Abstract
This workshop explores institutionalized approaches toward archiving production for undergraduate theatre students and reflects on personal experiences with the archive. Participants consider what we value in the photo-documentation of university performances and course assessments, while acknowledging that these images seed an emerging artist’s professional portfolio before graduation. As educators, do we know what images will resonate for our undergraduate students after completing their studies?
Leane and Harkin describe the archive as “the assemblage of feelings, objects and stories we gather, and all that is unknowingly gathered around us” (52). Reflecting on our own experiences with the undergraduate archive, this workshop considers four key ideas:
- The echoed image reverberating through shared digital spaces of recollection such as social media sites, websites and personal correspondence. Do we control the distribution of the memory or does the memory seek to reposition our present self?
- The idealized image treated as an artefact within our personal spaces. What did we value from our undergraduate experiences?
- The emerging professional image marketing our memories to others. What defined us as emerging artists leaving university?
- The absent image which completes this living archive. The missing visual memory we wish we had and speaking towards Johnson’s “What do we do with the undocumented, the erased, the redacted, the unrecorded, the disappeared...?” (Johnson 43-4)
We invite attendees to share pre-conference visual memories from their archives self-chronicling their undergraduate theatre experience. These images will be explored in the workshop and displayed as a digital installation across the conference.
Works Cited
Johnson, Odai. “The size of all that’s missing.” The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Performance Historiography, edited by Tracy C. Davis and Peter W. Marx, Routledge, 2020.
Leane, Jeanine and Natalie Harkin. “When Records Speak We Listen, Conversations with the archive.” Law's Documents: Authority, Materiality, Aesthetics, edited by Katherine Biber, et al., Taylor & Francis Group, 2021.