Inaugural Address

International Association of Libraries and Museums of the Performing Arts

Société Internationale des Bibliothèques et des Musées des Arts du Spectacle

Inaugural Address

Simonetta Luz Afonso, Director of the Portuguese Institute of Museums

Documentation des Arts du Spectacle dans une Société en Mutation / Documentation of Performing Arts in a Changing Society
Société Internationale des Bibliothèques et des Musées des Arts du Spectacle / International Association of Libraries and Museums of the Performing Arts

19ème Congrès International, Lisbonne 7-11 septembre 1991 / 19th International Congress, Lisbon 7-11 September 1992

Ed.: José Carlos Alvarez. Lisboa: 1994, p. 9

It is with the greatest pleasure that I welcome all people participating in the 19th International Performing Arts Libraries and Museums Congress, prestigious SIBMAS, the only international organization that includes specialists from all the world that work on preserving the performing arts. For the first time they meet in Portugal, on initiative of the National Theatre Museum.

Concerning the theme of your congress - Documentation of Performing Arts in a Changing Society - I believe there are two sides of it: on one side, the persistant search of a deeper knowledge of the performing art's past that tries to transmit to a changing society like the present one, so frequently avoiding its roots, a past time that so frequently tries to forget its roots, a past time that dreams of surpassing its golden or its crisis periods, a stimulation on for the present time realizations.

On the other side, the constant challenge of new technologies that day after day stand on present society, they permit until now unsuspected possibilities, for instance the taping and preservation of shows on video.

Those new techniques are a complement of all traces of performing arts but don't work without the gathering and conservation of them. They consist of your archives and libraries and of your museum's collections. They include different items like costumes, set designs, costume designs, annotated texts, press clippings, memoir books, photos, programmes, posters, publicity leaflets, and many other things that make one feel the director's, the technician's or the actor's work human warmth as well as the taste from a certain period or of a certain audience.

It is a documentation through which one rediscovers and transmits the fascination of lives and works that time sometimes erases, and which study and systematization are helped nowadays with those new technologies, specially computers. They make documentation more functional, more accessible, in one word, livelier.

For centuries, museums and big collections only cared about paintings, sculptures, the so-called great art, as well as the pieces of the decorative art of more grandeur.

Being so, documentation of performing arts, which was for so long considered of no importance was lost or dispersed. Only on the first decades of this century, in some pioneer countries it was shyly valorized and safeguarded.

It is clearly difficult the gathering and study of this kind of documentation. Meetings like this congress in which specialized people from all over the world with the same interests can exchange ideas and reveal their own experiences are privileged places to increase past and present life of performing arts.

In a time like this where Portuguese art, through some exhibitions shown in foreign countries is getting a growing interest, I wish that this congress, which the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation so generously supported and welcomed in its headquarters, is a pretext for their participants to make acquaintance with Portugal's performing arts. Those performing arts in Portugal had brilliant periods and are internationally very little known.

I wish to all specialized people here reunited a stimulating work, full of good results. I declare opened the 19th International SIBMAS Congress.