Les Convergences entre passé et futur dans les collections des arts du spectacle- Connecting Points: Performing Arts Collections Uniting Past and Future

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OPENING SESSION
SÉANCE INAUGURALE

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Foreword

Claudia BLANK

The 28^th SIBMAS conference was an exceptional one, which brought about a closer relationship between our association of theatre collections and theatre researchers. For the first time in the history of SIBMAS and IFTR, spanning over 50 years, the conferences of these two associations took place in the same city at the same time and thereby offered opportunities to present joint events.

The second special feature was the German Theatre Museum’s 100^th anniversary, and the Museum was able to invite its colleagues from all over the world to this conference. It was an opportune time to reflect and look back at the past as well as look into the future. We did this jointly, under the theme of “Connecting Points: Performing Arts Collections Uniting Past and Future”.

We are grateful for the many suggestions received, the exchange of ideas, and the strengthening of our personal contacts with our international colleagues which this opportunity provided.

I’m pleased that this publication bears witness to this and I should like to give my warm thanks to Nicole Leclercq, Helen Baer, Susan Cole, Kristy Davis and Andrea Hauer for their work.

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Opening Speech

Claire HUDSON

President SIBMAS (London – United Kingdom)

Ladies and gentlemen,

Mesdames et messieurs,

I am delighted to be welcoming you here to the Munich Museum of Ethnology, the venue for this, the 28^th SIBMAS conference.

For an organisation whose main raison d’être is to create an international network for sharing knowledge and expertise, the biennial conference is one of our most important activities. I know how hard the organisers work to plan these events and to deliver a first-rate conference.
I would therefore like to begin by thanking the City of Munich, the Museum of Ethnology, and of course Dr Claudia Blank and her colleagues at the German Theatre Museum for all the work they have already done on our behalf. I would also like to congratulate the German Theatre Museum on the occasion of its 100^th birthday this year – quite an achievement and one to be celebrated.

This is actually the second time that this fine city has hosted a SIBMAS conference – our sixth was held here in Munich in 1963. Despite the advances made in communication technology since then, personal contact, the ability to meet and converse in person with our fellow professionals, and the opportunity for us to see the host institution, its collections and understand the culture within which it operates, are still invaluable to us.

The management of Performing Arts collections demands a very broad set of skills. Our collections tend to be extremely diverse in their physical make-up, ranging from costumes, works of art, photographs, archives and time-based media such as film. As well as knowledge of performance history and practice itself, we need to know about developing, documenting and conserving these diverse collections, and about how to connect with our audiences through exhibitions, displays and publications. The arrival of new technology for creating content, organising and accessing it has added further skills to what was already a very demanding list. In my own ← 17 | 18 → career I have found my involvement with SIBMAS and attendance of its conferences to be of enormous benefit. It provides an opportunity to learn from the people with whom, professionally, we have the most in common. In times of financial stringency there is, if anything, even more of a need to optimise the resources we have, to collaborate and share, and to avoid duplicating what has already been done elsewhere. All this depends on nurturing an active professional network.

I greatly look forward to further expanding my own knowledge over the course of the next five days, and at the same time enjoying your company and all that this admirable city has to offer.

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Introduction

Claudia BLANK

German Theatre Museum (Munich – Germany)

Dear Colleagues, a very warm welcome to you all!

For me personally, it’s a great pleasure to be able to welcome all of you to a SIBMAS Conference here today, as so often in the past I’ve been your guest at many other venues: in Mannheim, Stockholm, Helsinki, London, Paris, Rome, Barcelona, Vienna, Glasgow – and now we’re here. Our colleagues have staged impressive events and we shall now try to match them: I hope that our efforts can go half-way towards this, because we can’t possibly fulfill all expectations. For example, it was an express wish by the previous organiser, Alan Jones, in Glasgow, to whom I’d like to extend a warm welcome, that his concept of an interactive structure be continued in the form of so-called “Expo-Papers”. I’ve attempted to do this, because it worked so wonderfully in Glasgow. And, with some difficulty, I managed to find a venue for this, and made an offer in the invitation to the Conference – only the response was much too low. So the traditional form of presentations will remain. However, these presentations will surely become interactive, since well over half of the participants have asked to deliver spoken presentations, and regular discussion sessions are a feature of the programme structure. And we’ll probably be able to take real advantage of these sessions, because after checking through the papers the presentations don’t appear to be excessively long. Despite the platform and audience floor set-up, I think we should still be able to see ourselves as a community, coming together here to discuss subjects which unite us all.

For me, this is the really fascinating thing about every SIBMAS Conference: we come together for a few days from many different countries and cities, and all of us sitting together in the same hall ultimately share the same areas of activity, subjects of interest, thoughts and problems.

But despite all these pleasures, today I can’t avoid addressing problems as well. It won’t have escaped your notice this morning that there are not too many participants at this Conference. We’ve seen how our Greek ← 21 | 22 → colleague had to cancel when the European Union crisis intensified, and shortly before the start of the Conference nearly all our Spanish colleagues had to cancel. We very much regret all these cancellations. So I should like to thank you all the more for making today possible.

These are not easy times: the global financial crisis is causing problems for us all. We must assert and try to strengthen the existence of our institutions. The rapid progress of technical media is constantly presenting us with new challenges. And at a time of increasing globalization, it is necessary on the one hand to develop contacts and on the other hand to highlight our own individuality.

With theatre collections we have reached a crossroads at which on a political level restructurings are occurring or are imminent. For example, there have been changes in London and Stockholm, as well as in Amsterdam, about which we shall hear tomorrow. At such a crossroads it may be a form of counter-strategy to establish connections and mutual support. For me, and I hope for us all, finding connecting points is an essential aspect of this Conference. Connecting points versus crossroads.

