Portland: On Thursday, November 5, the American Theatre Archive Project (ATAP) Northwest Regional Team co-leader Natalia Fernández, along with Steering Committee Co-Chairs Colleen Reilly and Christa Williford, led a training workshop as part of the pre-conference program for Debating the Stakes in Theatre Performance and Scholarship, the annual conference of the American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR)-Theatre Library Association (TLA). The workshop was attended by a dynamic group of archivists, librarians, scholars, graduate students, and theatre volunteers.
The ATAP Archival Team Training was developed primarily to train archivists, documentarians, and theatre makers how to implement the ATAP Initiation program for a local theatre. It introduces ATAP’s mission and team structure, describes the ATAP Initiation Program and process, and engages common and extraordinary questions about archival activities. The November training focused primarily on the three stages of the ATAP process: the Pitch, the Assessment, and the Workshop. Portland area participants attended the workshop in preparation for conducting the ATAP Initiation program with Portland’s Artists Repertory Theatre through the ASTR sponsored 2015 ATAP Initiation Grant.
The November workshop also provided an opportunity for diverse stakeholders to communicate and connect around the critical issue of preserving the legacy of American theatre. As a pre-conference activity, the ATAP Workshop provided a reminder of the theatre practice that informs the scholarly and theoretical concerns of the conference. An initiative of ASTR, ATAP continues to work to create, educate, and facilitate local teams to support theatre makers in archiving records of their work for the benefit of artists, scholars, patrons and the public.