International Association of Libraries and Museums of the Performing Arts
Société Internationale des Bibliothèques et des Musées des Arts du Spectacle
Theatre Museum displays and their importance to the theatre practice
Théâtre vivant et documentation
Acts of the XIth International Congress of the Libraries and Museums of the Performing Arts
Actes du XIe Congrès international des bibliothèques-musées des arts du spectacle.
Copenhagen 8-14 september 1974. (Editors: Per Pio & Ev Steinaa.)
Copenhagen 1976, pp. 40-46
More than 500 different theatres operate in this country - drama, opera and ballet, musical, children's and puppet theaters. Since they are government-subsidized, all of these theaters have a permanent staff of actors, directors, and stage designers. They also have auxiliary shops, staffed by wardrobe mistresses, electricians, make-up experts, stage hands etc. As a rule they are repertory theaters with 10-15 plays staged during a season. The best plays are kept an the repertory for years. For example, Gorky's The Lower Depths and Maeterlinck's Blue Bird have been on the repertory of the Moscow Art Theatre (MHAT) - the first since 1903 and the second since 1908. Tschaikovsky's opera Eugene Onegin has not missed a single season since Stanislavsky staged it in 1922 at the musical theater that now bears his name. Two years ago the theater celebrated the fiftieth year that it has been playing the opera.
Needless to say, the performances of the calibre I named have educated many generations of actors and have grown to be a school, whose traditions are handed down.
Documents concerned with such performances are carefully preserved in theater museums. Some one fourth of all Soviet theaters have museums, which collect authentic documents about the creative and public life of their collectives. The collections represent the theatre's history, but most important of all, they are used in the daily activity of the theater.
The museums preserve drawings of stage-sets, showing them in colour and perspective, models displaying the imaginative ideas of the directors and theater designers, stage properties, samples or fabrics, of which the costumes were made. All this comes in exceedingly useful when the theater decides to stage a particular play many years after the premiere.
The museums collect all sorts of manuscripts, such as a director's work scripts of a play, actors' notes pertaining to the part they are working on, diaries of rehearsals made by stage managers, minutes kept during a discussion of the play by the body of actors or at a meeting of the theater's art council, documents drawn up at various city organizations, with which the theater was in contact, etc. These materials make later it possible to resurrect the way a play was handled and give an insight into the artistic merits of a particular staging.
And of course, all playbills and programs are kept since these establish the dates of the first night performances, the actors or any changes in the cast.
Photographs are very special documents cherished by the theater museums. I do not claim originality in saying that photographs are among the most valuable kinds of documents. Our museums collect photographs of actors doing parts and these show the make-up and costumes used for particular parts. Naturally there is also a big collection of the actor's photographs off stage.
In collecting photographs of mise en scenes, special efforts are made to show the continuity of a play, its pivotal point - the director's staging in general. The theaters often have albums of photographs made on the stage while a play is on. Every picture is captioned with the lines uttered by the actor or the musical phrase, accompanying the scene, if it is a musical. Practice has shown that such albums are important in setting forth the theater's history, but even more for practical purposes - when a performance is resumed or a new actor is given a part that had been played for years by another. These photo albums are used by the drama and other theaters with equal success.
It is almost impossible to use those photo albums for displays or publication because, having been taken during the performance of a play, the pictures are very small and rather dark. But they have been found to be most useful for theatre practice and to the historians of the theater preparing monographs about actors for publication. Stress is now made on collecting films or tapes, reproducing the theater's best plays, entirely or in part.
I shall not list all the materials that the theater museums collect as aids to the work of their companies. All I shall say is that theaters make extensive use of their museums -
- When they wish to repeat the staging of a
classical or
modern play, something the theaters do constantly;
- When they introduce new actors
in a current staging (there are two and even three stand-in casts for
the
leading parts, especially if a play remains on the repertory for
several
years);
- When new plays are rehearsed. The museums
help to choose properties,
make-up, costumes etc.
- The museum fund serves educational aims. It
is used
by drama colleges for teaching students at the departments of acting,
directing, the history of the theater and stage designing.
- The theater museums give all-round assistance to amateur companies. But that is a vast subject, that I cannot discuss in detail here because it goes beyond the framework of this Congress.
It would say this represents the constant, and even daily contact between the museum and theater, at which it has been set up, and assistance that museums give to theaters in other cities and republics. The assistance is especially appreciated when the first production was directed by a famous personality or starred a great actor.
It should be said that theaters make use of their own museums as well as of the local lore museums, whose cultural sections have accumulated extensive material about the history of the theater in their own region.
