Should Theatre Disappear Like Soap Bubbles?

Abstract

I recently read an excerpt from a 2004 interview with Peter Hall where he claims that he was happy for his materials to disappear "like soap bubbles" (Reason, 2006). One of the fundamentally difficult things about archiving theatre, aside from its ephemeral nature, is the approach that creatives take to their work. Not only do we need to battle the format of live performance but we also need to convince many creatives, not all I must add, that their work can and should remain in the Archive for use in the future. There are glimmers of potential in the area of documenting process with increasingly fertile discussions between academics, archivists and creatives so it is an exciting time to be a performing arts archivist.

Keywords

• documentation
• performance
• oral history
• embedded archivist