Call for papers - Thematic Dossier (Sinais de Cena, no. 3) (closed)

Archives and performing arts: memory, transmission and creation

(coord. Maria João Brilhante)

 

Archives are not places where untouchable and secret documents are stored, deposited there to preserve law and order or to bear witness to the past. They are living places available for the questions we want to ask them and, nowadays, to return to our coexistent documents transformed by artistic creation.

Understood as a set of documents, the archive stores what is produced at a given moment, associated with events, with certain practices involved in circumstances that give them a value or a function. Therefore, documents from the more or less distant past that we find in physical and more recently digital archives are looked at and analysed by us now, in search of understanding a past that affects us in the present.

Historian Marc Bloch highlighted the importance of the passing of memories through generations, made possible by the survival and transmission of documents and the reasons that justify this transmission. Documents are also monuments produced and left for future memory, to commemorate, just like statues, temples or buildings that house institutions and signify the identity recognition of the community, or part of it.

An archive creates the memory and identity of a society because it brings together the documents that the community wanted and wants to preserve, but, for this very reason, the archive is also a creation of that community. Its configuration serves the interests of those who created it.

The work of history is produced, above all, by searching the archives for documents from the past that we consider relevant to answering the questions of the present. To do this, archaeological work must be carried out, choosing them, describing them, placing them in relation to each other, constituting sets, in the words of Michel Foucault, questioning them.

 

The starting idea for this reflection is based on this documentary mobility of the archive, on its permanent re-composition because documents are utilized for new uses and combinations and keep the marks of this circulation. We can speak of an archival memory, if not an archive history. Thus, the relevance of the archive lies in the dynamism it is capable of creating, in the impact that its documents produce on the community when appearing in the public sphere in different forms, intervening in social and collective memory.

What is the relevance of the archive for contemporary artistic creation? Archives also choose and propose documentary arrangements (texts, audiovisual records, photos, objects) that dialogue with the present and with the memories shared by the community or build the (post-)memory of what was not actually experienced.

Archiving theatre raises the broader question of what it means to preserve the aesthetic and artistic trace of theatrical practice through very diverse materiality and random gestures of inclusion and exclusion, sometimes obscure or motivated by the artistic, economic, sociopolitical circumstances of the creation itself (and here we link the archive to the genesis of the creative process), gestures involving multiple agents, we should not forget.

In this issue of Sinais de Cena, we invite the submission of papers that deepen a discussion featuring authors such as Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Diana Taylor, among others. Registration, erasure, transmission, discourse, ways of doing and using, fragmentation, materiality, order and chaos, digital existence, are some terms around which to speculate about the passion for archives and the need to create and transmit them.

 

Suggested bibliographic references:

BENJAMIN, Walter (1940), On the concept of history, Walter Benjamin Archive, available at: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/benjamin/1940/history.htm (consulted in 1-09-2023).

BLOCH, Marc (1949), APOLOGIE pour l’HISTOIRE ou MÉTIER D’ HISTORIEN, Cahier des Annales 3, Paris, Librairie Armand Colin.

DERRIDA, Jacques (1995), Mal d’archive. Une impression freudienne, Paris, Galilée.

FOUCAULT, Michel (1969), L’Archéologie du savoir, Paris, Gallimard.

TAYLOR, Diana (2003), The archive and the repertoire. Performing cultural memory in the Americas, Durham and London, Duke University Press.

 

All texts should be sent, until December 31, 2023, to: sinaisdecena@gmail.com

 

Papers must be submitted in accordance with the following submission rules: https://revistas.rcaap.pt/sdc/about/submissions