INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE
CROSSED ARCHIVES
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Abstracts
Archiving theatre as collaborative performance of care
Heike Roms
*in English
It is often thought that the greatest obstacle to archiving theatre work is its ephemeral quality. In this talk I will propose that an even greater challenge lies in theatre’s collective nature and its distributed authorship. In discussing several recent examples of communal archival labour, the talk will ask, how may we conceive of archiving theatre as a collaborative performance of care?
Arte de archivo, pensar los archivos desde el sur
Pía Gutiérrez Días e Katharina Eitner
*in Spanish
How do we think the archives of the South? In this intervention, Katharina Eitner and Pía Gutiérrez, both members of the Arde de Chile collective (www.proyectoarde.org), propose to review approaches to archival practice in performance art from the Chilean and Latin American context. The focus will be on archives and the use of their collections. Undoubtedly, archival work has become a tool for creation, research and making living arts practices visible, but in our territories it requires creativity to generate survival strategies. Based on some theoretical approaches, the exhibition will delve into the experiences of performing arts archives.
Centro de Documentação Teatral: criação, atuação e perspectivas
Elizabeth Azevedo
The presentation should provide both a history and an overview of the Theater Documentation Center at the School of Communications and Arts of the University of São Paulo. It will address the form of constitution of the center, resulting from its status as a university body. Next, the strategic-methodological choices made by the coordination will be seen in the face of the São Paulo, and even national, reality of the structure of entities for the preservation of artistic and cultural heritage. Finally, examples of the collection in custody will be presented, with special relevance to the theoretical issue of the archival organization of personal collections, as well as research initiatives based on the existing mass of documents.
INCOMMON. In praise of community. Shared creativity in arts and politics in Italy (1959-1979)
Marco Baravalle
*in English
INCOMMON. In praise of community. Shared creativity in arts and politics in Italy (1959-1979) was a research project funded by the European Research Council and hosted by IUAV, University of Venice. INCOMMON was meant to be the first study to systematically analyse the field of performing arts as resulting from the practice of commonality both theorized and experienced over the 1960s and the 1970s. In particular, the project was aimed to study the history of the ‘laboratory Italy’ as the place where artistic counterculture expressed by performing arts arose in a milieu characterized by a profound relation between philosophy, politics, and revolutionary practices.
If the archive is the locus that possibly interrupts a linear evolutionary narration of the history of performance and art, to us it is also a repository of relations. Along the course of the project we have been often interrogating archives in light of who and what was absent or peripheral in them, in an effort of reparation towards what became unarchivable. At the same time, this effort of reparation wasn’t oriented in the direction of imposing a new discipline over radical Italian performance. It wasn’t a taxonomic principle to guide us. Instead it was the political urgency to restore the subversive potential of rebel bodies and voices which were canceled or normalized after the defeat of the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s.
It was with this urgency in mind that for several months I worked in the private archive of Giuliano Scabia, one of the seminal figures of the Italian theatrical avant-garde of that period. In particular, I will focus on the relevance of the concept of “decentralization” in questioning traditional theatrical forms and institutional structures, and on Scabia’s Decentralization actions: an example of assembly-guided participatory theatre that he implemented in the midst of the raging workers’ struggles of the so called “hot autumn” of 1969 in Turin.
Um outro teatro? A presença queer no arquivo do MNTD
André Murraças
Through a selection of theatre performances with queer overtones presented in Lisbon from 1982 to the beginning of 2000, and documented in the archive of the National Museum of Theatre and Dance, this presentation will attempt to reflect on the impact of these works on the creation of a national queer identity. It therefore proposes a re-reading of an archive. Bridging the gap from the years of censorship and the importance of Bernardo Santareno's work, especially with O Pecado de João Agonia, the post-revolutionary years are creatively portentous if we want to analyse national production from a queer point of view. Shows like Filipe Lá Féria's at Casa da Comédia, the work of Teatro da Graça (and the free distribution of authors Joe Orton, Tennessee Williams, Fassbinder), the café-concerts of Comuna and Fernando Gomes, the cabarets of Cassefaz, the importance of Teatro Experimental de Cascais with Jean Genet, the coming of Angels in America to the Dona Maria II National Theatre, the solos in Miss Coco Peru and The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me, and the Portuguese versions of London and Broadway hits such as The Lisbon Traviata, O Beijo da Mulher Aranha and A Minha Noite com o Gil. And to understand how we theatricalised that terrible disease of the 1980s? Through its programmes, photographs and posters, the MNTD archive makes it possible to understand the historical arc traced by these shows and to identify the emergence of creative lines that reinvent the past, correct it and propose new paths. It's possible to make different readings of an openly queer material and even discover other hidden ones. What was this community we saw on stage and who were its spectators? What meeting places were these theatres? What was put on stage and what did we discover together?