Theatre collections are often treated as small exotic items compared to the large Fine Art museums of the world, so for this reason we don’t need to hide away, but must show our qualities to the public. Ulrike Dembski, who I would like to warmly welcome, called her 2006 SIBMAS Conference in Vienna Performing Arts Collections on the Offensive. This appeal has not lost its topicality – indeed, it’s more necessary and urgent than ever.

I’d like to thank Ulrike Dembski and Alan Jones very much indeed for their support in the preparation of this Conference. Futhermore I’d like to give my warmest thanks to our host, the Director of the Museum of Ethnology, Claudius Müller for staying here this week. And I’d like to thank cordially the Theatre Museum’s small team, which has for months provided its support in the staging of this Conference: especially Monika Haberl and Marion Weltmaier, and very particularly Andrea Hauer for her very impressive commitment. All three will always be available during the Conference, and like all the Theatre Museum personnel will be wearing a name tag showing our logo. Please don’t hesitate to approach my colleagues or me if you have any questions, or if you should unfortunately have any problems. We’ll all be very pleased to help you.

Furthermore, I’ve taken up Alan Jones’s idea of a special identification on the SIBMAS name tags: small green stars mean that this colleague is attending a SIBMAS Conference for the first time. The small red stars indicate SIBMAS Excom members, all of whom will be very willing to give advice if you have any questions.

The focal point of the Conference is the programme of talks, which I’m looking forward to very much, and the discussions on them. However, ← 22 | 23 → I think that the shared intervals and framework programme are almost just as important as well. These have offered me a very valuable opportunity to establish friendly contacts and make co-operation possible.

Here I take communication to be rather like subtitles, and communication with the theatre researchers is also close to my heart. And so I’m very pleased that for the first time it has been possible to hold our Conference at the same time and in the same city as the world congress of IFTR. Yesterday evening both Excoms met up to have an evening meal together. This evening around a hundred participants at the IFTR Conference, at which only the working groups are initially meeting today, are expected to join us. Tomorrow evening all participants are to meet at a joint session, where we will be able to have discussions amongst ourselves, and some of the IFTR members are then expected at the State reception. You can see that we’ll have a large number of personal connecting points.

I hope you find this week stimulating and enjoyable.

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Greeting

Klaus WESCHENFELDER

Chair of ICOM Germany

Distinguished audience, dear colleagues and members of SIBMAS!

Thank you very much indeed for the invitation to speak a word of greeting to you on behalf of ICOM Germany. It is a great pleasure and an honour for me to attend the opening of such a promising conference and to address such a respected audience of professionals of museums and libraries from all over the world.

Within the family of museums – and of libraries as well – institutions with collections of performing arts, often called “theatre museums”, are maybe a smaller group, but they represent one of the most important facets of cultural activities of mankind. Theatre and all sorts of performing arts pervade our culture at all levels.

To deal with theatre museums reveals in a special way an intriguing relationship between the content – the collection – and the medium of representation.

In the history of the origins of the museum the terms “museum” and “theatre” seemed to be very close, nearly coincident.

To pay tribute to the spirit of Munich, the place where you decided to have your conference, I would like to refer to some local examples while presenting some very brief remarks on this peculiar relationship between museum and performing arts or museums and theatre.

Some of you might know that only a stone’s throw away from the Munich State Museum of Ethnology, were we convene, a building called “Alte Münze” (old mint) is situated, which originally housed not only the stables but also the cabinet of curiosities of the Bavarian Court, when it was built in the middle of the 16^th century (1563-1567).

The draft for this cabinet – not the design of the architecture but the concept of collecting and presentation – was provided by the Flemish scholar Samuel Quiccheberg.

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Quiccheberg was at that time in the heyday of his career, coming from Augsburg where he worked as a librarian in the service of the Fugger family and then acting as an influential advisor at the court of Duke Albrecht V in Munich.

Quiccheberg’s draft is considered to be the founding text of the theory of collecting. The text, which lays out the future cabinet of curiosities at the Bavarian court, marks the beginning of the erudite discussion about the museum as a major topic in pre-modern scholarship.

The treatise deals with the principles of collecting and displaying, and it describes the idea of a comprehensive and encyclopaedic knowledge. Interestingly the title of his treatise does not use the term “museum”, which was not common at that time, but the term “theatre”. It reads as follows:

Inscriptiones vel tituli Theatri Amplissimi, complectentis rerum universitati singulas materias et imagines eximias ut idem recte quos dici posit : promptuarium artificiosarum miraculosarumque rerum, ac omnis rari thesauri et pretiosae supellectilis, structurae atque picturas, quae hic simul in theatro conquiri consuluntur, ut eorum frequenti inspectione tractationeque singularis aliqua rerum cognitio et prudential admirande, cito, facile ac tuto comparari possit.¹

Quicchelberg calls his idea of the museum a theatrum amplissimum, and the term “theatrum” denotes the book as the space of the description as well as the premises of the cabinet as the space of representation.

Quicchelberg evokes the idea of a museum as a rich, lavishly stocked stage with showcases and prestigious cupboards as a scenery and with precious works of art as actors. About one hundred years later the encyclopaedist Athanasius Kircher installed his museum in Rome as a place for performing experiments to demonstrate the knowledge of his period.

Actually the theatre metaphor played a major role in the context of collecting from the 16^th century onwards, with changing meanings until today.

Scenography as a part of performing collections is a crucial issue of the museum and it has become an increasing influence on museum work during the last decades. Proper fairs and conferences are provided, such as the forthcoming exhibition “Scenography and Exhibition Design” organised by the Design Department of University of Applied Science in Basel later this year.

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