ELTA

On Monday we will launch the new OTHA site at UEL, thereby closing the CEDAR Project.

All of us on the team would like to take this opportunity to say thank you to all those who made this project possible, and on a personal note I’d like to say it has been a priviledge over the last nine months to meet such an astonishing array of people with exceptional skills and knowledge who were kind enough to give us their time and attention.

We hope that OTHA will play an important role in academia and the performing arts in general, and if any of you would like to contact me to discuss the project activities or research outputs then please send an e-mail to j.j.dunne@uel.ac.uk and I would be more than happy to help.

The project is now in it’s final few weeks and we are are preparing to lauch the Online Theatre Histories Archive. Although CEDAR may be winding down, I have simply become too interested in this area to let it go, and will continue to research and develop ideas to explore this area. One example is a module that I teach at UEL, Performing the Archive where we consider the archive in it’s broadest context i.e. a performance space.

Keep posted for any future activities.

Let me reiterate Richard’s apology for the state of the website; the web team are currently working very hard to get the site up and running, but we expect to see changes very soon. The research that I and the team have been conducting over the past year now has to implemented into the site, and as I’m sure you can imagine there is quite a lot.

Now I know it’s late, but happy 2011!

Now that we’ve completed our research activities, we are currently writing up our case studies for JISC which will outline the research findings and explain the rationale behind our process. I’m sure that these will provide invaluble insight for future projects to use, as well as contributing to the subject area. As a practitoner as well as a researcher this project has certainly given me fresh perspectives on methods of researching theatre, and the possibilities that both physical and digital archives have for theatre practice. I am currently starting a new performance project and plan on using some of the methodolgies I formulated during the workshops.

Next Week: Will is going to bring the edited film version of the workshops in on Friday for me and Libby to have a look at, so they should be going on the website ASAP.

Apologies for the site’s current chaotic layout, we are in the process of re-doing the design. Things should be working again (and looking better) by next week.

My colleague Cara Davies and I had an extremely productive, fun and stimulating day on Saturday where we delivered a workshop for professional practitioners. The workshop was held in the stunning UEL dance studios at Trinity Buoy Wharf with ten participants from a broad range of disciplines and backgrounds, including the visual arts, architecture, dance, archiving and theatre.

The premise of the workshop was based on the following questions:

• How can a space be understood as a body, with its own memories and history?
• How can one trace and re-create the journey of a building?
• What alternative narratives emerge from an embodied approach to records?
• Can experience be documented?

These questions derived from my research into the documentation of theatre processes, where the ‘live’ is forever being recorded, but  usually takes the form of written documentation which does struggle to transcend the descriptive level. When I asked the group why we document performance the general consensus was that it is an attempt to capture it’s ‘essence’. But what is this essence, this essential? Is it the visual happenings, or is there a level beyond this? I believe that there is, and this is the interpretative quality of performance which resides with the audiences psyche. If we consider the age of the digital live performance is becoming increasingly other and recognisable, but for performance to exist in the digital age it seems prudent to engage with it’s discourses.

In the workshop I was exploring the relationship between document, experience and re-embodiment in an effort to re-present a journey to it’s essential beyond narrative description. Cara was concerned with mapping this experience using documentation as a territory to inhabit. What we were both fascinated with was the notion of placing the human being i.e. the producer of documentation in the archive by acknowledging archival ‘gaps’. In a performative context these gaps can be considered interpretative spaces to be inhabited, which creates many possibilities for creating new performance works.

Last Tuesday I travelled to Nottingham University to work with MA students on the theatre studies course. This workshop was a little different from the one I had facilitated at Royal Holloway; primarily because we did it in an office! I decided to utilise some of those ideas in a more theoretical context i.e. how to document experience and the ways we could reflect that in documentation. I had asked that the students prepare by going on a journey in town and collecting materials on the way. These ranged from a theatre ticket, receipt from a cafe, free newspaper and photographs.The most interesting part of the discussion was when the students talked about the performative quality of their encounters with the world which was a result of their journye being a task. This knowledge significantly altered the perception of their experience, as live performance has certain conventions and qualities that are recognisably performative. However, these criteria have been constantly challenged in the 20th and 21st centuries through investigations into site and technology, and performance has become an extremly loose term that can be applied to a number of different scenarios. When considering how theatre practitoners can use ephemera creatively the terminology we use to discuss the items is a hugely significant factor in considering their usage, as that instantly ‘frees’ them from their form and allows the space for interpretation.

