Opera Australia's vast collection has a new home
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Opera Australia will now have a place to house its vast collection of performance material after striking a deal with the Arts Centre in Melbourne.
The company's archive of props and costumes, including many worn by Dame Joan Sutherland, will be preserved as part of the Centre's Performing Arts Collection.
Opera Australia's Artistic Director Lyndon Terracini says the agreement means the public will be able to appreciate the hard work that goes on behind the scenes.
"It's important, very important to have this agreement with Arts Centre Melbourne," he said.
"It means that these iconic productions, these wonderful costumes and parts of sets can be on display in the Arts Centre's collection so members of the public can come and see them."
Arts Centre Melbourne's Chief Executive Judith Isherwood says Australia has an extradordinary legacy surrounding performing arts.
"The national companies, the companies like Opera Australia, are an important part of that story," she said.
"The wonderful thing about the Performing Arts Collection that Arts Centre Melbourne has been developing for over 30 years is that it's always had as its ambition to be truly representative of the breadth and depth of the performing arts industry in this country."
"We have over 500,000 items in this collection," she said.
"Everything from many of Kylie Minogue's stage costumes, Dame Edna Everage's costumes and so on, but also some really surprising materials, Nick Cave for example, has donated a lot of his material including notebooks and lyric sheets that he's worked on over the years."
Trish Butterworth is Dame Joan Sutherland's costume maker.
She has worked on dozens of intricate costumes worn by the late Soprano.
"When she opened her mouth, no-one sings like she did and I'm not an opera buff at all but she just gave you tingles."
"People will get an opportunity to see the kind of work that we do and reminisce about the Dame who was I suppose an icon of Australia and these days I find too that we have younger ones coming in and they don't know who she is so at least this will give some opening to understand what she was and who she was."
Others in the collection include costumes worn by Dame Nellie Melba in the 1800s.
There are also some of the unforgettable numbers made famous by Dame Edna Everage.
The famous gold hotpants worn by Kylie Minogue are also in the collection.
Comments
There is a bit more background to this acquisition here: http://performingartscollection.wordpress.com/2013/04/19/opera-aust...
The 'Research Centre', which provides public access to the collection, isn't unfortunately all that well used, it is also somewhat under resourced; however, if you are looking to access the collection for research or do a tour contact PAC on: researchservice@artscentremelbourne.com.au (see: http://www.artscentremelbourne.com.au/discover/collections-and-rese...). Some of the collection (~70,000 items) are listed at varying levels of detail via their online catalogue: http://collections.artscentremelbourne.com.au/paminter/imu.php?requ...; however, a significant portion of the collection isn't available online (they also have a rather substantial backlog of unprocessed material, some of which they aren't all that familiar with).
I used to be a curator at the Performing Arts Collection, it was a facinating place to work, with some wonderful collection material. Unfortunately the staff largely come from an art museum/curatorial background without archival skills, so there was a distinct lack of focus on managing their paper-based record collections. The Kylie Collection contains almost every costume she has ever worn, it is huge - I was always a bit surprised turning a corner in the stacks at PAC and coming across the box with the gold hot pants, or a feathered headdress. :-)
It is wonderful that this material is being made accessible via the Performing Arts Collection, although it is a great shame that there is only limited exhibition space at the Arts Centre Melbourne for display - with over 500,000 items the collection really does deserve to be housed in a dedicated musuem/exhibition space. Interestingly no mention is made of the paper/photographic/moving image records of the company.
How exciting I would love to see this collection next time I visit Melbourne.