The artists
As already mentioned, the archive of the stage-management is
important for re-staging a piece. By re-staging I mean not only
the day to day activity of a repertoire theatre or a possible revival
later at the DNO, but also the performance on tour abroad.
Marie-José exemplified this with a DNO production played in
Barcelona, where next to the assistant-director and the assistant-
designer, only the production-management archive was brought
from the DNO to reconstruct the production. It is much more
cost-effective to use the archives than to send the actual
stage-managers and technicians with the production. That's why
it is crucial to lay everything down exactly how it should happen.
Frank Lever, the secretary of the stage-management is
responsible for keeping the archives of this department in a
good order. He created a list for the stage-managers about the
components of the archive. I found a sentence at the end of
the list: "Frank zeggen dat het archief af is" [Notify Frank when
the archive is completed] particularly meaningful. Frank
explained that sometimes he has to urge the stage-managers
to archive their works appropriately. In this respect, he described
archiving as an affective process: "you are greatly involved in the
process of making a production, but after the premiere the
enthusiasm slowly fades away, that's why you have to document
during the process!"
Frank, next to his official task, takes also care of the old
archives of the whole DNO. According to him, the old archives
(which are dated before the moving of the institution into the
Stopera in 1985) still have to be organized and described:
pictures are waiting to be digitized in order to be preserved and
booklets with other valuable pieces of the Opera have to be
organized into a 'meaningful' order as well. When I asked Frank
why he would not send all these material to the Dutch theatre
archive, his answer was quite emotional: "It belongs to this
house. It isn't worth going to the Bijlmer [the repository of the
Dutch theatre archive] to research all this material if you can also
keep it inside the house". This illustrates quite well the heritage
and also the identity value of the archive next to its memory or
evidence values.
As I learned from Frank, there is no central archive for
the whole institution. This means that if researchers want to
investigate the entire archive of one performance, they have to
look for the records separately at every single DNO department.
Lacking of a central documenting or archival plan or policy,
every department manages its own archive based on its own
rules and common sense. This can be quite risky, since parts of
the archive can easily get lost after a couple of years, as it is also
rather accidental which old archives survived from the period
before 1985.
After taking this quick look at the documentation and
archival strategies of the DNO, let us now see the similarities
and the differences when it comes to the (self-) archiving
strategies of the performing artists.
In the following sections we will follow the sometimes wandering
thoughts of the independent artists about their ideas of
recordkeeping. The artists are: Eva Susova, Czech performance
artist based in Amsterdam; Zsófia-Tamara Vadas and Imre Vasi,
Hungarian dancers; Martin Boross, director of a Hungarian
independent production house and Julia Balazs, Hungarian
stage designer. I attempted to organize these thoughts around
the most relevant functions that came up during the interviews.
Stage manager Marie-José Litjens with her 'bible', foto Frank Leverand
An ephemeral moment of Martin Borsoss's Promenade,
later used for promotion, foto Maté Bartha
Touchstone for future remounting? Zsófia-Tamara Vada and Imre Vasi
in Before you die, foto Kata Schiller
