- Title
- (Re) constructing the archive: a regional perspective on performance histories
- Creator
- Arrighi, Gillian; Watt, David
- Relation
- Scrapbooks, Snapshots and Memorabilia: Hidden Archives of Performance p. 67-82
- Relation
- http://www.peterlang.com/index.cfm?event=cmp.ccc.seitenstruktur.detailseiten&seitentyp=produkt&pk=54678&cid=558
- Publisher
- Peter Lang
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2011
- Description
- When the AusStage venture began its ambitious project to create an electronic database of live performance in Australia, it was faced with a number of logistical questions, many of them revolving around the distinction drawn by Keith Jenkins between 'history' and 'the past'. For Jenkins, 'the past' is 'all that has gone before everywhere', and as David Lowenthal has pointed out, 'the past' is a 'foreign country' essentially inaccessible to us, while 'history' is (following Hayden White) the narratives we construct out of selected elements of 'the past' for present purposes. Developments in history as a discipline over the last century or so have produced, in rough chronological order, 'people's history', 'labour history', 'women's history', 'indigenous histories', 'local histories', 'visual history', 'oral history' and so forth. Each has required recourse to different 'traces of the past', and sometimes even to the creation of an archive as an organised, catalogued, systematic entity, out of those traces. Thomas Postlewait contends that documents recording or identifying a past event were initially constituted by agents with a particular attitude to the event: 'That is, someone else, before the historian, has already given meaning to the event in the process of designating and representing it'. His observations about the relative, rather than absolute, meaning of evidentiary documents, and the initiating conditions which shape all such documents (and by inference the archives which preserve them), speak directly to the problem of constructing or augmenting an archive and its ensuing database: 'all traces of the past are circumstantial. The trace itself, which designates an event, reveals an act of making, a complex interpretive process by someone who constituted the event for some purpose' (ibid.). So archives, and the databases which they underpin, are always a bit more and a lot less than just a neutral record of 'the past'. There is always a broad range of factors which construct the archive, some ideological, some deliberately partisan, some purely pragmatic, and others entirely circumstantial, but all of them carry implications far beyond those envisaged at the time of their creation.
- Subject
- AusStage; performance archives; performance histories
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1053392
- Identifier
- uon:15581
- Identifier
- ISBN:9783034303903
- Language
- eng
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