Letter to a Dead Playwright: Daily Grind, Vicki Reynolds, and Archive Fever
’Nothing is less reliable, nothing is less clear today than the word “archive”,’ observed Jacques Derrida in his book Archive Fever: a Freudian Impression (1996). This paper reflects on the unsettling process of establishing (or commencing) an archive for the Melbourne Workers Theatre, to form part of the AusStage digital archive which records information on live performance in Australia. Glenn D'Cruz's paper juxtaposes two disparate but connected registers of writing: an open letter to a deceased Australian playwright, Vicki Reynolds, and a critical reflection on the politics of the archive with reference to Derrida's account of archive fever, which he characterizes as an ‘irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for the return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement’. Using Derrida's commentary on questions of memory, authority, inscription, hauntology, and heritage to identify some of the philosophical and ethical aporias he encountered while working on the project, D’Cruz pays particular attention to what Derrida calls the spectral structure of the archive, and stages a conversation with the ghosts that haunt the digitized Melbourne Workers Theatre documents. He also unpacks the logic of Derrida's so-called messianic account of the archive, which ‘opens out of the future’, thereby affirming the future-to-come, and unsettling the normative notion of the archive as a repository for what has passed. Glenn D’Cruz teaches at Deakin University, Australia. He is the author of Midnight's Orphans: Anglo-Indians in Post/Colonial Literature (Peter Lang, 2006) and editor of Class Act: Melbourne Workers Theatre 1987–2007 (Vulgar Press, 2007).
‘Best Betrayal’: the Documentation of Performance on Video and Film, Part 2
Whether described as adaptations, documentations, translations, or transcriptions, the video cassettes which allow us to see performances on video are proliferating. Not always easily available for begging, borrowing, or buying, not always willingly turned over by the theatre companies who hold them for in-house use, often lost or erased by television channels, and always beleaguered with copyright problems, these electronic arts ‘documents’ are none the less causing a revolution in teaching, rehearsal methods, and research. In what constitutes a first detailed mapping of the territory, Annabelle Melzer's two-part article, of which the first part appeared in NTQ42 (May 1995), deals with the theoretical and aesthetic questions surrounding performance documentation, with some of the hands-on issues of such filming – and with her own journey to seek out the documents themselves. Annabelle Melzer, Associate Professor of Theatre at the University of Tel Aviv, is completing ten years of research on the adaptation and documentation of theatre through moving image documents. Shakespeare on Screen, the first volume of her multi-volume filmography, Theatre on Screen, appeared in 1991, receiving the Choice and American Library Association awards as outstanding reference book of that year. Her articles on avant-garde performance have appeared in Artforum, Theatre Research International, and Comparative Drama, and her Hazan Prize-winning book Dada and Surrealist Performance has recently been reissued by Johns Hopkins University Press. She is at present writing a book on the theatricality of war.
Securing Our Dance Heritage: Issues in the Documentation and Preservation of Dance.
Additional copies are available for $15.00 from the above address. Orders must be prepaid, with checks made payable to the Council on Library and Information Resources. Catherine Johnson served as director for the Dance Heritage Coalition's Access to Resources for the History of Dance in Seven Repositories Project. She holds an M.S. in library science from Columbia University with a specialization in rare books and manuscripts and a B.A. from Bethany College with a major in English literature and theater. Ms. Johnson served as the founding director of the Dance Heritage Coalition from 1992 to 1997. Before that, she was assistant curator at the Harvard Theatre Collection, where she was responsible for access, processing, and exhibitions, among other duties. She has held positions at The New York Public Library and the Folger Shakespeare Library. She has written extensively and directed several films about dance and has received grants from NEA and NEH in addition to numerous honors. Since 1993, she has served as executive director, president, and chairwoman of the board of directors of the Buckminster Fuller Institute. Michelle Forner is director of the Dance Heritage Coalition. She holds an M.A. in dance with a concentration in ethnology from the University of California at Los Angeles and a B.A. in communications from The Pennsylvania State University. She served as an archivist on the Dance Heritage Coalition's Access to Resources for the History of Dance in Seven Repositories Project. As a dance performer, educator, and scholar, her focus has been on dance forms from northern Africa and western Asia. She has also held editorial positions in magazine and book publishing, and served as managing editor for two volumes of the UCLA Journal of Dance Ethnology.