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-74295020320000Book of AbstractsArchives, 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 ProcessPeter 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.” 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 almost-simultaneous 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 critically-acclaimed 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 micro-seconds 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;” 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. Louise Ritchie(Aberystwyth University)Hactivating the archiveThe 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 ProjectEstablished 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 in-house 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 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.Manuscripts, Data & Digital TextsCHAIR: Kieran Hoare(NUI, Galway)Rosemary K.J. Davis(Amherst College)The Samuel French Archive at Amherst CollegeSince 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' BooksThe 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 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, kin?sthetic 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 MetadataIn 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 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 AgeThe 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.Access, Collection, Exhibition and Education CHAIR: Tracy Davis (Northwestern University)Jane Gallagher (University of Kent)Performing at the CrossroadsThe 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 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 ArchiveThis 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 re-assesses 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 WalesThe 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’ 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.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 fieldThis 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-in-training 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? Steven Paige(Plymouth University)The Ties That Bind: Reusing Online Archival as an Interdisciplinary ArtistIn 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 re-enactments 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 re-enactment. 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 TheatreThis 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 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. Archives and the CityCHAIR: Ian Walsh (NUI, Galway)Stanislava Slavica Stojan(Institute for History of Croatian Academy) Records of the Criminal Court (1550 – 1800) and Performing TheatreThe 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 non-nobles, 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 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 ArchiveThe 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. 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. 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 ResearchMy 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?April Sizemore-Barber(Georgetown University)Queering ‘Coloured’ and Colouring Queer: The Sequins, Self, and Struggle Project and the Miss Gay South Africa Pageant archivesMy 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 re-present 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 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 UniversityRachel Krische The Body As ArchiveWe 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 un-recordable, 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 KendallSawing the Legs Off ChairsThis 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 post-performance 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 ArchiveCHAIR:Conor O’Malley(Dept of Arts, Culture and Heritage)Blake Morris(University of East London)Walking the ArchiveThere 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 six-week 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, 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 Beno?t Larbiou(University Paul-Valery Montpellier and Cultural Service of the Frontignan Council)The Spectator as a Living ArchiveOrganising 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 LiveIn 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. 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 IslandMultimedia 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 MemoriesHardiman 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 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 ArchiveElizabeth Jeffery(Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham) Puck: A Performance HistoryWilliam 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, 1954-77The 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’ 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 scholarshipIn 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 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 repertoireIn 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 InternationalismCHAIR: 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 UniversityIn 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 valuable resource for researchers everywhere”. 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.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 DublinIn 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 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 ArchivesCHAIR: Trish McTighe(University of Reading)Matthew McFrederick (University of Reading)Staging Waiting for Godot at 60: The Arts Theatre and the archiveThe 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 BeckettBeckett’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 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 manuscriptNot 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 ArchivesCHAIR: Tanya Dean(NUI, Galway)Catherine TrenchfieldRoyal Holloway, University of LondonThe 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. 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 GrotowskiPeter 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 non-reproducible. 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. Natalya Baldyga(Tufts University)The Accidental (Digital) Archivist Considers Carlo GozziIn 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 ArchivesCHAIR: Barry Houlihan (NUI, Galway)Rachel Foss and Stella Wisdom(The British Library)Collaborative Creativity: Archival Personae at the British LibraryThis 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 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 StageThe 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, LondonThe 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 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 HistoriographyIn 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.” 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 1995-2014In 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 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 ObjectsIn 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 over-arching collaboration entitled Reading at War.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 RatteeReading the Biscuit TownMy 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 inter-linking 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 CheneryRemediating TracesMy 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, 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 ArchiveCHAIR: Marina Ni Dhubhain (NUI, Galway)Daithí Kearney (Dundalk Institute of Technology)Seeking Inspiration, Reliving Lives: The Role of Archives in Irish Folk TheatreSiamsa 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. Mary Elizabeth Lange(University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa)Applied Storytelling in post-conflict community museums: District Six and Free DerryThe 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 ArchiveNorthern 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 MovementShelley 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 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 anti-apartheid 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 ArchiveCHAIR: Rhona Justice-Malloy (University of Mississippi)Monika Meilutyt?(Kultūros braai)Ethics of Representing Archival Materials in Exposition and Performance: The Case of LithuaniaVarious 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 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 PortugalMost 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 post-memory 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 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 Szczawin?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 Frljic?). 19. Theatre in Northern Ireland through the ArchivesCHAIR: Barry Houlihan(NUI, Galway)Eilis Smyth(The Shakespeare Institute, Birmingham University)The Bard in Belfast: Staging Shakespeare During the TroublesThe 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 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 TheatreHaving 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 lesser-known 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 -1981Although 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 fit-ups, 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 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 PastCHAIR: Stephen Muir(University of Leeds)‘Performing the Jewish Archive’ (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 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 YorkPerforming the Historical Context of a Cabaret from the Terezín/Theresienstadt GhettoIn 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. ?21. Visual Archives: Photos, Images and the RepertoireCHAIR: Justine Nakase(NUI, Galway)Rachel Emily Taylor(Sheffield Hallam University)Photographic Documentation Foundling MuseumThis 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 doesIn 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-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 RepertoireThe 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 ‘re-presentation’ 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 PerformanceCHAIR: Ian Walsh(NUI, Galway)Elspeth Millar(University of Kent)Establishing the British Stand-Up Comedy ArchiveThis 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: 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 RoyalThis 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. Sara Benoist(University of Paris-Sorbonne, France)Circus research through time: private collections, public archives, the “dedicated amateur”, and the scholarAs 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 TheatreCHAIR: 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 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 PastThis 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 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 1985-1989In 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. 24. Philosophy, Religion and Archival ResearchCHAIR: Patrick Lonergan (NUI, Galway)Claire Read(Roehampton University)Pondering PlatoPlato'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 PerformanceThe 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 re-presentation of an act using non-traditional physical material? Can the celebration of 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 performanceDuring 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 ArchiveCHAIR: Liza Penn-Thomas (Swansea University)Hannah Manktelow(University of Nottingham/The British Library)Reclaiming Regional Theatre History with the British Library Playbill CollectionThe 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 early-twentieth 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 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 London-centric 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 OnlineThe 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 re-created) 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 OnlineThis 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 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. ................
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