Dag 1: Het Archief Speculatief (donderdag 27 februari)
Bekijk hier het programma van dag 1 van het symposium Het Archief Speculatief. De voertaal is Engels.
Program: Thursday February 27 2025
Location: Allard Pierson, Oude Turfmarkt 127-129
Language: English
Schedule:
12.30 – 14.00: Walk-in
14.00 – 14.30:
- Speech by Els van der Plas, director Allard Pierson
- Presentation of the book ‘Theater verzamelen’ by Hans van Keulen, curator of the Theater Collection
- Introduction of the lecturers by Kati Röttger, professor and chair of the Institute of Theatre Studies at the University of Amsterdam
14:30-15:15
Keynote by meLê yamomo (Universiteit van Amsterdam) – Tumrap susilaning gěndhing winor laguning lělagon – meLê yamomo in conversation with Sri Margana, and Amabilita Celessya Shafaswara
with the artistic and production support of Jay Yamomo, Rafaga Svara, and Yiping Tian
Are recorded voices, music, and sound cultures stored in museums and archives in Europe just in exile, waiting for their return to their communities? Sound and media scholar Jonathan Sterne (2003) calls sound media resonant tombs where the voices of the dead reside. yamomo (2021) argues that sound archives are cemeteries of deceased sounds—removed from the communities that keep them alive through collective memory. Can we reanimate them by reconnecting them with source communities? In doing so, can the archive speak back? In this performance lecture, meLê engages historical sound documents and recordings from Southeast Asia “on exile” in archives in a conversation and asks the sound archives to speak back.
15:15-16:00
Keynote by Mark Fleishman (University of Cape Town) – Archiving Performance in a Digital Age: Practice, Research, Engagement
In this presentation I will outline the approach to archiving adopted as a central component of the Reimagining Tragedy in Africa and the Global South (ReTAGS) research project in which my collaborators and I have been engaged over the past 6 years. In particular, I will focus on the digital archiving of process and the relationship between such archiving of process and emergent methodologies of practice-led research in the discipline of Theatre and Performance Studies. This approach to archiving is less about the collection and conservation of partial remains at the end of a creative journey, than it is a way of making the journey itself available to researchers so that they may follow the emergent processes of thinking of that creative journey, but also as an invitation to ongoing engagement and open-ended development.
16:00-16:30
Break
16:30-17:15
Keynote by Ricarda Franzen (Universiteit van Amsterdam) – Picking up the Paléophone: In Conversation with Dead Actors
At the end of the performance De Spaanse Hoer (1970), actress Ank van der Moer, in her role as the procuress Celestina, audibly returns from the dead, closing with a poetic and self-conscious note on her ghostliness: “You can hear us sometimes. When there is silence in your song.” Her words resonate with both Edison’s sound recording technology, “widely represented as able to channel voices demanding remembrance from beyond the grave” (Morin 2014), and theatre history’s evocative examples, such as Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape.
The literature on sound and archives is rich with metaphors of ghosts and traces. Yet, the researcher engaging with the archive is usually not expected to leave any trace, somewhat understandably: Imagine analog written documents scribbled on with researcher’s annotations, underlining, and commentary… Unthinkable? In the case of digitized sound collections, however, I explore the possibility of audio annotations as part of ‘close listening’ (Hoffmann). In this lecture performance, I embark on a speculative journey, placing my own researcher’s voice in dialogue with the theatrical voices from the digitized theatre sound collection of the TiN/ Allard Pierson. How might such interventions take shape as a dialogue with the past? And how might a researcher’s voice leave traces in the sound archive after all?
17:15-18:00
Drinks with fingerfood
Opening exhibition Ricarda Franzen Studio Allard Pierson
18:00-19:00 PM (separate registration needed)
Performance ‘’Een Mjeeuw – “Njiks is zo dood als een dode actjeur’’ by Collectief Blauwdruk (language: Dutch), location: Universiteitstheater, Nieuwe Doelenstraat 16. Please note that you must register separately for this performance