Proper Research, Improper Memory

Abstract

Following on from the exploration of archives and archival promise in Chapter 2, this chapter examines the ‘academy’ as a second and connected forum or institution of documentary drive and activity. In this context, both archives and the academy are interested in the documentation of performance history; both able to claim, in part as a result of their production by experts and their institutional status, a powerful degree of authority and legitimacy. Discourses of archival worth promise access to an authentic memory of past performances; meanwhile the academy claims authority in scholarship and primary, archival research. If archives are the storehouse of performance history, then it is the respect for expert knowledge invested in the academy that can direct what gets looked at, remembered and recorded in the first place. Further, it is often the academy that invests meaning into (and which speaks for) the documentary traces of performances.