International Association of Libraries and Museums of the Performing Arts

Société Internationale des Bibliothèques et des Musées des Arts du Spectacle

Theatre Collections and their Relationship to Scientific Research

Antonella Ottai (Rome)

17. Internationaler SIBMAS-Kongreß / 17ème Congrès International de la SIBMAS / 17th International SIBMAS Congress, 1.-9. September 1988, Mannheim

Bericht / Actes / Documentation. Red.: Liselotte Homering. Mannheim : Städtisches Reiß-Museum, 1990. pp. 164-166

Performing arts - especially theatre art - are "ephemeral" and "composite" by nature; they are "events" and involve different elements of expression.

A museum of the theatre comes to face several problems, related to the memory of an event and to the showing of what survives from it: on one hand, drawing from documents and repertories some evidence of what does not exist anymore, proving that it did exist once, almost priming an archaeological process, as to say, which reconstructs the whole from its various parts; on the other hand, the difference in materials and repertories that, as we said, belong to heterogeneous artistic expressions. Starting from these considerations, the project of the Museo Multimediale dell'Attore was born by means of the Centro Teatro Ateneo and Dipartimento di Musica e Spettacolo of the University of Rome La Sapienza, supervised by Professor Marotti.

Our research work is specially focused on the study of the actor necessarily connected with his/her "multimedial character": if we consider the actor within the comprehensive subject "performance", we state that we need to study the theatrical language in its very transitory parts, that is to say, the living body of the person who plays; since the theatre research pointed out the importance of the actor in the performance composition - aptitudes, different poses, relations between actor and stage, understanding strategies with respect to the audience, gestures, sound and acting plastic factors - the researchers were obliged to revise and to renew their methods and instruments. As we ascribe importance to the actor's mask expressions and to his voice main features (sound gesture, pauses, breathing, timbre, tone, etc.), consequently we need to find pertinent materials to supply documentary evidence of such elements (drawings, sketches, caricatures, records, pictures, films and videotapes...). Thus, the problem which arises is how to work these documents out (actually they have different sources and nature) and how to prepare homogeneous sets, so that we can compare heterogeneous ones and come across analogies and differences which make them particularly interesting and let them "speak".

Multimedial Filing: Eduardo de Filippo as an Example

Seen from that point of view, "multimedial character" seems to be not only a reproduction system of different objects, but also an important connection between them, that allows us to interpret them, considering both the multiplicity of expressions and the unity of poetics. On the one hand, the traditional sources we find in a museum tell us about the actor's (or actresses) absence, rather than about his/her presence: costumes, particular objects witnessing one's behaviour on and off the stage, souvenirs, that by means of their physical and emotional connection with their possessors are able to evoke the whole personality they belonged to; on the other hand, in the last few years, the evidence of films or videotapes gives the absent body back to the research (or the shade which used to upset Eleonora Duse and made Eduardo de Filippo anxious, too) - as well as the time and the place where this body played. In spite of that, we cannot regard films and videorecordings as real performances: allowing ourselves this sort of freedom of interpretation, nevertheless we have to interpret and to reconstruct the hypothetical performative event from the reality of what once was present on the stage and its reproduction, from the event and what the medium keeps of it. On the one hand, a multimedial, strategically focused technological equipment has to mark all that out by making the sources clear; on the other hand, it has to allow historical and critical hypothesis of performance, within hardly comparable materials, as well as to point the terms of comparison out.

From that point of view, we tried to experiment with a new method not only to put different elements together, but also to integrate them with interpretations: at the moment we are producing a Video Disc about Eduardo de Filippo, to check out the system and to set a pattern-sample up; it has to be a pattern of the actor's culture, that moulded all the artistic performance usages, from writing to mise-en-scène; a pattern of analytical method - the decomposition of that culture into its significant components (filmed or videorecorded comedies are not included, but only fragments which are enucleated by modelling) -, a pattern of an interactive system, connected with a laboratory usage in which the audience is involved in several degrees of interest, according to which everybody can enjoy the system itself as he/she wants to. The Video Disc functions as a multimedial system filing of the actor's culture; thematic, informative and technical issues can be connected, and documents can be reached by random access. They are different by means of sources and materials: texts, static and kinetic images (pictures, films, tapes), sound items (records and tapes etc.).

Elements of the System

Essentially the multimedial filing system consists of:

1. A Video Disc set, recording static and kinetic images, partly fragments from Eduardo's works, partly graphic works of ours, partly special effects.
2. A Compact Disc set, covering sound aspects, which are worked out along the same line of the visual ones.
3. A cataloguing computerised system giving detailed information about the recorded documents (date, occasion, source, technical details, etc.).
4. The software of the system.

Main Features of the Project

Eduardo's poetics have been divided in five main chapters (La famiglia teatrale, L'arte della commedia, Il discorso in scena, Figure in scena, Scene), which are then split up again into two parts (i.e. 1. La famiglia teatrale, 1.2 La commedia della famiglia, 1.2.1 Rituali familiari).

At the moment, before printing the Video Disc definitively, some sets are already available on video as a demonstration, to show how the Video Disc can be used.

Each chapter goes through the whole of Eduardo's work (which is particularly suitable for such an analysis, because we are able to collect and use plenty of documents on the subject); it is composed of fragments from pertinent texts - films or videorecorded comedies or lessons - as well as recorded documents, able to give further information about Eduardo's work and to find out its constant and varying elements: stage pictures, sketches, various writings. While the index reconstructs the author's performance strategies, through different media (i.e. the way the theatre space is conceived differently on a theatre stage or in a television studio), the filing system which is included in the Video Disc lets the viewer know where each image comes from, and at the same time it allows him/her to come across other thematical issues, making other historical or technical possible connections from other points of view within the documents.

New Technologies vs. a New Concept of Museum

For a museum system, this kind of work brings several consequences: not only it allows us to record and keep different documents on the same medium, helping us to compare them, but it affects the audience as well. Thanks to its operating possibilities, the Video Disc is a real experimental laboratory of the actor's culture, offering different degrees of enjoyment: one can look at it as a mere performance or as a thematic, historical or technical research instrument; according to one's own purposes, everyone can accomplish a real cutting of the subjects he/she is chiefly interested in by random access. Furthermore, these instruments, giving more importance to relation possibilities rather than to the very documents, introduce a new museum idea as a telematic network, as a starting point to reach as many places as possible, being the museum itself a place whose boundaries are mental and logical, rather than physical and spacial.

SIBMAS Home

HOME-BIENVENUE

Rules
Statuts

Executive Committee
Comité exécutif

Institutional Members
Membres institutionnels

Joining SIBMAS
Adhérer à la SIBMAS

International Directory
Répertoire international

Congresses
Congrès

National Collections
Collections nationales

Research Sites
Sites de recherche

Partner Organisations
Organisations soeurs

WHAT'S NEW
NOUVEAUTÉS

FORUM