The digital archive as storyteller

Abstract

Theatre in South Africa is deeply entrenched in the art of storytelling. We live, speak and move our stories in our embodied performance practices. While performance and its development are by their nature ephemeral, how can they be captured as data? And how can the data develop digital outputs that eventually tell their own stories? This paper will outline the way in which the rehearsal process of Antigone (not quite/quiet), the first of three practice-based research productions of the ReTAGS project, was documented and curated into an online repository. As data stewards, we will share the journey undertaken to migrate the ephemeral process of theatre devising into interactive and searchable data on UCT’s digital collections platform, Ibali. We chronicle the processes and jobs undertaken to capture, catalogue, document, enhance, curate and showcase the material. We explore how an online repository can be constructed not only in order to share the multiple stories present in the rehearsal process, but to encourage further engagements to advance a rigorous living archive. Through this we aim to give precedence to the way artist-researchers can use performance-based methods as reputable means by which to produce data, in order to drive academic research.