Para um mapeamento da memória
Carlota Castro
This communication arises from the practical experience gained as part of the "REENACT NOW" project, a proposal to activate the archive of the International Festival of Iberian Expression Theatre through the body, which I directed and which was produced by Visões Úteis in 2023. Starting by clarifying the theoretical dimension of the endeavour in question, through practice as research, it was intended to be part of the field of Reenactment Studies, which has only recently begun to cross paths with the performing arts sector. In fact, while in the fields of history and anthropology this was a relatively well-established practice, in the arts it was still viewed with some suspicion, since the artists' aim is not to understand what really happened - if that is even possible - but rather to reflect on the tensions between vividness, mediation and the way the audience remembers (or not) a particular event (Benzaquen-Gautier, 2020). In this sense, it is easy to understand that, regardless of the form or purpose for which it is carried out, reenactment presupposes, to a certain extent, the act of imagining. After all, if the past no longer exists and if access to its collection is limited and conditioned by ruins, remains and traditions (Agnew, Lamb & Tomann, 2020), the researcher is necessarily expected to be a creator and try to fill in the gaps they come across. Thus, "For a Mapping of Memory" begins this dive into the archive of one of our city's most emblematic theatre festivals, seeking to bring to light the difficulties encountered during this process: from press reviews to a VHS cassette returned forty years overdue. In a second moment, precisely corresponding to the choice of the play to (re)interpret ["Ibéria Sector 5," by Cooperativa Bonifrates, dated 1981], the methodologies of (re)creating the object will be addressed, along with the peculiarities inherent in working with an actress from the original cast challenged to repeat – or not – the same role decades later. Finally, the reception by the audience will be discussed: are the spectators witnessing a restaging or participating in the creation of a new piece (Benzaquen-Gautier, 2020)? It is worth noting that all of this happened over half a year ago, and how treacherous my memory can be...
Seeding the digital in the physical: Geo-located sound walking practices as anarchives
Jo Scott
*in English
The proposed contribution to the Crossed Archives conference focuses on geo-located sound walks as anarchives, and as digital seeds sown into physical spaces. Geo-located sound walks are created through attaching digital sounds to physical environments using a web application, to form the route for a sound walk that can be streamed or downloaded by participants. The experience comes into being when the participant travels through those spaces, triggering the digital sounds through their movement, which is tracked through the satellite positioning system embedded in their smartphone. As a sound-walk maker who has ‘sown’ these digital seeds for future sound walk experiences in the physical spaces of cities and parks in the North of England, I reflect on the continuing presence of the walks as a contingent and processual ‘anarchive’. This seeded anarchive is made of both digital code and the shifting material realities of the spaces where the walks are positioned, but is only brought into being through the embodied movement of the participant. Springgay et al. (2017) comment that ‘anarchiving is less a thing, then a process or an action’ (p.898) and that ‘anarchiving practices invite embodied interaction turning them as Mereweather (2006) suggests from “excavation sites into construction sites” (p. 146).’ (p.903). As referenced above, it is embodied interaction that brings into being the sound walk experience. The sounds cannot be extracted or excavated from the place of their creation – they are embedded in this physical space and in constant conversation with the present of its happening, making them simultaneously a digitally determined and materially unpredictable experience. In addition, Brian Massumi (2016) describes an anarchive as ‘a feed-forward mechanism for lines of creative process, under continuing variation’, which is ‘activated in the relays: between media, between verbal and material expressions, between digital and off-line archivings’ (p.6). I am particularly interested in exploring what the anarchive of a geo-located sound walk is and does in the present ‘relays’ of its activation by a participant and how the ‘feed-forward mechanism’ of the archive of sound interacts with the ‘continuing variation’ of the present physical environment. I propose a presentation that uses the structure of a guided walk to lead delegates through the anarchival potentialities of ‘left behind’ sounds and what they can do in and to the physical and social spaces of their happening. I will focus on a sound walk I created for the city of Manchester, UK, titled ‘Wanders in the (wild) smart city’. This walk uses geo-located sound, text, binaural recording and song to reveal and playfully resist the covert surveillance and data harvesting enacted by smart technologies embedded in the physical spaces of the city, which are often hidden. Through the proposed virtual journey, I will reflect on the walk’s persistent potential - as an ‘anarchive’ and seeded digital presence in these busy urban spaces - to disrupt and interrogate the workings of the ‘smart city’ through its present and future activations.