I presented my first paper at a conference last week, the PSQG forum at the National Archives in Kew. Despite me being very nervous as I had never presented in an official capacity before it was an extremely interesting day, full of challenging and stimulating papers concerning the shift to digital archives and the implications this has for the profession as a whole. My paper was entitled ‘The Live Archive’,  discussing the theories that I have been formulating over the last 6 months on creating methodolgies to interact with theatre ephemera, and how the form of a document is highly influential in how users interpret it.

One of the most interesting papers under discussion was from the Borthwick Institute for Archives.The speaker and her team had conducted a study to see how far people are willing to travel to visit a physical archive, and why people still choose to do it when it is far more cost and time effective to look at a digitised collection. But what intrigued me most was that this study focused on outside users and not students, and when I asked how many of your visitor are comprised of students the answer was very few, which is quite astonishing considering that the archive is based on a university campus. It strikes me there is still  much work to do to open archives up to students and to let them know that these resources are available for them as much as anyone else, and perhaps digital archives can facilitate this process.

Last Saturday I delivered the first of the CEDAR workshops at Royal Holloway…and it was a great success! The students were asked to consider modes of representing experience, and whether written documentation was the most accurate way of representing or documenting events e.g. walking through a park. Think of the things that are missed out, the sights, smells, colours, textures, all highly significant to our experiential understanding. They then asked similar questions of material taken from OTHA (as we have to start calling it now!) . I showed them three pictures of productions with actors in costume, which they then ‘embodied’ to create a character. The next step was to show them architectural plans of the Hackney Empire and attempt to create a little scene with these characters using the potential space as a set. It was very exciting seeing all of that theory I’ve been formalising over the last 5 months put into a practical context, and gave me tonnes of ideas about how useful performance archives can be for practice. The workshop was filmed by Will Huntley and will be uploaded onto the new website where you will be able to see the results for yourself, and hopefully be able to contribute your own ideas, thoughts and opinions.

Because of the additonal material that has been added to the site we have decided to re-name the site the ‘Online Theatre Histories Archive’. The decision has been taken because the material now extends beyond east London theatres, as well as recognising that an archive has many narratives within it. Some are complimentary, others are contradictory. But the most important thing to recognise is that no one definitive history of events or peoples exists. This is not just true of theatre but any past event-it is simply too complex. I interviewed the director of the Unfinshed Histories archive, Susan Croft, a few weeks ago, and she said somenthing that stopped me in my tracks. Her archive is concerned with recording the alternative theatre movement in the UK, and when I asked her why she started it she said that she was growing increasingly concerned that very important companies and individuals were being forgotten about because there was no substantial docuemntation on fringe companies. And once they are forgotten that can never be regained without material that can act as a spur to memory. Theatre is comprised of a myriad of voices and stories, none of which exist in a vacuum.

We are also adding new features to the website to make it more user-friendly and develop tools for to make it easier for users to interact with the material and share ideas; ultimately leading to an online community that can share ideas and thoughts on the material, as well as creating research opportunities. These include a research toolkit, a forum and a feature that allows users to create their own collections depending on their specific research interests.

We had an extremely lively and enjoyable discussion at the focus group with academics last week, and has just gone to strengthen my opinion that theatre docuemntation and performance archives are of paramount interest to the performing arts and academic communities. The group was comprised of Libby Worth (Royal Holloway), Daniel Hunt (Lincoln), Paul Fryer (Rose Bruford) and Conan Lawrence (UEL). When comapring it to the focus group that I held last month with archivists, what struck me most was the amount of diverse arguments and viewpoints when it came to the use of archives with students; not just what an archive is but what it becomes when it is interacted with, can contemporary students fully appreciate the notion of a unique document…and do they really need to? Does it matter? And while I’m making assumptions about student’s perceptions what makes me immune to the endless reproductions in our society…are any of us immune?

We discussed quite a broad range of topics, beginning with students use of physcial archives. Paul described how the collection at Rose Bruford contained some fine material on Stanislavski, Clive Barker and Noel Greig, but that it was hardly ever used, and that an online archive could increase its usability a great deal, thus promoting the physical collection. But the greater question arose as to why students weren’t using it, what barriers existed, and how could we help students overcome them? These are not easy questions, and speak to the greatest issues of any teacher; how can teachers present disciplines and materials in such a way that the student becomes enchanted with it and seeks knowledge out for themselves? Accessibility is a big issue, and the internet is a possible way to overcome any the problems. I think we often forget how intimidating universities can be as the sheer amount of knowledge and resources can be quite overwhelming…so much so you don’t know where to start, and so perhaps you don’t do anything. But having an archive online can allow the inexperienced user (not just students) a chance to navigate their own pathway, and give them a sense of ownership of their own learning; which, as a lecturer myself, I consider the most important aspect to the student experience because it nurtures creative and original thinking, and isn’t this why universities exist in the first place?