Jan Dorman’s Happy Prince as an Auto-Archive Cover Image

Szczęśliwy książę Jana Dormana jako autoarchiwum
Jan Dorman’s Happy Prince as an Auto-Archive

Author(s): Magdalena Rewerenda
Subject(s): History of Art
Published by: Instytut Sztuki Polskiej Akademii Nauk
Keywords: Jan Dorman;hauntology;theatre archives;performative studies;phantom;

Summary/Abstract: The paper proposes to study the documentation of Jan Dorman’s production based on Oscar Wilde’s Happy Prince as a model for Jan Dorman’s thinking about a connection and a feedback loop between theatre and archive. The production forms the basis for a more detailed examination of Dorman’s multi-layered interest in his own archive as well as the ways in which memories of his art and private life can be preserved. Using the findings developed in the area of archival turn and hauntology, the paper elaborates on the most important spheres of Dorman’s intentional self-archiving: his frantic collecting and cataloguing, the habit of constructing a cultural repository for himself and his co-workers, confabulating and self-mythologising, recycling of objects, characters and motifs to be used again in subsequent productions. In the resulting vision of Dorman’s archive, it appears to be a deliberately constructed performative space rather than merely a collection of material traces of his professional and private life.

  • Issue Year: 271/2019
  • Issue No: 3-4
  • Page Range: 196-212
  • Page Count: 17
  • Language: Polish