L’Archive Dionysos: une approche méthodologique à l’iconographie théâtrale

"The Dionysos Archive: a Methodological Approach to Theatre Iconography. The article illustrates the Dionysos Digital Archive of Theatrical Iconography, created by the research team of the University of Florence directed by Renzo Guardenti. The Dionysos Archive collects more than 22,000 images accompanied by cataloguing files, relating to the history of Performing Arts from Greek theatre to the first decades of the 20th century. The cataloguing of the images contained in the archive is based on criteria aimed at highlighting their theatrical specificity and responds to a historiographic perspective that privileges the visual dimension of the Performing Arts, of which iconographic documentation constitutes a source of primary importance. Keywords: theatre iconography; history of theatre; performing arts; digital archive; cataloguing "

The Body’s Memory Archives in the Process of Generating an Aesthetic Movement and `Flow Experiences` for the Audience in the Production of the Performance tXc -TOXIC (after F. Richter’s play Rausch)

"The present enquiry is particularly interested in the performer’s body archiving memory while generating poetic movement on stage. The main site of investigation is a theatre-dance performance and the work engaged by the performers of tXc-TOXIC (after the Falk Richter’s play Rausch, an Insula Creative Hub production, directed by Cristian Grosu, choreographed and co-directed by me). The focal point of my argument is that, with proper and sustained body training, performers can easily incite and produce aesthetic movement after engaging the CI (contact improvisation) means of accessing movement and body memory. Keywords: (Non-toxic) body archives, aesthetic experience, embodiment, dance, performance "

What Can Be Said: The Jenő Janovics Archive in Cluj

"This paper focuses on the documents kept in archive of Jenő Janovics, an artistic director in Hungary and Romania for 30 years. The rich archival materials, kept in Cluj, of this important public figure reflect the turbulent times of history of Hungarian Theater in Cluj in the first half of the 20th century. The study presents a possible approach to this material, also introducing Janovics’s diary’s hermeneutical problems. Keywords: Jenő Janovics, Hungarian Theater Cluj, diary, Hungarian theater history, Jewish "

Structure and Methodologies of Research in the Arnoldo Foà Archive

"The focus of this paper is the presentation and description of the Arnoldo Foà archive and its importance as the main documentary source for studying the contemporary actor: through the analysis of the sources contained therein, in fact, it was possible to conduct an in-depth study of theatrical career of Arnoldo Foà. The work is part of the Phd in Storia delle Arti e dello Spettacolo (History of Cinema, Music, Fine and Performing Arts) in Florence, a context in which I carry out a research dedicated to the artistic profile of Arnoldo Foà, protagonist of the theater from the second half of the twentieth century. Starting from the description of the archive in which the research was conducted, some significant examples are examined that can demonstrate how archival sources have managed to reveal unpublished and fundamental information for the study. Furthermore, the value and the high potential that the archive assumes as the main study tool for the performing arts are highlighted. Keywords: contemporary theatre; performing arts; archiving systems; acting; artistic biography; documentary sources; recitative style; historical memory. "

Performing Archives: Documentary Theatre, Transition and Adaptation to a New Lifestyle in Romanian Society

"The change of political regimes and the long period of transition that followed afterwards brought dramatic, even tragic shifts in common people’s lives, who were born and raised in the Eastern Bloc. These experiences, which were strikingly common in Eastern European countries, have left significant marks in nowadays society, which historians and artists alike are trying to analyze and explain to their audiences, in a personal and accessible form. This article aims to analyze the manners in which recent history themes, like the period of transition, economy and the essential lifestyle changes which came as a consequence, are researched and handled in Romanian documentary theatre. As follows, two theatre productions of this kind will be presented. They were considered to be a real success in the independent theatre scene in the past five years and their specificity is the shared socio-political context between stage and audience. Keywords: documentary theatre, archives, transition, recent history, non-Aristotelian theatre, independent theatre, consumerism, society. "

The Active Archive: Interview with Film Critic Andrei Rus

"The interview with dr. Andrei Rus, associate professor at UNATC Bucharest, tried to cover both the motivations and the developing process of the Active Archive projects, a work in progress activity of research, selection, digitalization, and dissemination of several old documentaries from the Sahia Studio Archives, on one hand, and several experimental movies made by students of the UNATC in the Sixties and Seventies on the other hand. Keywords: Andrei Rus, archives, archives activation, film archives. "

The Fetish of the Ephemeral, the Praxis of Repetition, and the Logic of the Archive

"When the very special nature of performance’s evanescence gets emphasized, it is the logic of the archive that lurks beneath the argument, the logic which opposes the residue with the lost and vanished. For a good part of theater scholars, it is the lost and vanished that is valuable; for the archivist it is always the remainder, haunted forever by what’s lost. This paper shall not offer a theoretical overview of the scholarship on repetition or its philosophical interpretations; instead, it will use the concept exclusively in relation with theater plays, theater art, and more broadly the so-called performance arts, in order to reaffirm the bodily dimension of preservation and archiving the theatrical experience. Keywords: theatre, repetition, theatre communication, spectatorship, archive "

Reviving the Archives. The Researcher as Artist and the Artist as Researcher

"How to make the archives live again for a contemporary audience? Based on the writings of a famous historian, Arlette Farge, and on my own experience in working with archives I am arguing in this article that the archive researcher should take inspiration from artistic creativity and artists should pay more attention to the scholar dimension of their research, while both need to understand they are accountable to the next generations for which they need to re-write the historical narrative in a responsible way, as close to the truth as possible. Keywords: archival research, Farge (Arlette), reviving heritage, performing arts, historical narrative "

The Actor in Search of Musical Forms. Case Studies

"This article looks at the major differences in the reception of the sounds of a musical fragment, depending on the personal experience of each individual and his profession. The musicians relate to the sound universe guided by the constituent elements of the scores, and the actors look for connections between sounds, gestures, words, characters, and stage situations. They can approach music in other ways than musicians and remember the melodic lines or create accompaniments by making connections with the context in which they find themselves. In some examples that the article offers, the studied actors demonstrate that sound can become music even in the absence of the vocal or rhythmic qualities of the performers. Other examples refer to the way in which the personality and creativity of artists have a significant role in creating songs or the sound support they need. Keywords: music-theatre, performing arts, music, musical training "

Theatre Photography in Nineteenth Century France: Document, Archive or Pure Fiction?

"Indoor performance photography, which was born in France on the occasion of the Paris World Exhibition in 1889, remains a problematic theatrical and media object to this day. But at the Belle Epoque and until the Second World War at least, it requires to be approached with all the more caution because it is always the fruit of multiple manipulations, either at the time of the making of the shots (mandatory posing of actors, specific lighting, etc.), or at the time of their “post-production” (printing, but especially edition in review or volume). A complex and particularly rich object that must be studied in its context (publications or archives), stage photography is then offered as much as a document to be deciphered as a fiction to be deconstructed. Keywords: theatre photography, France, Belle Epoque, document, photographic archives. "