O que devemos ao futuro?
Carlos Costa
This communication, with two archives in it, aims to share the paths taken, the mistakes made, the solutions found - partly thanks to ARTHE itself - as well as the belief that to fight for the memory of performance - through its archive - is to reinforce the social inscription of the performing arts, legitimising them as an identity factor. For 20 years, Visões Úteis [VU] has been haunted by an archive, which was bequeathed to it at the time of the dissolution of Companhia Absurda, a collective from Belo Horizonte (Brazil), which was decisive in the founding of VU itself; it managed to mourn but not escape the haunting of 5 boxes that demanded meaning, a dignified destination for the contents deposited. The first attempts to exorcise the fear that we weren't up to the task were artistic in nature, reflecting on the presence of someone else's archive and using the VU archive as a creative device. In the first show, we invited two actors from the generation before ours to perform the (apparent) fiction of a collective trying to find a destination for its archive. At a second moment, imagining the death of the previous protagonists, we invited two actors from the generation after ours to give a destination to an (alleged) last box. These creative devices increased our sensitivity without solving the issue, so the next step was a megalomaniac attempt to solve it in general: we mobilised the attention of the Torre do Tombo, believing that a top-down solution would be the most effective, which didn't happen, despite all the goodwill of the National Archives. It then seemed that we lacked knowledge about the field in which we wanted to operate, so we began to approach the University of Coimbra, which led to a colloquium and publication on archiving practices in the performing arts, the start of a series of events affiliated with the field of Reenactment Studies and the ARTHE project itself. At the end of this process, amid anguish, mistakes, hesitations, setbacks and learning, we realised that the urgency was no longer just for the Companhia Absurda archive but also for our own archive, now that we were approaching 30 years of activity. As fortune would have it, the archives of our Brazilian peers flew to Brazil in the hope that they would receive the treatment they deserved. And because fortune moves in spirals, we had the privilege of getting to know some of ARTHE's experiences, which soon convinced us that it wouldn't be from the top down but from the bottom up that we would find a solution for the VU archive. So we turned to the Municipal Historical Archive of Porto, where we found the preliminary willingness to collaborate in the treatment of our archive, allowing it to be better used as a working tool and facilitating the subsequent political decision to integrate it into the Municipal Historical Archive: the technicians' first visit to the VU takes place precisely on the morning of 12 December 2023, at the same time as the sessions of the Arquivos Cruzados International Conference are taking place; another turn in the limitless line of fortune.
The SPA (University of Malta) Digital Archive: Preserving and researching the performing arts in Malta
Vicki Ann Cremona and Marco Galea
*in English
The School of Performing Arts Archive developed from the efforts of Theatre Studies academics at the University of Malta to document the performing arts in the country. The immediate context was that local theatre history was not sufficiently researched, with the main issues being that the generally amateur nature of theatre practice meant that practitioners felt little need or lacked resources to document their work. Conversely, national institutions like the National Library and the National Archives generally ignored these practices. As a result, many practitioners have faded from memory and researching their work has become increasingly difficult. The philosophy that formed the archive has always been a very pragmatic one, that is. trying to document past and present performance in a standardized manner with very little human, financial and spatial resources. The archive evolved into a digital collection consisting of copies of artefacts (play texts, programmes, posters, photographs, correspondence etc.). Metadata is created for each item and digital files and their related metadata are deposited into a repository hosted by the University of Malta library and made available to researchers through the Open Access platform. This relatively simple system has enabled us to digitize (and possibly save from oblivion) thousands of artefacts in under a decade and make everything available to researchers and theatre-makers. This has also enabled us to gain the trust of more and more theatre-makers and theatre institutions who increasingly lend or donate material to the collection. The presentation will discuss the main aspects of the practice (including the relationship with stakeholders), as well as the challenges and limitations of the model we have adopted. The discussion will then look into plans for the solidification of the collection and ideas for making the archive a better tool for researchers.
