DRAMA 573 A: Problems in Theatre History Research

Drama 573:   Performance and the Archive

Archives are unnatural spaces.  They arrest what should, by right, decompose.  They persist in recalling what would otherwise be forgotten.  At best, archives, with or without curation, cargo forward a promise of re-accessing a world that is past.   At their worst, they replicate the hegemonies of those worlds.  

Performance archives offer a particular challenge.  Performance famously disappears, but it has a curious way of disappearing incompletely.    Titles remain where the play does not.   Images endure, but the traditions behind them are lost.   Sometimes texts endure, but no score.  Plays without a theatre; or a theatre without a repertory.   The efficacy of performance is almost always the first thing lost. 

Still, collectively a great many artifacts of many mediums have been preserved.   This seminar is built around what survives and how to story those surviving artifacts:  the material and immaterial evidence of performance’s long past.