August 17th, 2010

What a week! We’ve all been very busy here at CEDAR, and what with the new term looming I’ve been focusing on preparing workshops for the students and getting in touch with our partners to work with them a lot closer in the new term.
But, to the archive! Matt and I have been wading through the Hackney Empire archive and have finally chosen the posters that will be digitised. As we were doing it we were constantly struggling with choosing what not to include. What is irrelevant about any of the material? It all contributes to the history of the Hackney Empire. But one of our guiding principles was to choose a range of material that reflected this extraordinary diverse theatre, and the final collection is mind-boggling. Ultimately Hackney Empire is all about the audience it aims to perform for, and if there is any sort of through-line with this material it is, simply, wanting to give the audience a good time. Thats not to say that it’s repetoire appealed to the lowest common denominator, quite the contrary, but was always conscious of having a programme that stretched a wide arm to a multitude of disciplines (including opera!) Many theatres could learn from the Empire’s shining example.
The CAST material is currently being sorted by Matt and our in-house archivist Caroline Lam, and should be ready to be digitised soon.
Talking about archivists, on Tuesday 17th August I held a focus group for archivists at UEL. The group consisted of Alex Hailey and Lynda Barraclough from the British Library, David Bennett who works on the Siobhan Davis archive at Coventry University, the lecturer Lucie Sutherland and archivist Richard Hunt from Nottingham University. We spoke about a broad range of topics; the ontology of the archive, digitial vs physical, the notion of ‘gaps’, context…and it was absolutely fascinating! What strikes me about the archiving profession is the incredible respect they have for material and their profession as a whole, and considering the recent cuts that have been announced they have to defend their profession even more vehemently than they have had to do in the past.
I sensed that the practice of archiving isn’t as critqued as other disciplines, which is extraordinary as the practice of recording is as old as mankind. But, as came up during discussion they do have a very time-consuming job and, in practical terms, they just don’t have time to constantly reflect on their practice. However, I wouldn’t want to suggest that there are no theoretical frameworks surrounding archives, quite the contrary. When you consider regimes such as the Soviet Union, record keeping is an extraordinarily powerful tool,as in 100 years people will be relying on these records to understand that time, and therefore the archivist is in a very influential position (how many other professions potentially create collective memories?). When considering ELTA, it is our responsibility to present the material in as useful and unbiased way as possible…if,indeed, that is possible.
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August 10th, 2010

Yesterday Matt and I went to Royal Holloway University to select material from their Gay Sweatshop collection, with the invaluble help of their in-house archivist Vicky Holmes. As this was a collection that concerned a company as opposed to a theare, we decided to focus our selection on specific productions that the company performed. There were some extraordinary photographs, which when we were looking at them made us feel, in some very small way, connected to the original live production. When we had a stack of visual material we looked at any meta-data that supported it; such as funding applications, tour dates, audience feedback etc. This last one was of particular interest for me as when put with letters and early drafts of scripts, combined with the photographs, these comments allow us to understand how the play was received after the performance, and what reactions it provoked in spectators. These comments can not only tell us about an individual production, but how a companies ideology translates into a mode of performance. But what I think makes Gay Sweatshop stand out from other political/social orientated companies ( which were very afffluent in the seventies and eighties) is their committment to experimenting with alternative dramatic forms. In other words, they seemed to care as much about theatre as an art form as they did for it’s ability to analyse and critique society at large. I feel that this will make an invaluble contribution to ELTA and provide fascinating parallels between the Hackney Empire Collection.
Next week: Hackney goes digital!
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August 2nd, 2010
We at CEDAR are working with the Hackney Empire on the Artist Development Program 2010, a chance for young people aged 13-19 to research, produce, direct and perform on a professional stage! The theme they have chosen is the history of the Hackney Empire, and the performers are working towards bringing such legendary figures as Charlie Chaplin and Marie Lloyd into the 21st Century. Last Wednesday three of the peer mentors on the project came to visit the Hackney Empire collection at UEL to research the history of the theatre and to see what extraordinary events have occurred in this monumental building. Watching these brave young people plough their way through the extensive range of material reminded me just how different conducting research in an archive is compared to reading a book…how is a letter discussing tour dates at all useful when you want to research a role!? Perhaps it isn’t, but after a little while I could see how this material was giving them ideas as to what they could potentially explore. The biggest problem was there was simply so much they didn’t know where to start! However, just by seeing the amount of material available made them realise how many contrasting theatrical practices have occurred in the theatres one hundred and nine year history, and gave them some understanding of what different theatrical forms they can experiment with; music hall, variety, cabaret, magic shows, stand-up comedy, pantomime…The biggest challenge for them now is to decide what parts of the history they are going to focus on, as I explained to them an archive avoids contextualisation so that the raw material can speak for itself.
Next week, me and our archivist Matt will be going to Royal Holloway to select material from their archive for digitisation.

