Research and Performance: A Roundtable on the Future of the Archive

{ 16 } \ Research and Performance A Roundtable on the Future of the Archive —KENNETH SCHLESINGER The American Society for Theatre Research’s Fiftieth-Anniversary Conference in Chicago in November 2006 chose as its theme “‘America,’ ‘Society,’ ‘Theatre ,’ and ‘Research.’” For the plenary on research, conference chair Shannon Jackson proposed a special roundtable on the state of the archive, which would be jointly organized by ASTR and the Theatre Library Association (TLA). She envisioned an interactive dialogue between theatre history scholars and archivists exploring shared and conflicting issues. Performance studies scholar Tavia Nyong’o of New York University and I were enlisted to organize the panel. Our call for papers—initially titled“Performing History/Historicizing Performance : The Archive as Negotiator or Co-Conspirator?”—solicited contributions investigating archival challenges in theatre research as well as performative aspects of the archive. As a stimulus for discussion, we posed the following questions: What is the difference between performance history and performative history? What is the relationship between performance history and theatre history? What does it mean conceptually and professionally to think of the archive as static? as dynamic? or performative? How does serious engagement with performance and performativity change archival research and protocols? Correspondingly, how does engagement with archival research and protocols affect theories of performance and performativity? • • • • { 17 } RESEARCH AND PERFORMANCE How should the archive transform its methods of collection, description, and access to respond to new strategies of performance scholarship? Further, as a performing arts archivist, I was interested in considering some ethical and philosophical issues of personal interest during more than two decades in the profession. While archives are ostensibly designed to preserve access to the historical record, are archival organizations essentially hierarchical and elitist in their construct? In other words, do they exist institutionally to uphold and reinforce the dominant culture? Are archivists stewards of this storehouse of knowledge, gatekeepers in their unavoidably subjective interpretation of records, unintentionally misleading in their organizational schemes and finding aids? Moreover, this leads to larger questions about the construct of “history”: Who gets to tell it? How do we determine the big picture based on the minutiae of selected documents? What about the interstices, the gaps—the silences? Finally, how do new technologies simultaneously extend access yet possibly misrepresent the original context of historical documents? We received some fascinating submissions, including two that aren’t included in this volume: Odai Johnson’s “Theatre Research and Reconstruction of America’s Oldest Theatre,” which employs archaeological evidence and creatively assesses quotidian historical records to guide reconstruction of an original playhouse in Colonial Williamsburg; and Mary Keelan’s “Archival Definition as Barrier: The Case of the New York State Archives Film Script Files,” an analysis of inconsistent subject headings and probable censorship impeding access to records documenting classic Russian film screenings in the United States from the 1920s to the 1940s. In terms of structure, we asked participants to present a ten-minute snapshot of their research, which could be a jumping-off point to further discussion among panelists and the nearly one hundred audience members who attended . Predictably, this roundtable ended up raising more questions than it resolved, but attendees appreciated the high level of provocative and entertaining discourse. Since archives are primarily concerned with issues of documentation , it seemed appropriate that Theatre History Studies asked me to edit these papers for publication. Elin Diamond’s “Performance in the Archives” opens with a discussion of New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s controversial and contested decision in 2001 to privatize his administrative papers by transferring them to an independent foundation rather than depositing them in the municipal archives. Widely and effectively protested by the Society of American Archivists, this • { 18 } KENNETH SCHLESINGER peremptory move clearly violated the principle of the transparency of government records as well as the public’s right to know. Professor Diamond also traces the resonances of this action to the Bush administration’s conduct of secrecy, imposing access limits on historical archival records that had already been declassified, all in the name of national security—while simultaneously violating the public’s privacy and trust by engaging in illegal wiretapping. Diamond then shifts gears by wittily relating a recent visit to the Fales Library...