Archival Gaps

“So many people complain about silences in archives, but that doesn’t mean they’re actually quiet.” 

I was listening to Ruth Wilson Gilmore, scholar and prison abolitionist, being interviewed by Krista Tippett for the On Being podcast, when I heard her speak about the silences in the archives. It was an articulation of something that had been rattling around in my own mind -- about archival gaps not actually being empty. 

When the archives are empty or “silent” you must go look in noisier places: arrest records, trial transcripts, cookbooks, diaries. The story is at the edges of photographs and in the fine print of footnotes. 

This is something that The Anthropologists theatre company has intuited since its founding in 2008 and the development of our first full length play, Give Us Bread (2009). The official record had very little to say about immigrant women in 1917 who took to the streets to insist on their right to affordable food. My quest to find their voices in photographs and Yiddish newspapers and turn-of-the-century homemaker guides is documented here.

History and humanity are often stored in objects.

As the title of our current play, axes, herbs and satchels suggests, history and humanity are often stored in objects. “Even in their most organized form,” Tiya Miles asserts in All That She Carried, “archived records are mere scraps of accounts of previous happenings, ‘rags of realities’ that we painstakingly stitch together in order to picture past societies.”  

Each play The Anthropologists makes is built on a foundation of research. We’ve never relied solely on what is academically authorized. Indeed, we’ve been ironic or subversive, once basing a play on a Kickstarter fundraising campaign (see No Man’s Land, 2016). With curiosity as our flashlight, we traverse the space between the “official” archives; that’s where our imagination breathes. 

The word archive refers to both the repository for historical records or materials, as well as the materials themselves.

How does the form of the content itself influence the form of the art?

As theatre makers, the implications of the archives go beyond the stories which are -- or are not-- stored there. In the structure of our storytelling and our staging, we are constantly asking, how do you illustrate or acknowledge the archival gaps? How does the form of the content itself influence the form of the art? The archives can construct the architecture of a play. Their contours become the topography of the world that our characters traverse. 

A photo of a research coding session led by co-writers Sandie Luna and Melissa Moschitto.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore again: “the study of geography and drama are very similar. They’re both about making worlds.” (In the On Being interview, I was delighted to learn that before Ruth became a geographer and prison scholar, she earned a B.A. in drama.)

In No Pants In Tucson (2021), a play about gender oppressive laws, we confronted the gaps by contesting the material in front of, or directly to the audience, asking them to be partners in verifying or denying the archives. In No Man’s Land, a series of vignettes -- each with its own aesthetic and unique protagonist(s) -- is disrupted by the ensemble themselves, as they interrogate each other. Ultimately, the final “act” is created  through collective storytelling; as if at a campfire, they reconstruct, imagine and revise the story of a woman whose story lives in the fragment of a news story.  

Interacting with the archives onstage; Mariah Freda in NO MAN'S LAND

When the archives are loud.

Artemisia’s Intent (2018) is largely rooted in court transcripts. The 2000s burst through as an echo of 1612. Sometimes, you couldn’t differentiate between the testimony of Taylor Swift and that of Artemisia Gentileschi, despite there being 4 centuries between them. That’s the point. Women’s voices, asserting their truths, remain an unmistakable constant. While touring the show in Scranton, PA, we tuned into the Brett Kavanagh hearings. Through the television screen, we heard the questioning of Artemisia’s assailant, except it was lawmakers questioning Dr. Blase Ford. We shuddered. The questions were almost identical. 

In that moment, the archive was so loud.

How do we seek these stories and how do we listen?

“When trying to understand humanity, seek out firsthand accounts.” (Glennon Doyle, Untamed). How do we seek them and how do we listen? In order to locate people who aren’t white, male and straight, we must look for them from the perspective of the archivist, the researcher or even the journalistic language of the time. With the now-weaponized search term, we attempt to detect them. This means using language that is at best, outdated, and at worse, harmful, in order to find these stories. For example, “negro” paired with "male attire" led us to the Black women would-be voters who took to the streets of Alabama, dressed in male clothing as they headed to the polls (She Tried To Vote In Pants, 2020).

Language has always been a weapon and a tool; in both regards it must be wielded sharply in this time of erasure. 

As we’ve discovered while researching Black midwives in the American South, the silence in the historical record is not always the result of omission from the official record, by decision of the historian or the institution. During her field work, Anthropologist Gertrude Jacinta Fraser observed a reticence from communities to share information. “Privileged silence and restraint,” she explains, are “effective tools for containing and holding onto personal and communal narratives.” (African American Midwifery in the South: Dialogues of Birth, Race, and Memory)

Silence can mean protection. It can also point to non-verbal communication. It can ask us to listen closer to the axe, the herb and the satchel. But we cannot afford to silence these stories any longer.