Searching for Theory in the Performing Arts Archives

During my residency this summer in The New York Public Library’s Short-Term Fellows program,  I was able to immerse myself in more than forty boxes of materials donated to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts by a rather remarkable woman named Hallie Flanagan Davis, director of the Federal Theatre Project from 1935-1939.

Flanagan Davis appears to be somewhat well-known in the world of theater and performance studies, but has yet to be recognized as the visionary that she was in the realms of civic communication and rhetorical theory. Several scholars in the field of rhetoric, Ann George, Elizabeth Weiser and Janet Zepernick, argue that “women between the wars were not only using rhetoric; they were creating rhetorical theories, enacting them, and even writing them down—but they were writing in ways the mainstream either did not see, or did not acknowledge as ‘theory’” and their theories have been, as such, largely erased from history, (George et al., 13). Flanagan Davis is one such woman, and her recovery as a civic-rhetorician my goal.

While Flanagan Davis published several books and articles that speak to her theories, the theories are often embedded in a story of practice, fragmented, and up to the reader to interpret and stitch together. Fortunately, the materials she donated to the Billy Rose Theatre Division of the Library for the Performing Arts provide a much richer map of her theories, a map with texture that appeared slowly as I read page after page of archival material. I began noticing that there were about 12 phrases that appeared over and over again in different documents: in a Federal Theatre bulletin article, in a speech to Federal Theatre directors, in a letter to a congressman or friend, in her lecture notes. These phrases are consistent in their use of certain sets of terms or metaphors, but the exact wording often changes just slightly, and they very often have different sentences bookending them.

One example of this is the assertion that the theatre, “to be worth its salt…must have in that salt a fair sprinkling of gunpowder” (Box 24; Folder 2; p. 2). The words “to be worth its salt” and “sprinkling of gunpowder” remain consistent between appearances, but sometimes the sprinkling is described as liberal rather than fair, and sometimes it comes with no descriptor. Sometimes the context is a discussion about how theatre can be dangerous, how it can “shatter accepted patterns”; sometimes a discussion about how theatre should engage current problems and attempt to help remedy them, sometimes the need for theatre and socioeconomic life to interpenetrate one another. Sometimes the word “dangerous” is invoked, other times “explosive.”

These repeated phrases help to reveal the foundational aspects of Flanagan Davis’s theories, both because their repetition over time points to their importance, but also because their slight alterations over time act to clarify the meaning behind the phrases. Some of these repeated phrases can be found in Flanagan Davis’s published works, but they can only be found once, and in one incarnation. Her archival materials, in their overlapping, repetitive nature, reflect her theories as they were being built, organically; the terms and ideas she kept coming back to are the ones that the archivist, too, will keep coming back to, even as she moves forward one box at a time.

The whole process gave new weight to the phrase, what is repeated is important. I had always been taught that phrase in relationship to literary analysis—what is repeated in the text is important—but here it seems the most apt advice for archival recovery of theory as well. The things the theorist dwells on, repeats, comes back to, re-states over and over are likely both of importance and intrigue to her, are likely the cornerstones of her theory. Thus, what the archives, and this fellowship revealed to me was nothing less than that: insights into the cornerstones of Flanagan Davis’s theories, and the chance to more honestly and accurately reflect those theories.