The recordkeeping practice of the production
management at the Dutch Opera and Ballet
is the following: what roles do archiving and recordkeeping
play in the institutional and individual forms of performing arts?
It is my hope that elaborating this question may contribute not
only to the sometimes limited understanding of performing art
from an archival perspective - namely that theatre is performance
and performance is ephemeral - but may also offer fresh insights
to the values and behaviour of records that an archivist never
could observe in public archives.
By scrutinizing the functions and practices in the two
settings, with this paper I aim to explore the hidden, multi-
layered and multifaceted meanings in 'archivalization'
and archiving inside the investigated theatre institution and in
the recordkeeping practice of the interviewed performing arts
artists. The term archivalization is introduced by Eric Ketelaar
in 1998 during his oration. With this term Ketelaar points out that
a record goes through several conscious or unconscious choices
(determined by social and cultural factors) during the process
of archiving. In this paper I will show that archiving and the
process of 'archivalization' is indeed multidimensional, because
a record can undergo several processes and it can fulfil more
than one meaning even at the same time.
This short essay is based on seven interviews with different
actors of the theatre making process. On the institutional side
I have analysed the recordkeeping- and archival practice of the
production management department in the DNO. Though this is
only a part of the organization, during the research I obtained
useful information not only about the recordkeeping practice of
this department but also about that of the whole organization.
To explore motives of individual recordkeeping and self-
archiving, I have conducted five interviews with independent
theatre artists (that is, with performers who are not affiliated
permanently to one particular institution but work individually,
or collaboratively on project basis).
Due to the explanatory nature of my endeavour, I have tried to
leave my questions open during the interviews to grasp the
elementary issues that emerge during the recordkeeping and
archival practices of the examined cases. Accordingly, it has to be
kept in mind that the interviews did not strive to draw ground
claims or conclusions about the motives and practices of the
theatre and the performing artist in general. Rather, this essay
serves as a trigger to think further about possible meanings and
values of performing art records and archives.
With the assistance of Marie-José Litjens, stage manager, and
Frank Lever, secretary, I was allowed to look closely into the
archival practice of the production- and stage management at
DNO. Stage management is responsible for organizing and
coordinating a theatrical production. The tasks within this unit
encompass a variety of activities, including the organization of
the production and coordinating communication between
various personnel (for example between director and backstage
crew, or actors and production management). Marie-José asserts
that the archive "is all operations [handelingen], all movements,
all props, costumes, lighting cues, and all about the performance
that is documented precisely". This definition of the archive
reveals already a great deal of the archival practice of a theatre
institution. It shows namely how an actual performance is put
together on the stage and how it is documented: in the archive
of a production all the above mentioned elements have to
appear, so it can be reconstructed (or restaged), often also
outside the location of the Stopera (the building that houses the
national opera).
There are three kinds of archives in the production-
management department: 1) on-going productions, 2) deep-