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July 20th, 2010
This week I have been organising focus groups with academics and archivists to discuss the role(s) of the archive in higher education and in the broader field of research. One of the ‘big’ issues we’ll be discussing is the highly debated subject of digitisation and how it has changed our relationship with archival material. After researching this subject it is clear that the digitising process has had a profound effect on the way that material is now interacted with and consequently received and understood by those who are interacting with it. And this word, interaction, is one that has been frequently analysed to attempt to define what we mean when we say ineractivity? In this age of digital technologies the ways we interact with material- from podcasts, blogs, e-mails to paintings, maps and books-has multiplied drastically. Not only that, but just in the last ten years we have become accustomed to having many different types of material all available in the blink of an eye on our desktop computers. Because the internet is a limitless storage facility there is no great sense of authoratitive stores of knowledge i.e. the archive. Has the function of the archive now changed and, if it has, what is that new function? We will also be discussing the ontology of an archive (if indeed it has one) and how it has shaped our understanding of past events, in particular past performances.
If any of these interest you why not come and join the discussion? Simply send an e-mail to joseph4@uel.ac.uk and I’ll book a place for you!
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July 13th, 2010
On the 24thJune, Dr Mary Smith and I attended a conference at the ICA entitled ‘The Digital Democracy’, which was organised by LIFT (London International Festival of Theatre). The subject was to discuss the debates surrounding the relationship between audience and performer and how our relationship with interactive technologies (Facebook, Twitter, online gaming) has created multiple opportunities to explore this relationship further. The debate explored some very controversial but exciting issues, the most interesting being that there now exists a generation that have grown up with digital technologies and can’t remember a life without it, unlike us old fashioned lot who can still remember the days when dial-up and mini-disc players were the cutting edge of technology! This ‘digital generation’ are now fully entrenched in world of interacting across vast distances and having the opportunity to contribute their own opinions and thoughts to a potentially unlimited store of material. What implications, then, does this have for live performance? Something that was thoroughly discussed was the opportunity audiences now have to have to contribute their own ideas to the process-of-the-making and not just the finalised product. As a theatre-maker, this struck me as very strange and potentially problematic; how many people will have a say in future experimental projects, and will this devalue the notion of original and creative thinkers? On the plus side, theatre is always struggling to reach wider audiences, and these technologies could encourage an entirely new way of encouraging people to come to explore the incredible rich assortment of theatre practices operating in the UK. Just looking at these brief examples you can see there is a lot to consider…I guess we’ll just have to wait and see!
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June 23rd, 2010
By way of introduction my name is Joseph (Joe) Dunne, and I am the new research assistant for ELTA.
Over the past few weeks I have been immersing myself in the fascinating and somewhat controverstial world of the ‘archive’; both as a tool for research and more abstract, ‘out of the box’ thinking. Just consider these questions for a start: Can people be considered an archive? What similarities are there to the processes of live performance and documentation? What new purpose or meaning does an object acquire when it is placed in an archive,who decides what that new purpose is? Does the relationship between user/archive and performer/audience have more in common than we think?
These are the sort of topics and debates that I would like to engage with; not just in theory but in practice as well. These research strands are forming the base of a case study that I am currently working on, which will provide exciting points of depature for the team to engage with.
The potential areas for creative exploration are vast, and we are very excitied about the implications such research can afford practitoners. Drama is a vast and ever-evolving discipline, and the archive could open up a whole new world of theatrical and performative innovation…the possibilities are endless!
If you have any thoughts on these issues and would like to discuss them further then get in touch at cedar@uel.ac.uk
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June 17th, 2010
Matt, our new digitisation officer, started with us this week, and so we are embracing the heady and exciting work of digitisation selection! Well, not really ‘heady’, but it is quite interesting thinking about how to select material that will have a real research value for staff and students. It won’t just be pretty posters – hopefully this will help any practitioners or interested people who want to look at productions in greater context and mimic a ‘real’ archive and its sense of exploration.
Again, we’ve been drawn to the differences between ‘real’ and ‘digital’ archives, and the presentation and cataloguing of material as a result. Something we will experiment with is clustering content together in collections online, which we haven’t done before. 
This week we also ran a workshop on the Olympics and archives on the subjects of bids and legacy with students from Birkbeck. My favourite item from the BOA archives that we also hold here at UEL was the model of the russian bear mascot from the 1980 games. We talked about past projects and decisions that were made and about the upcoming Olympics in London, we asked the question – what do you think is relevant to archive about an event that hasn’t happened yet? Bit of a tricky question, that, almost impossible to answer. Good that The Record exists and projects like this by the British Library to help us make sense of it http://www.bl.uk/sportandsociety/
And, on Saturday, our other major collection, the Refugee archives, hosts an open workshop. So a busy few days ahead…
Tags: cataloguing, digitisation, Teaching and learning
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May 27th, 2010
Last week we held our conference, Archiving for the Future, at Stratford Circus. The majority of the conference was kindly funded by Palatine, the HEA for Drama, Drama and Music.

We organised the conference to showcase some of the work that we have been doing with our partners, and for them to share their response to it, as well as share it with a wider audience. We want to do so to develop a model of best practice when using archives in teaching and learning. For me the success of the day was introducing staff from different sectors and with different interests to each other, and I hope that the interest we identified on the day and before it will be sustained in future partnerships.
One particularly interesting aspect of the conference was that it seemed to coalesce with the research we have been doing which explores the very different relationships people have to archives and the ways in which they are conceived of: there were inevitably some traditionalist responses about how to define archives and approach them and some less so, where people had experimented with living archives and archiving as part of projects. We don’t place value on the responses but we do want to encourage more people to take part and use archives. UCL’s Information Studies centre has been looking at this issue for years, so I advise you to check them out if you’re interested in this particular aspect of the debate.
Also, aside from a (possibly overly) heavily referenced Derrida, we also confirmed that we have to think through how to approach archives of / archiving or capturing performance. Many of the participants who had a connection to performance approached this through their practice – capturing performance as more than a moment in time, while we could also question why and if we should? It was a relief to hear that this is a current concern as it will help the development of our metadata tools week by week.
At the end of the day we ran an open space session – a principle of asking questions for debate that conference delegates take responsibility for and then invite others to debate. A report about the conference will be produced soon and we’ll make it available here, as well as the questions and responses to them.

Finally, I just want to say thanks to all the paper presenters for making the day a success!
The photos here are of the UEL archives, a behind the scenes look for anyone who hasn’t seen behind the scenes at an archive before.
Tags: collaborators, community, conference, Teaching and learning
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