Frameworks for co-creating historical archives
Andi Johnson
*in English
Recently two independent UK dance companies came together to form a new dance and performance company. Between these two companies are 60 years’ worth of history in dance performance and research, beginning in the 1990’s. Though these companies have their own individual archives, their archival presence is minimal in physical and digital curational spaces. Between 2023 and 2027, I will be working on a research project engaged with developing these archives in practice-based contexts in collaboration with the new company. The end goal of this work is to create frameworks which can be a guide for a variety of performance-based organisations hoping to manage their own archives. For this conference I look to present my initial analysis of the project, focusing on establishing the historical archives for these companies and how research practices may reveal the best practices for accomplishing this goal. Many previous archives have been established without consultation of a trained librarian or archivist (Sant, 2017; Whatley, 2013). As a trained librarian myself, I establish this research through the fields of Dance and Performance Studies, Museum and Archives Studies, and Digital Media Studies. In doing so, I hope to apply more technical aspects of preservation work such as building frameworks for collections, user experience design, and collections analysis into independent performance collections building.
While engaging in this research, I hope to address the following questions to build and engage the archives of the previously established companies:
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How can we collaboratively set up initial frameworks for establishing these archives in sustainable ways?
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How do we build upon the archives to expand what we know about the history of these companies?
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What are the historical impacts impacts and how do we measure and curate them through the archives?
Through practice-as-research methodologies and focusing on creative arts reflective practices (Candy, 2019) as ways of historical archive building, this research will reach an end goal of developing a historical dance archive and curation that weaves together the histories of two dance companies which have historically engaged their communities in different ways. We will then use this historical analysis to determine where the company needs to continue to develop and grow, looking at issues of diversity, inclusion, equity, and social growth. This presentation will focus on the plans to achieve these goals through the following means:
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Tracing the activities and funding of the organisation relative to other events at the time. Did the organisation develop events that created impacts for specific communities?
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Working with an organisation in a co-collaborative effort to develop archives and engagements as an embedded researcher.
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Ways of representing data around impacts of the companies’ activities that can be understood to external audiences.
Because the research is in the initial planning stages, this presentation hopes to gather feedback from other professionals in the field with experience in establishing archives. In taking the feedback, the research can be established in ways that will be more proactive to collaborating with the organization.
Documentos da exposição colonial de 1931 em diálogo: articulando arquivos transnacionalmente
Juliana Coelho
A group of fifty-one Balinese performers performed for two months at the 1931 Colonial Exhibition in the Vincennes Forest in France. In theater studies, this Balinese stay is particularly important because it was on this occasion that Antonin Artaud witnessed what he called "Balinese theater". From the confrontation with these performers, Artaud had the revelation that another theater was possible, and wrote "Le Théâtre Balinais, à l'Exposition Coloniale", published in La Nouvelle Revue française in the same year. One of the aims of the project "Archives and Narratives: the Balinese experience at the 1931 Colonial Exhibition" is to investigate this event, also seeking to understand it from the perspective of the Balinese, as well as to identify the possible consequences of this experience in Bali. To this end, numerous institutional and family archives were accessed in France, the Netherlands and Indonesia, with the aim of gathering and analyzing documents and collecting testimonies from the Balinese artists who performed there, as well as expanding knowledge about this event. It is important to note that the experience of the Balinese performers is part of a broader context of practices of exhibiting colonized natives, which was not inaugurated by the Colonial Exhibition of 1931, but which finds one of its milestones in it. The colonial exhibitions spread, especially in France, from the villages indigènes, which were present at the Universal Exhibitions. It should be noted that, within this event, various forms of theatricalizing life in the colonies and the social behaviour of the colonized coexisted. As the metropolitan countries at the 1931 Exhibition established different administrative relationships and uses of power in each colony, this theatricalization of the "colonial world" was equally heterogeneous. The purpose of this communication is to present a creative exercise in articulating and dialoguing between the different types of documents chosen from some of the archives in this research: the Dutch and Indonesian national archives, the French overseas archives; the French and Indonesian national libraries, the documentary funds of the KITLV/Royal Netherlands Institute for Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies and the Tropenmuseum, the family archives of I Made Regog, Cokorda Gede Agung Sukawati and the testimonies of the families of Cokorda Tublen, I Nyoman Kakul and Anak Agung Mandera.
