Book of Abstracts
Introduction Presenting the Theatrical Past. Interplays of Artefacts, Discourses and Practices
Welcome to Stockholm at IFTR 2016! Departing from the 250th anniversary of the Drottningholm Court Theatre the IFTR conference 2016 focuses on critical perspectives on theatre history. The theatre of the past is accessible to us via historical objects, theoretical discourses and archive materials. But we can also experience it through performance practices that keep traditions alive or engage in re-enactments of theatre events and representations. The conference “Presenting the Theatrical Past” addresses questions concerning our relationship to theatre history, i.e. the relation between present and past. How and why do we deal with history? What do we do with history? To what extent is historical research an exploration of our present?
Critical investigation of historiographical issues in the field of Theatre Studies touches upon the interplay between theatrical artefacts, practices and discourses. Such historical artefacts in relation to theatre can be theatre sites/venues, historical objects (props, scenery, costumes), archival materials and documents, historical locations for reenactments, etc. Practices comprise performances such as theatre, drama, dance, opera, performance, installation art, laboratory experiments, educational curricula etc. The notion of discourse relates to historical ideas as well as contemporary theories, questions of ‘historically informed productions’ (HIP) and historiographical concepts, reconstructions of past performances etc.
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We are delighted that more than 900 theatre scholars from all over the world responded to our call for proposals and would like to welcome you all here at Stockholm University. You are contributing to a rich program presenting historical and historiographical research in the field of theatre studies. We are hoping for inspiring and thought-provoking talks and discussions during the five days of the conference and wish you a wonderful stay in Stockholm. Your Stockholm Organising Committee
Presenting the Theatrical Past, IFTR 2016, Book of Abstracts
ALDO ROMA
Sapienza University of Rome
[email protected] Aldo Roma is a Ph.D. candidate in Music and the Performing Arts, in the Department of Art History and Performance Studies of Sapienza University of Rome. In 2011 he earned his Laurea Magistrale (equivalent of a Bachelor of Arts and Master of Art degree) in the Study of Theatre, the Performing Arts, Film And Technologies for Digital Performances in the School of Philosophy, Arts and Humanities and Oriental Studies of Sapienza University of Rome, presenting a thesis on contemporary opera stage direction entitled Staging Don Giovanni: Mozartian opera in the readings of Strehler, Bieito, Kušej and Guth. His research interests are directed primarily at the interconnections between music and theatre. His current areas of research are indepth study of the development and layering of comic strategies in the dramaturgy in the 17th Century Roman opera. He is currently working on a critical edition of the libretto of San Bonifatio (1638) by Giulio Rospigliosi. In addition to his research activities, he is also an arranger, composer, and performer for the theatre.
Digital Archives and Textual Attribution: Story and Reflections About a Migration from Opera to Vocal Music in the Late Seventeenth Century As theatre historians, we deal with residues, fragments, layered elements which are likely to remain silent if they are not correlated with one other. The study of documents relating to a single event or theatrical artifact is useful in evaluating their microhistory (Georg G. Iggers, 1997), that is, the relationship between that object and the cultural system that produced it. Sometimes, however, it is extremely difficult to account for the potential relationships between a theatrical artifact and other external contexts. A major reason for this impediment is the difficulty in finding sources. The proliferation of computer technologies in the Humanities, the conception and planning of digital archives, and the progressive integration and standardization of the information management protocols have in effect revolutionized the ways of thinking and doing research. “Old” disciplines, such as philology and history, nowadays have tools infinitely more powerful than just a few decades ago. The purpose of this paper is to report the identification of the exact text matching of two sections of an early-Seventeenth-century Roman opera with two vocal compositions from the late 1600s preserved in manuscript form in the Archivio Musicale del Duomo di Como (Italy). This discovery has been fulfilled thanks to an online search, made possibile by the interaction between a common web search engine and the database of the Catalogo Nazionale dei manoscritti musicali (National Catalogue of Music Manuscript) of the Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense in Milan, which includes the main references for the music manuscripts up to the Twentieth century in Italian libraries. Such contingency, furthermore, warrants some methodological considerations regarding, inter alia, the nature of the digital archives, their architecture, and the policies of copyright law/open source that may affect the level of accessibility to the sources.
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