BALTIMORE: On Thursday, November 20, Steering Committee Members Susan Brady, Ken Cerniglia, and Colleen Reilly led a training workshop introducing ATAP to a diverse group of students, scholars, librarians, archivists, and theatre artists. Thanks to ATAP’s parent organization, the American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR), which is currently holding its annual meeting at Baltimore’s Marriott Waterfront Hotel and generously provided the facility and refreshments to sustain participants through the four-hour program, ATAP was able to attract many highly engaged participants eager to learn about how they could support theatre artists in the work of creating and preserving their own archives.
One of the hopes for the day was to cultivate enough local interest to form a new Baltimore-based ATAP team, large enough to support the vibrant community of artists living and working in the region. The first Baltimore team meeting will be taking place in the coming weeks. Any person in or near Baltimore who was unable to attend the workshop but would like to be notified about this meeting should contact ATAP Communications so that they can be added to the list of supporters of ATAP in the area.
Thursday’s discussions highlighted the importance of including multiple perspectives in the work of empowering theatre artists to think pragmatically and strategically about how archival programs can help support theatre-making and scholarship. These multiple perspectives are, at once, ATAP’s greatest opportunity and greatest challenge. Scholars, teachers, and students love archives for the immediacy with which they connect them to history: encounters with archival materials can provide some of the most memorable and transformative moments in their lives. Archivists and librarians are passionnate about making these moments possible, both today and tomorrow. Artists’ connections with their own and other artists’ archives are personal, practical, and profound: they rely on them for the construction of their own histories, for day-to-day sustenance, and for inspiration to create new work. While all of these groups may share many of the same interests, their priorities often differ, and without frank and open discussion of what those priorities and interests are, it is impossible for cultural heritage professionals, scholars, or enthusiasts to understand how to help contemporary theatre artists with their archives.
It is important for the future of ATAP to create more frequent opportunities for open communication and exchange between the makers and potential curators and users of theatre archives. Do you have a success story that involves bringing theatre artists, archivists, librarians, students, and members of the public together around theatre archives? If so, ATAP would like to use this space to tell that story. Contact ATAP so that we can celebrate and share what you have achieved.