The Collected Works collaborated with The Museum of Performance + Design to develop and perform a new site-responsive performance based on materials found in the Museum’s performing arts archive. The project brought together artists devoted to creating theatrical performances within non-traditional environments and a rare collection representing the rich history of the San Francisco performing arts.

Archive Live by The Collected Works was performed by Tonyanna Borkovi, Renu Cappelli, Michael Hunter, Derek Phillips, and Ryan Tacata.

Four researcher-artists from The Collected Works activated materials from the archive through performance. Guided by pre-determined rules, they explored our stacks and pulled materials from our diverse collections. These materials were intermittently activated by the performing artists through speech, movement or play. Through this real time activation, impromptu narratives formed, invoking people, places and histories of the past, and evoking new connections, situations and conditions of human and dramatic interest. Through the durational performance, journals, correspondences, rare books, programs, unpublished manuscripts as well as recordings and visuals from the archive accumulated in the performance space, leaving a visual incremental trace of the remnants of history and the passing of time.

Audience members were immersed in an environment charged with history and had an extended, novel and three- dimensional experience of words, sounds and images from our archive as re-imagined and brought to life through the artists’ performance methodology, actions and use of space. The durational performance accommodated a wide and diverse audience and allowed for those in attendance to come and go and experience the transformation of the site and the performers’ engagement on their own time, and over time. Archive Life took place twice on June 17 and June 18, and offered a different performance experience each night.

This project was funded in part by the Zellerbach Family Foundation and W & F Hewlett Foundation

(Text description courtesy Museum of Performance + Design)

ARCHIVE LIVE AT THE MUSEUM OF PERFORMANCE + DESIGN from Pinecone Pictures on Vimeo.