, I
have collected information from thousands of the Library's playbills and used digital
research methods to analyse the hard data, facilitating an interrogation of long-standing
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assumptions about the state of regional drama in this period. A corresponding
examination of playbills as material objects and items central to what Christopher
Balme has termed the 'theatrical public sphere' has allowed for a
reconstruction of the
history of provincial performance that challenges some of the field's traditional Londoncentric narratives.
This paper will provide an overview of these findings and will explore the extent
to which we can consider playbills reliable artefacts of past performance. The
limitations of this form of ephemera as a whole, and the British Library's archive in
particular, will also be discussed, including reference to the origins of the collection, the
process of selectivity, and a consideration of that which is omitted from the record.
Overall, this paper will seek to demonstrate the wealth of possibilities that exist in
playbill research and the potential that these resources have to reveal untold stories
and allow us to reclaim marginalised histories.
Katherine Johnson
(Sheffield Hallam University)
Can ephemera endure?: Performance Archives Live, Living and Online
The ephemeral liveness of performance is often deemed to be beyond the grasp of the
tangible endurance of the archive and the confines of the objects that comprise it. But
what if the archive itself was live, and living? Live, in the sense of being created (and recreated) continually, as the performance occurs, and re-occurs. Living, in a metaphorical
sense – a record that continues to evolve, but also in a more literal sense – an archive
animated with/in the performance repertoire, oral and corporeal. An archive enlivened
with a touch of the ephemerality of the performance it seeks to retain. This paper
interprets the work of Edinburgh’s Beltane Fire Society as a move towards this
direction. Through this case study, I will consider the possibilities of utilising
performance as archive, and conversely, the way an archive becomes performance. To
do so, I draw on my experience as both performance practitioner and performance
ethnographer.
Repeated each year since its re-conception in 1982, the Beltane Fire Festival in
Edinburgh is, I argue, a living tradition that functions as an ephemeral, and yet
potentially enduring archive of itself. Its digital archive – an ever changing web of online
conversations, photographs and video footage that form part of the annual cycle of
rehearsal process, performance and reception – mirrors this. Should this state of
perpetual flux be understood as disintegrating, or updating, Beltane’s archive? How can
social media function as a form of archive, and could the open, international
contributions it facilitates help to democratise performance history? What is the
relationship between this online record, and the embodied repertoire of performance?
As both a practitioner and academic, and both a performance studies theorist
and historian, I seek in this paper to bring these differing, yet potentially
complementary strands into more active communication. An ethno-historiographic
methodology is enhanced by performance theory on the relationship between
performance and archives, between theatre and history, and between the digital, the
mediatised and the live.
Ann Folino White
(Michigan State University)
Celebrated Actor Folks’ Cookeries: Performing in a Collection and Online
This paper examines how evidence, and so the theatre historian, performs at distinct
sites of access – online and at a brick and mortar collection – to disclose the ways in
which archival and digitizing conventions shape research. By comparing the charitable
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celebrity cookbook Celebrated Actor Folks’ Cookeries: A Collection of the Favorite Foods
of Famous Players (1916) in its digital and material contexts, I throw into relief the
representational practices by which historical documents are made not only accessible
but also interpretable. I also document the research methodologies prompted by online
engagement both in tandem with and in distinction from archival engagement, with
particular attention to Elizabeth Yakel’s and Deborah A. Torres’s notion of “archival
intelligence” as an integral co-performance of researcher and archivist.
While hyperlinks to keywords in the title and “similar items” place Celebrated Actor
Folks’ squarely within the theatre historian’s purview on the Haithi Trust Digital
Library, the Michigan State University library (my local, most easily accessed collection
site) catalogues an original edition of Celebrated Actor Folks’ within its extensive Food
and Cookery Collection. Seventeen other U.S. libraries also maintain the book within
special collections of cookery—all positioning the text as an object of interest for food
historians and potentially obscuring its relevance to theatre scholars. These distinct
disciplinary contexts and sites of access render the book a fascinating case for
examining how digitizing projects are reshaping relationships between the researcher
and the librarian and the archivist and the archives. In the end, the formal properties
and content of Celebrated Actor Folks’, which features 257 recipes (for now unfamiliar
dishes) from famed (now many unknown) international tragedians, comedians,
vaudevillians, opera singers, and dancers, along with photographs, autographs, and
anecdotes encourages researchers to examine it via both sites and through the lenses of
both food and theatre history in order to understand the cookbook’s construction of
early-twentieth-century celebrity.