Throughout 2010 ELTA will in develop as part of the CEDAR project – Clustering and Enhancing Digital Archives for Research.

As Research Assistant, part of my job is to help develop ways of integrating the archive into teaching and learning contexts, as well as developing research methodologies, organising participations and disseminative events. This blog post is a reflection on some of my findings and activities this month:

1. Victoriana! (the archive outside living memory).

I imagine the rustlings of the old posters and  playbills in the wind. They are modern and proliferate, folded for pockets or crumpled, and, lastly, strewn. The theatre, not a conserving artform by nature, is built upon an economy of ephemera, thousands of extant notices of forthcoming attractions: On my favourite, the promise, at the Pavilion Theatre, Whitechapel Road:

On May the 9th and Every Evening,

Mr. F.W. Marchant’s Drama of

VIDOCQ

The French Jonathon Wild

Yes, a favourite! For the mystery (could it be easily solved?): Who is Vidocq, or who is the Jonathon Wild he is named after? If we read farther down we find: ‘Vidocq the Thief Taker… He Cleared Paris of Thirty Thousand Felons and Murderers’. I wonder at this story, it’s boast, the moralities it might imply. A quick search (off-ELTA) suggests that Eugene Francois Vidocq was first a criminal, then a ‘criminalist’, the first private detective [note: references 'to follow'].

My affection for Vidocq seems to be twinned with a growing love of detectivework.

THE FUTURE:

‘On the 9th of May, and Every Evening…’

The poster for the performance of  ‘Vidocq’ states that it will take place on the 9th of May. It will be something to look forward to. The advertisement does not document the performance, it anticipates it. It is something like J.L. Austin’s ‘performative utterance’, it enacts a promise. The East London Theatre Archive documents the performance to come.

2. CAST / Hackney Empire / New Variety

This is all about politics – the politics of activism and the place theatre might have in political debate, asbout being a ’socialist theatre group’ and then a ’state-funded sociaslist theatre group’, and then about the preservation of a building, and the support of new forms of popular theatre (Caribbean Farce / Alt. Comedy).

We have 151 items relating to Cartoon Archetypical Slogan Theatre (Roland and Claire Muldoon’s political theatre company, active from 1965 to 1992); 164 items relating to Hackney Empire; 173 items relating to New Variety. These items cross over: The Muldoon’s activities (the company, the venue, the variety nights) constitute three strands of a practice which, taken together, demonstrate some of the benefits of creative resistance to dominant political ideologies (critiquing or proposing an alternative, for example, to government legislation: the Employment Bill stating that nomore than 6 picket members belonging to the same workforce could strike at any one time). Their practice also demonstrates some of the difficult choices facing theatre-makers (see comments by Bill McDonnell  – former CAST member – on the Theatre Archive Project Website: ‘…a State that funds you is a State that’s very highly confident, it seems to me, that it can contain and control you’ (www.bl.uk/projects/theatrearchive/mcdonnell.html).

[[Always a politics]] The CAST / Hackney Empire collection, it seems to me, is one of the highlights of the physical collection: it details some of the culture of political theatre, documents funding awarded (and funding cut), and it documents government debate on the nature and purposes of state-funded theatre. The majority of the CAST / Hackney Empire collection (like the majority of the material collected on the ELTA Site) comprises advertising (see STRAND 1). What we are offered is a  set of documents that evidence the commercial need to fill theatres or other venues (an irony in CAST’s particular case), but whilst we can gather certain fragments of useful information (the economic or aesthetic – or anyway, populist – choice of pub venues, half-price for UB40…) the digital archive omits a very great deal of salient information. What, then, atre the criteria for inclusion.

THE FUTURE:

The Hackney Empire was designed by Frank Matcham in 1900. Nine months of building saw its completion in 1901.

Note to Frank Matcham: The conception of theatre may be, firstly the conception of a sociality and then the conception of an architecture (it may or may not benefit us to question which comes first). But presupposing these, the drawing up of architectural plans conceives the theatre as a space for archival. Frank Matcham, first archivist of the Hackney Empire. Scale of 1 inch to 22 feet

3. PA2304: Networks:

‘Networks in a module led by Dr. Ananda Breed, senior lecturer in Theatre Studies at UEL, which I will be co-teaching.

In the first session, after a Talk by Roland Muldoon, I give them: Group 1: Scrapbook for US Tour of ‘Confessions of a Socialist (San Francisco Mime Troupe); Group 2: 4 photographs from a folder titled ‘Various’ – Concert for ‘Put People First’; 1 of woman in audience, head down; Group 3: 2 photographs on ‘One Strike to Another’; 2 posed photographs, possibly the same production; Group 4: : 4 clippings from ‘What Happened Next?’: ‘Halls ban Anti-Nazi Group Play’; ‘Realistic Theatre’; ‘Political Play at Cambridge’ ‘Play Poses Question on ‘The Front’.

Next week the students will give their responses to the materials: how they read the documents, what questions emerged.

In the meantime: Note To Students in the coming weeks: Since Hackney Empire is closed to us, perhaps we can do no more (and perhaps we should do no less) than keep it in mind as we continue to perform. The empire is not (and maybe no longer) inhabited in the way it once was – it is present to us now in the way that other people are present to us, incompletely, never absolutely, something to remembered or imagined but never quite understood. In the way in which we bear other people in mind, or take something of landscapes with us as we leave them, it might be possible to consider the ‘past’ in the ‘present’, the ‘then’ in the ‘now’, the ‘there’ in the ‘here’.

- Dr. Simon Bowes, CEDAR Research Assistant. 12-02-10.