Creative Use of Archival Material: talk by Julia Pascal to Royal Holloway Phd Students Feb 2023
Julia gave a talk to a postgraduate student led group At Royal Holloway, University of London, called ‘Exploding the Archive’ looking at innovative ways of using archive material.
She discussed how research can be interpeted creatively. She illustrated examples with her work on the life and work of Eleanor Marx. This was developed into a dance-theatre event incorporating dance, music, song and nursery rhymes. It was performed at the Bloomsbury Festival 2022 at the Royal National Hotel to a very diverse audience.
See:
Some feedback:
It is so nice to see a refreshing and creative use for the archive.
I think that the decision to have the audience at the same level spatially as the performers articulates so well with the subject of Eleanor Marx, and the themes of disrupting power structures…In a lot of theatres, there is a clear spatial hierarchy between audience and performers, so levelling this out for this performance chimes so well with the subject!
As an ethnomusicologist, this medium of making archives accessible is exciting. Usually, we write an ethnography with transcriptions of music written in the text, but a textual medium is quite limiting when discussing music
See RHUL blog: Royal Holloway Archives and Special Collections Explodes the Archive with Pascal Theatre Company