For twenty one years, Talawa has kept detailed records of every production that it has mounted. It has also completed a number of projects aimed at documenting Black Theatre and its achievements, including a series of taped interviews with pioneers of Black British theatre called
Blackstage, an oral history of Black Theatre in Britain. Yvonne Brewster, Talawa's founder and Artistic Director, was at a cultural festival in Ghana in 1994 when she heard that Norman Beaton, star of Desmond's and one of Britain's most accomplished black actors, had died. She was hit not only by a sense of personal loss, but by a sense that history was slipping away.
"It made me realise that we had no record of what he'd done," she says. "If you go into the archives you have nothing. That night I thought, 'We've got to do something about this'. And that's when I actually drafted the little proposal to the Arts Council."
The result is
Blackgrounds and
Blackstage, two oral histories of black theatre in Britain.
Blackgrounds (recorded in 1997 and supported by Arts Council England) and
Blackstage (recorded in 2002 and supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund) consist of 16 videotaped interviews with the pioneers of black British theatre-from the first black student of RADA to the man who started Britain's first funded black theatre company.
Until now, this collection of recordings, and all Talawa show materials, have been housed in Talawa's offices. Students and theatre practitioners involved in research or project development have been allowed access to it and as far as possible, care has been taken to maintain the collection intact. We are aware however, of how valuable a resource this archive is and of the need for it to be properly housed and curated.
In July 2007 the Heritage Lottery Fund granted an award of £235,000 towards the cataloguing and preservation of Talawa's valuable archive collections. This award enabled the Company to establish a consortium project with Future Histories, the Victoria and Albert Museum's Theatre Collections and Access to Archives (A2A). Working under the title Trading Faces: Recollecting Slavery - the project partners undertook a range of heritage education initiatives to help widen access to information about Black British performance histories
In December 2007 the Talawa archive was relocated to the V&A Theatre Collections at Blythe House to make the records accessible to the general public for research purposes. Work was also completed for an online exhibition for the Trading Faces: Recollecting Slavery project that includes a selection of digitised images from the Talawa archive collections.
This can be accessed at
www.tradingfacesonline.com
Other useful links are:
For further information about the Talawa archive, please contact Havana Wellings-Longmore at hq@talawa.com
