Abstract

Based on personal experiences of researching productions at the RSC, this article considers and laments the widespread voicelessness of theatre workers and audiences, who frequently play an integral role in the creation of performance archives. It acknowledges typically overlooked variables - such as the individual perspective of the authors of notes in promptbooks - in the construction of a performance archive, and their potential to skew a researcher's impression of the original performance. Beginning with Derrida, and drawing on the work of the artist Christian Boltanski, it theorises the position of the archive as always in process, highlighting its power to create and shape meanings, while also acknowledging the material lacks that it inevitably creates. The argument rejects the conception of archival objects such as promptbooks as static, completed objects, instead offering a reading of them as the continual marker of the process of creating a performance: both in terms of individual moments in a particular performance, as well as the production as a whole. This allows, the article argues, for a consideration of the tension between performance and the archive as well as the play of performance within the archive: in other words, the performativity of the archive itself.

Keywords

Archive,Performance,Memory,Production,Promptbooks,Derrida,Shakespeare,Christian Boltanski,RSC

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