Update on the Theatre Museum

[Denis Salter]

Dear All, 

Below is the official position from the V&A regarding the collections at the Theatre Museum.  Please circulate to all colleagues and students.  

Information regarding special collections can be accessed via www.backstage.ac.uk as well as the Theatre Museum webiste.  Online guided tours, images and other resources are available via our peopleplay webiste www.peopleplayuk.org.uk  and the library catalogue contains information on some of the prompt-book collections, National Video Archive of Performance and books catalogued since 1999: http://catalogue.nal.vam.ac.uk .


Thanks, Kate



The Theatre Museum Collections Centre at Blythe House:

Although the Theatre Museum's site in Covent Garden will be closed from Jan 2007 there is no intention to change the status, role or strategy of the Theatre Museum as the UK's national collection for the performing arts.  Our work of documenting performance and developing our collections will continue, and research access to them will go on being provided, as now, at our premises in Kensington Olympia, where the collections have been located since June 2005.  Indeed, one of the outcomes of the closure of the museum building in Covent Garden will be to redirect financial resources into developing a range of online materials and touring exhibitions designed to give the public better access to our collections.

The Theatre Museum possesses the largest collections in the world relating to the UK's performing arts.  One of their strengths is that these are constantly updated with new material relating to both contemporary and historical performance. Once items are transferred to our ownership, we are committed to preserving them in perpetuity and in accordance with the highest standards of curatorship.

The Collections Centre is open to all researchers (academics, theatre professionals, family historians, students and interested members of the public) by appointment  (tel: 0207 943 4727, email tmenquiries at vam.ac.uk).  Researchers  can use the reading room to watch videos, study documents, designs and photographs, make use of the museum's library and obtain advice and guidance from curatorial staff.   In addition to this, the museum holds regular open days for those interested in larger or more fragile objects which cannot be issued in the reading room, these include costume and stage technology tours.  We also run an enquiries service for the profession and the general public available by emailing  tmenquiries at vam.ac.uk or ringing 0207 943 4735.

Dr Kate Dorney, 
Curator of Modern and Contemporary Performance, 
V&A Theatre Museum

Tel: 0207 471 9872
Fax: 020 7471 9864
E-mail: k.dorney at vam.ac.uk 
 
Visit www.peopleplayuk.org.uk to see Theatre History online










_________________________________________________________________
" . . . we have to accept that our tragedy lies always in our past, that we have to live with our ancestors' folly and suffer for it, just as they, in their turn, suffered, and as we, through our vanity and ignorance, ensure the pain and suffering of our own children. How to correct history, that's the thing."--Robert Fisk
____________________________________
"In 2005, the world . . . pass[ed] the trillion-dollar mark in the expenditure, annually, on arms. We're fighting for $50 billion annually for foreign aid for Africa: the military total outstrips human need by 20 to 1. Can someone please explain to me our contemporary balance of values?" --Stephen Lewis.
__________________________________________________
Denis Salter
Professor of Theatre
McGill University
853 Sherbrooke St. West
Montréal, QC
H3A 2T6
Tel (514) 398 6592 
Regular Fax (514) 398 8146
Computer Fax (309) 294 0444
denis.salter at mcgill.ca
__________________
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://artsservices.uwaterloo.ca/pipermail/candrama/attachments/20061114/981b1623/attachment.html>