Derrida's Archive Fever guides much of the discussion in Scrapbooks, Snapshots and Memorabilia, an account of adventures in the business of documentary collecting which uses as examples various performance archives from Australia, the US, Britain and New Zealand. According to Maryrose Casey, this book may be read as an example of the third archive – that created by researchers themselves. Indeed, each chapter here is like another tantalizing box waiting to be opened, its otherwise hidden contents suddenly on bright display. There are even boxes within boxes, such as Tom Burvill and Mark Seton's random dissection of Sidetrack Theatre's not-yet archive, currently stashed away in a tin shed in suburban Marrickville.
Glen McGillivray proposes two types of archive: public and private. However, this collection deals largely with the latter, and it originally grew from the AusStage project, a database aiming to record information on every live performance event in Australia (www.AusStage.edu.au). Thus Gillian Arrighi and David Watt's chapter documents one of the earliest examples: a ‘carauberie’ (corroboree) by indigenous people as described in Governor Lachlan Macquarie's journal, and very possibly the first record of a professional performance in the Newcastle (NSW) region.
Scrapbooks also reminds us that, in a pre-digital age, even this most notoriously ephemeral of art forms can leave behind significant material traces, often saved arbitrarily (depending on the dedication/obsession of the individual collectors involved). An example of this can be seen in the remarkable scrapbooks kept by sisters Alice and Rita Lawrence documenting in meticulous detail a series of private productions among New York's upper crust over nearly six decades from 1874 to 1935.
There are many fascinating questions raised by this book. When does mere private detritus become historical record? Who decides what is kept and what is discarded? Can an archive be subversive, as Foucault suggests? Will the field of history be claimed as much by the humble collector as by dominant cultural institutions? And does this mean that the very process of archiving automatically canonizes what is kept? As someone currently immersed in over thirty boxes of the ‘not-yet archive’ of TheatreWorks, Melbourne's former site-specific community performance company, Scrapbooks, Snapshots and Memorabilia proves a timely theoretical and documentary resource that I, for one, need to have, while its timeliness and applicability to methodological problems in the conservation and historiography of live performance documentation recommend it widely.
