The STAGE Project

• Main Authors: Lynde, Denyse, Ormsby, Rob, Quigley, Colleen, Halford, Tom
• Format: Report
• Language: English
• Published: The Harris Centre 2013
• Subjects: Newfoundland
• Online Access: https://research.library.mun.ca/8152/; https://research.library.mun.ca/8152/1/12-13-ARF-Final-Lynde.pdf

The STAGE project was re-started in 2011, after it had been on hiatus for several years. For the project, students interviewed members of Newfoundland and Labrador’s performing arts community and then transcribed those interviews. STAGE’s origins were in a three-sided relationship among the University’s library, the English Department and the theatre community. By the time the original STAGE project went into hiatus in 2003, 275 people had been interviewed and 65 students were employed as interviewers. By extending the project’s activities we continued to build the archive of recorded and transcribed interviews, acquired performing arts material to be added to the archives (i.e. in people’s personal collections including play-scripts, posters, pictures, programs, etc), reviewed the current state of the STAGE holdings and updated information that needed to be updated. Furthermore, recording the interviews and including that video material in the archives enables those using the archives to read, hear, and watch the interviews. The interviews provided an opportunity to solicit archivable material (posters, playbills, etc.) from the interviewees. The interviews are of great benefit to stakeholders in the province: they contain a tremendous amount of factual detail about the history of performing arts in Newfoundland and Labrador; shed light on individual careers and how practitioners relate to various institutions; the STAGE archive provides an extremely valuable resource to theatre practitioners, to researchers, and to media when writing about performing arts communities. Our objectives were derived from our observations about the nature of the interviews and their value as records of the province’s culture. In light of these facts about what the STAGE project is able to document and the kind of experience that the interviewing process is able to provide the students, we established the following objectives: - Continue to build the archive of interviews and memorabilia - Consolidate the gains of the earlier phase ...