A M AT E U R T H E AT R E : H I S TO R I E S A N D C U LT U R A L H E R I TAG E
TANGIBLE AND INTANGIBLE CULTURAL HERITAGE Laurajane Smith has drawn attention to how heritage can refer to the tangible materiality of ‘things’ buildings, monuments and artefacts, but also to the intangible knowledge and skills that communities and groups do, practice and pass on from generation to generation as part of a living cultural heritage
Laurajane Smith, ‘The “doing” of heritage: heritage as performance’ in Performing Heritage: Research, practice and innovation in museum theatre and live interpretation, ed. by Anthony Jackson and Jenny Kidd (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011) p. 80.
AMATEURS ‘DOING IT FOR THEMSELVES’ • Archives/scrapbooks (containing posters, programmes, designs, photographs, press cuttings, etc.) • Oral history interviews with past and present members • Visual display – films, foyer exhibitions, galleries of production photographs, etc.
PICTURE THIS Bolton Little Theatre’s wall of images from their shows over the years. There is a guide identifying each performer and play alongside. (Heritage Lottery Fund)
SHARING H I S TO R I E S
Publications that capture and publicly document the particular histories and unique character of their amateur theatre group.
PUBLISHED IN 1993 TO M A R K 6 0 T H A N N I V E R S A RY A N D REVISED AND U P D AT E D I N 2 0 0 8
Many members of the drama society would contribute memories and stories to help fill its pages‌the aim of the new version of Stage By Stage is to promote and showcase what the society does, as well as capture and preserve, in writing, its important place within the town's history.
(Stage by Stage: 75 Years of Theatre in Market Harborough, Leicester: Matador, 2008, p. ix)
LOCAL HISTORIES/PARTICULAR STORIES: Jerome de Groot’s proposes that ‘discovery, revelation and local particularity is key to local history’ and these books tend to combine narratives of production histories alongside the anecdotal because it is through these details that the particularity of the society’s history, its intangible heritage, is revealed and celebrated. Jerome de Groot, Consuming History: Historians and Heritage in Contemporary Popular Culture (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2009) p. 63.
A M AT E U R T H E AT R E AS LIVED SOCIAL P R ACT I CE : I N TA N G I B L E H E R I TA G E
RSC Collingwood Costume Store
MAKING AND DOING
Making props in the RSC Collingwood prop store
AMATEUR THEATRE AND INVENTED TRADITIONS • Company names and logos can be traced back over decades.
• Anniversaries are keenly anticipated and celebrated • Lifetime achievement awards and NODA’s range of medals, bars, badges and certificates all celebrate and honour service.
• Festivals and Awards Ceremonies with certificates, cups, shields and trophies
A M AT E U R T H E AT R E AND INVENTED TRADITIONS
Joe Allan receives the Best Supporting Actor Award at the RNTA Festival Awards
A M AT E U R T H E AT R E : INVENTED TRADITIONS
Commemorative glass and tie pin issued by the RNTA
AWARDS AND CEREMONIES AS CULTURAL HERITAGE ‘By creating awards for themselves, usually but not always under the auspices of a more or less formal professional association…practitioners of a new, neglected, minor or otherwise less than fully legitimate artistic form assert their desire for wider recognition, for a better place on the cultural field as a whole’.
James F. English, The Economy of Prestige (Cambridge, Massachusetts: University of Harvard Press, 2005) p. 63.
AMATEUR THEATRE: LOCAL AND NATIONAL CULTURAL HERITAGE AGENDAS • Amateur theatre companies often sustain local cultural heritage through their restoration and custodianship of key buildings. • Local and regional councils have also been known to incorporate amateur theatres into local heritage trails • Amateur theatre companies help disseminate and celebrate important local narratives, histories, industrial cultural heritage or cultural figures via its traditions and repertoire.
DIGITAL MEMORIES • Amateur theatre companies design and maintain websites that include ‘history’ or ‘archive’ in their drop-down menu options • Narratives chart the evolution of companies and chronologies of productions that go back up to a 100 years • A space to create on-line archives of scanned artefacts including posters, programmes, reviews and production photographs.
DIGITAL MEMORIES • YouTube – extending audiences – Bexhill Amateur Theatrical Society’s outdoor production of Hamlet from July 2011 has had 207,260 views (as at 30th August 2016). • Andrew Hoskins - ‘digital media introduce different equations of ephemera into our remembering processes’. • Rehearsal blogs open up new access to amateur theatre making and a greater personalisation of events.