Professor Pietro Clemente, University of Florence
2005 award - major research project
£
40,000 for 12 months.
This project is based on a previous census of archives of folklore and oral history in Tuscany and its main focus is Folk Theatre. Folk Theatre in Tuscany is a diffused form of ritual theatre, tied to the crop-growing year cycle and the religious calendar. The most documented genres are the “Maggio Drammatico” and the “Maggio Lirico”. Both performances are acted and sung by groups of local people, on the 1st of May in the countryside. The two genres are diffused in two different areas; the Drammatico is mainly located in the northern part of Tuscany, while the Lirico is typical of the South.
Most of these genres are not practiced any more, as changes in the socio-economic situation of Tuscany have produced deep cultural transformations. The only traces left to reconstruct the history of these various forms of Folk Theatre are in sound and audiovisual records, photographs and written texts that altogether constitute an enormous documentary heritage on the history and development of Folk Theatre in Tuscany.
The aim of this project has been to make digital copies of this documentation. All these materials were at risk of deteriorating if they were not going to be copied onto digital supports. The documents have been digitized onto CDs and DVDs in order to prevent deterioration.
31 archives have been selected and 28 finally took part. These have often been created by local people who have documented their involvement in the Folk Theatre with a tape recorder or a video camera. This project was explicitly targeted on these small content-based archives which did not have the necessary funding to preserve their materials.
All the digitized documentation will be open for consultation at the partner archive (the National Archive of Florence), the Library of the Faculty of Literature and Philosophy of the University of Siena and at the British Library.
Links
National Archive of Florence :
http://www.archiviodistato.firenze.it/nuovosito/
Library of the Faculty of Literature - University of Siena
http://prometeo.lett.unisi.it/
Department of History of Arts and Theatre – University of Florence
http://www.disas.unifi.it/
