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You Had to Be There Archiving and Curating the Ephemerality of Theatre

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You Had to Be There Archiving and Curating the Ephemerality of Theatre You Had To Be There Archiving and Curating the Ephemerality of Theatre Cassidy Schulze HMN 679HB Special Honors in the Humanities Program The University of Texas at Austin May 2018 ___________________________________ Dr. James Loehlin Department of English Supervising Professor ___________________________________ Dr. David Kornhaber Department of English Second Reader 1 Table of Contents Table of Contents…………………………………………………….1 Acknowledgements…………………………………………………..2 Introduction…………………………………………………………..3 Chapter 1: Archival and Performance Theory……………………….5 Chapter 2: Changing Interpretations of Shakespeare’s Heroines……16 Chapter 3: Archiving A Midsummer Night’s Dream….……………..27 Conclusion…..……………………………………………………….36 Bibliography…………………………………………………………38 2 Acknowledgements First, I’d like to thank my family and friends for holding my hand for the past four years through many, many tears, for the hugs, the coffee, the soup, the pasta, the face masks, and the nights listening to me rant about the bard and the importance of hoarding. Next, I’d like to thank my thesis advisors, Dr. Loehlin and Dr. Kornhaber, who absolutely made this thesis feel possible and necessary. Without the Winedale program and the support of that community, this thesis would not exist. I am forever grateful to the bonds forged in that old barn. Thank you, Dr. Lang, for helping me to find the perfect intersection of theatre, archives, and museums, and without whom I never would have started this thesis. Dr. Colleary, thank you for encouraging my enthusiasm for the archives, and especially for coming in at the eleventh hour to remind me why I cared about this topic in the first place. Lastly, I’d like to thank Linda Mayhew and the entire LAH program for giving me a place and a home in this program. Linda, without your suggestion to look into humanities during my presentation at the Harry Ransom Center, this thesis would never have been written. Thank you. 3 Introduction Audience members trickle in and scan the performance space for their seats, while the actors warm up backstage. Maybe someone peruses the program, recognizes some names, reads a synopsis, or scans the acknowledgements. The lights dim, and perhaps an orchestra tunes to Concert A. Audience members settle in as actors take their places for the beginning of the performance. A hush falls over the crowd, and the lights come up on the opening scene. Each person in the space shares the event, yet each experience differs drastically. Maybe one audience member cackles loudly, or an actor’s costume malfunctions. Anything could happen in this space, and a group of humans get to experience it together. A performance has begun. This thesis explores what is lost when transitioning a impermanent piece of theatre to a lasting medium in a museum or archive. Drawing on performance and archival theory, this thesis also documents the Shakespeare at Winedale performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in April of 2018 through an original online exhibit and archive. First, I take on a literary review of archival and performance theory, focusing on ephemerality, documentation, reproduction, and representation. Conducting a rhetorical analysis of articulations of ephemerality and engaging with ethical issues in curating performing arts, my opening chapter postulates that “influencers” are missing from the average performing arts collection. Following this evaluation of performing arts archives, my second chapter expands on the importance of “influencers” through a case study of Mary Cowden Clarke and Helena Faucit’s reclamation of Shakespeare’s plays for women in the 19th 4 century. This chapter explores how Victorian characterizations of Shakespeare’s heroines developed through performance and extra-canon works, the documentation of that development necessary for modern scholars, and the uses of performing arts archives for future theatre artists. My final chapter documents the process of archiving the April 2018 Shakespeare at Winedale performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I discuss the challenges and successes of collecting precedented and unprecedented materials for a performing arts archive, while addressing the difference between digital and physical mediums for archives. Overall, this thesis pleads for preservation and documentation in any and every way. The process of archiving theatre may feel like grasping at mist, but representations of the mist, plus a trust that others have grasped at mist too, allows someone to re-create an experience by imagining what it must have been like. Theatre-makers and archivists have the responsibility to keep contributing to the performance history of plays in order to best prepare future performers to create more nuanced art. 5 Chapter 1 Archival and Performance Theory “I like the ephemeral thing about theatre. Every performance is like a ghost: it’s there and then it’s gone.” - Maggie Smith Many scholars grapple with performance and archival theory, each uniquely articulating definitions of ephemerality, performativity, and liveness. Each articulation adds to the collective, organic, and changing definition of the feeling of being in the room where it happens. This chapter engages with these definitions, the reasons for archiving, and the essential bias that colors every archive and museum exhibit. Peggy Phelan’s Unmarked: The Politics of Performance is heralded as one of the first academic iterations engaging with the ephemerality of theatre. Phelan argues that “performance 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.”1 Phelan’s assertion that performance, by nature, cannot be represented after it is over presents quite the challenge for archivists. How can an archivist possibly hope to capture a performance if it evaporates into collective memory the moment it appears on stage? Yet, performing arts archives exist, and the 1 Peggy Phelan. 1993. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. London: Taylor & Francis Group, 146. 6 materials contained within them prove crucial for researchers and artists to imagine what performances must have been like. The ephemerality of theater stems not from the written text of the play, but rather the performance of it, placing a high value on the director’s and actors’ interpretations of a text. A single acting or production choice could inform the connotation of the play for the audience. These choices indicate not only an individual’s interpretation of the text, but also reflect conscious choices made to appeal to a particular audience. Performances live in fading memory, but liveness ceases as soon as it happens. Live theatre remains in a liminal space as the “is” between the “was” and the “will be.” Theatre exists in a limited temporal and spatial context. However, the way we place boundaries on that context can be a side-effect of our biases. Choosing to define a theatrical context in terms of the audience, the playwright, the director, the orchestra, the actors, or the producers can have unintended effects on how productions are represented in museums or archived. Susan Crane scaffolds her definition of “ephemeral” with a discussion of collective memory: the idea that communal experiences contribute to a collective understanding.2 This applies to museums in two ways: first, in how visitors engage with the materials on display based on established expectations, and second, in how materials can represent a historical collective memory. For both applications, the ephemerality of the materials comes into play as soon as the material leaves its original context. “Collected or conserved objects are frozen in the moment of their 2 Susan A. Crane, "The Conundrum Ephemerality: Time, Memory, and Museums,” Companion to Museum Studies, ed. Sharon Macdonald, 99 (Wiley, 2008). 7 most emblematic value - of singularity, of implementation, or representativeness - and denied their natural, or intended, decadent lifespan.”3 But what is the “natural, or intended...lifespan” of theatre? Does a material collected from a performance have a shorter life by nature of the ephemerality of performance? Does a costume or prop have meaning only during performance?4 If so, an archivist actually extends the life of the material by preserving the proof that a performance existed. However, taking a material out of its original context and reframing it in a curated context changes the value of the object from functional to intellectual. In a museum or archival institution, the preservation department has the sacred duty to, to the best of their ability, steal time. As all materials’ contextual meaning wanes the moment they are acquired for a museum, so too does their physical integrity. Crane argues, “according to Romantics then and now, posterity demands preservation against the ravages of time.”5 Conservationists are the answer to that demand. Scholars can only argue about the meaning and interpretation of objects if the objects are around for us to experience them. In any moment of experience, the subject must perceive what happens. Phelan argues that “a believable image is the product of a negotiation with an unverifiable real.”6 If everything exists through the biased perception of an individual, then there is no objective experience. This difficulty especially affects representations of 3 Susan A. Crane, "The Conundrum Ephemerality: Time, Memory, and Museums” 99. 4 The Shakespeare at Winedale program, like many other performance
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