This in brief was what I wanted to say in connection with the subject of this congress. I have told about the customary contacts between the theater museums and the theaters, a practice that stems from the peculiarity of theatrical work in this country.
As we
see it in the USSR, the aim of this congress is to exchange know-how. I
hope
that our methods of work could come in useful to other theater museums,
though
no, or rather, very few repertory theaters in the European and other
countries
have their own museums. I shall discuss in greater detail the things
that I
feel, my colleagues could use in their own work.
I have a few ideas about the principles for the layout of displays at the theater museum. As I see it, the displays are the most important aspect of a museum's work, since they concern a wide range of problems that go beyond the limits of acquainting visitors with the history and theory of the performing arts. This problem is closely linked with the practical side of the theatre, because actors and directors, to say nothing of stage-designers, often study them in the course of producing a new play.
Now, how should a display be laid out to interest all who come to see it? It is a very big subject, but I shall try to give a digest of several ideas about methods of laying out displays and will request my colleagues to take part in discussing them.
The
display is actually the end result of the theater museum's work in
collecting
materials and doing research. The collection of authentic documents
about a
theater and their scientific description represent the contribution to
the
performing arts that determines the museum's significance as a
scientific
establishment.
New displays of authentic objects collected by the theater museum represent their first so-called publication. The new materials are placed at the disposal of researchers, theater personalities, students and various sections of the public. The displays make it possible for the museum to play a double role - that of a scientific center and educational establishment.
The displays are more than a simple review of the museum's fund. .They are a scientific story of the performing arts, told with the help of documents, that visitors can visualize. The displays at the Soviet theater museums are laid out according to historic chronology, the thematical or monographic principle depending on the specific goal in view, and are always based on the latest deductions concerning the science of art. In other words they are based on the ideas of the Marxist science of the theater.
The most widespread is the principle of historical chronology. The story is told by the historical stages in the developing of the performing arts. This is the simplest principle and most understandable.
The thematical principle divides the history of the theater into specific themes. For example, the stands or show-cases combine the works of one playright (Gorky, Chekov, Ostrovsky, Shakespeare, Moliere, Pogodin, Arbuzov, Rozov etc.). But within the theme, the materials are still placed according to the historical chronology of stagings.
The monographic principle highlights the major personalities, who influenced the performing art as a whole. There are separate sections of displays devoted to Stanislavsky, Meyerhold, Vahtangov, Zavadsky, Popov, Tovstonogov or other directors, or to the great actors of the XIX and XX centuries.
This principle found fullest expression in memorial museums that are devoted to the life and work of the great masters (the museums of Stanislavsky, Vahtangov, Yermolova - in Moscow, Zankovetsky in Kiev, Paliashvili in Tbilisi and many others).
The monographic principle is most often used within the historical chronology display.
The enumerated principles are characteristic of the theater museum as well as others, such as local lore museums, whose displays always have a section devoted to the history of the performing arts of their locality.
Here are the basic requirements of a display: - it must have a clear and complete scientific concept; it must include a variety of authentic materials, such as photographs, playbills, programs and press reviews. It is most desirable to include objects that the visitor would not see in any other museum (manuscripts, directors' notes, drawings of stage sets etc.). These are the qualities of a display that would.be most appreciated by experts.
The displays must look attractive and should include such colourful exhibits as artists' sketches, crayon drawings made at rehearsals or performances, properties, costumes etc. To the lay visitor they mean a lifting of the curtain to reveal the "magic world" of the theater
It is possible to include exhibits that are not authentic
For an insight into the theme called "the creative laboratory of the actor", one can use illustrated books, old photographs and other materials, the actor had used when working on his part.
The Moscow Art Theater museum's display has a section devoted to Shakespeare's Julius Ceasar. Here a picture of V. Kachalov, who played the main part, has been placed next to a sculpture of Ceasar, of which there are hundreds. The sculpture allows visitors to appreciate the actor's make-up and posture, emulating the historic personality.
Not all of the themes one reads in literary monographs, historical or theoretical works devoted to the theater can be shown in displays. But the displays have the advantage of being documentary, colourful and pleasant to the eye, and for that reason understandable to visitors of different educational levels.
The following themes lend themselves easily to displays: the history of a play's staging, preparation for the staging by a company, the director's or the actor's own solution of the play as a whole or of a particular role, the stage sets and costumes - that is the content and style as well as the history of the play's performance on stage. Monographic themes, such as the work of directors, actors and artists, can also be shown in displays.
Taken together, the different parts of the display resurrect the artistic peculiarity of the century's theatrical activity as a major factor in the history of national culture.
