Sara Freeman: The Alternative and the Archive: On Theatre Companies as Historiographical Objects

    How will the availability of company archives interact with periodization and narration of British alternative theatre from the late twentieth century? As history about alternative theatre in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s ceases to be written by participants and observers of the time and comes to be re/written more and more by people who were not and could not have been there, both the presence of archives containing company records and working documents and the use of material in those archives will require increased theorization about the ways the preserved records and artifacts of an alternative theatre company differ from the archive of another type of company.
    Archives were pioneered by state institutions and are associated with “authorized” entities of social or political power. Does a company like the Royal Shakespeare Company or the Royal National Theatre produce a legitimate archive while Joint Stock or Gay Sweatshop only leave a hodge-podge collection of remains? Once that hodge-podge finds a home in a library, however, does the legitimizing process turn its trajectory? What can be seen when alternative theatre is legitimized this way? The paper elaborates how the archives of alternative theatre companies prove to be fertile sites of historiographical inquiry since the company’s alterity-in-practice results in a collection of documents and artifacts that foreground issues about how material is collected and saved, how it was or was not designed to be seen, what may be overemphasized or lost within archives, and what can and cannot be put into text about the embodied work of a theatre company.
     In the specific case of Gay Sweatshop and Joint Stock, the availability of archival material allows for insight about the actions of longstanding alternative groups in the late 1980s. By charting my journey through boxes in Gay Sweatshop’s archive at Royal Holloway University and the Joint Stock archive at the University of California at Davis to figure out what happened to the groups in 1988/1989, the paper develops a proposal about periodization: 1988 starts a small but distinct period, a jointure of six years when trends in British alternative theatre decisively reorient and which marks the difference between what in “the 80s” alternative had been and what in “the 90s” alternative would become.