Arquivar e reativar o teatro música português
Filipa Magalhães
Musical theater productions in Portugal composed after 1970 present numerous challenges in terms of their preservation, especially in the context of archives. Currently, the greatest difficulties faced by this performance genre are related to technological obsolescence, the dispersion of collections and the lack of testimonies about this type of collaborative and performance practice. Some of the music theater documentation is scattered among various institutions and personal collections. The institutions still don't have the means or centralized human resources to deal with such specific documentation, which includes: electroacoustics (magnetic tape recording), scores/graphic scores, scripts, notes/drawings by the composer and performers, images, objects, props, among others. As a result, some of these documents are no longer usable, are scattered and others are in danger of perishing. Music theater works are based on idiosyncratic languages and unconventional performance practices, which need to be identified and analyzed. In this sense, it is often necessary to turn to the participants in these performances (performers, directors, sound technicians, light designers, etc.) to understand the performative aspects inherent in the collaborative creation process, which cannot be uncovered through documentation alone, and also to understand the relationships between the various archive documents. Musicologically speaking, in methodological terms it is essential to carry out an archaeological investigation, which is why in my approach I use the concept of 'archaeological musicology', in that we organize and systematize all the documentation collected. This is a great challenge for musicologists, but also for archivists, because only through collaborative work between both areas of knowledge can we archive and reactivate the performative genre of music theater. In this communication, I propose to discuss some of the processes used in the treatment and recovery of documentation relating to music theater works, presenting by way of example some concrete cases of Portuguese composers' collections committed to this genre. The difficulties listed above certainly have implications for archival practices and affect the reproducibility of music theater productions. One question I'm trying to answer is: how can we establish relationships between the various documents in a musical theater production so that the work can be understood from a holistic perspective? Music theater is a cultural heritage at risk of perishing, which, due to the actual problems it presents, must be properly treated and safeguarded for possible reactivation and presentation to the public.
Como arquivar o som dos espetáculos? Os desafios do projeto “Arquivos sonoros de teatro”
Rafaella Uhiara
This paper proposes a reflection on an important gap in the field of Performing Arts: the lack of methodological and documentary bases for research into the sound dimension of performances. This issue is at the heart of the "Theatre Sound Archives" project, which was created in response to a specific need imposed on the University of São Paulo's Theatre Documentation Centre when it acquired the estate of Tunica Teixeira, a sound designer who worked for 48 years with the major names in São Paulo theater. Her collection includes sound documents on different media, many of them obsolete, as well as traces left by the sound designer's technical and creative activity: creative notebooks, annotated texts, operating scripts, riders with equipment specifications, sound equipment deployment maps. Considering that sound, unlike visuality, has never enjoyed the same prestige or the same interest from researchers in the performing arts, the team at this documentation center saw the need for important groundwork to process this set of documents, which involves everything from defining terms and concepts to surveying the various documents generated by the sound creation process of the shows. Given the extent of the work, the project brings together a multidisciplinary and multinational team, with experienced researchers and pioneers in the field, around 4 work priorities. The first is dedicated to studying the vocabulary used to designate the various elements that make up the sound dimension of theater, whose terms are ill-defined, polysemic and often controversial. The second strand aims to inventory the various documents generated by the different sound creations, identifying methodologies for interpreting them. Of course, this axis - as well as the project as a whole - does not aim for an exhaustive inventory, but rather the start of a work, based on a model collection, which will serve as a reference for future research. The third axis focuses on issues of conservation of the multimedia collection in both material and digital terms, opening up reflection on how the digital medium can change the way we think about documents, both in terms of internal organization and dissemination. In this sense, the team draws on the discussions raised by the Digital Humanities. Finally, the fourth and last axis is aimed at analyzing the use of sound documents in the performing arts, both in the creative process and in their use on stage, disseminated as they are, in ready-made form, or, more discreetly, in verbatim. In addition to the analytical aspect, this axis also envisages opening up artistic experimentation with sound archives, with the aim of bringing research and archives closer to the technical and artistic communities. The project, which recently began on October 1, 2023, has funding from the São Paulo State Research Foundation until September 2028, and is being developed in partnership with the French laboratory THALIM (CNRS/ENS/Université Sorbonne Nouvelle).