But the goal can be achieved only if the authentic objects in a museum's fund are not exhibited by themselves, but are combined by the theme and supplement each other in a complex. Only then does each object assume the importance of a document of historical significance that serves to consolidate the scientific concepts of the museum.
There is also a method of showing theatrical documents, unhampered by any theme, simply as a group of separate objects, unconnected one with the other. Such displays become more of an exhibition of the museum's fund than anything else. They can add nothing substantial to what is already known from literary sources and this sharply reduces their informative value. They appeal more to the senses than to the minds of the visitors.
I had the opportunity of seeing the displays at some of the theater museums in Western Europe and the USA. In quite a few cases I felt that this method of exhibition was used. On show were authentic objects that combined historical value with emotional impact on visitors. But their importance as a source of information about events in theatrical history, of which they were "silent collaborators", would have been greater if they had not been displayed alone, but were part of a theme complex.
If one
accepts that the display at a theater museum can serve the practical
requirements of the modern theater as a means of preserving traditions,
one
should seek ways of improving its informative level. And most probabiy
the
thematic principle for displays will bring us closer to the goal.
The thematic display presupposes that the museum undertakes to tell the essential facts about the history of the theater, the plays or the personalities of the theater - the very things that made them prominent in the theater's history.
If a display is devoted to a play, it is important to show how the company understood its content and what was the scenic style used by the theatre in disclosing it. I shall try to make myself clear by quoting examples from the practice of Soviet museum.
Gorky's The Lower Depths is a play with long-standing traditions in the Russian theater. It has been staged by scores of theaters in various towns and republics. But, if one were to take the first staging at the MHAT, at the beginning of this century, and one of the latest, which the rather new Sovremennik theater put on several years ago, I must say that they differ vastly in the interpretation of the play's content.
The MHAT staging, whose editing is carefully preserved in that theater, is distinguished by a certain romanticising of the doss house inhabitants. They are degraded individuals, nevertheless some of them have retained pride and dignity. They are free from prejudice and the Phillistine notions seething around them. This interpretation was justifiable for Russia of the beginning of the century. It was understood to be the theater's protest against the ideology that dominated tsarist Russia.
The staging at the Sovremennik shows the characters stripped of all romanticism. All of them are individuals on the lowest rung of the social ladder, degraded so that they have no right to utter lofty words about pride and dignity. The interpretation sounded a new note that underlined other realistic aspects.
How would a museum display show the character of each staging, and can it? Of course it can, but the museum expert must be free in using the materials and be able to pick combinations of objects that underline the character of each interpretation of the play. Important are photographs of the chief mise en scenes that mirror the director's and actors' idea, the notes he and the actors made while working on the play, reviews of the performance, reminiscences of the contemporary, the artist's drawings, the models.
The notes made by the director of a staging and the actors in the process of production are especially interesting. I shall quote an example. The Bahrushin Museum in Moscow put on a display devoted to the staging of the Optimistic Tragedy by Vsevolod Vishnevsky as staged, at the Kamerny Theatre by A. Tairov. The display was based on Tairov's address to the cast before work on the play was started in 1932. (Incidentally the Speech was included in A. Tairov's book About the Theater, 1970).
Tairov spoke of his own conception of what the play should be. His idea was that it should be a heroic tragedy. Tairov strived for a broad coverage of events in documental form. The way he saw it, the flames of the civil revolution steeled an unorganized group of sailors into a militant regiment of fighters for the revolution.
The museum's display included exerpts from Tairov's speech, photographs of the main characters in the play and mise en scenes that mirrored the chosen theme of the director. Central place was given to a model of the stage on which Tairov built up all action. The leather jacket, worn by Alisa Koonen, who played the main part of the regiment's kommissar and a colour portrait of her, were also on exhibition.
I do not wish to tire you with descriptions of displays representing the practice of the Soviet museums. I only wanted to illustrate the principle we follow. Naturally, we do not achieve all we set out to do and there is still much perfecting required in our displays. But the main thing in this, as well as other undertakings, is that one should not fear to face difficulties, fear to start anew because every time the new theme and the material on hand require an individual approach.
But we are convinced that theme displays can help to salvage the brittle art of the theatre, which recedes into the past with such terrible speed.
We are furthermore confident that the story, told by a display, has enormous impact on the audience and can serve as a means of cultural and esthetical education as well as a means of preserving traditions of the performing arts.
The
time has come for the museums to activate the popularization of the
performing
arts. It has become insufficient to simply collect
and preserve the theater's values.
Thank you.
Information about this site: Maria Teresa Iovinelli, Secretary General
Last updated: August 31, 2004