The Performance Calendar and the Database
By Stephen Johnson
The Performance Calendar is a standard research tool for the historian, in which the researcher assembles a chronological list of the performances that took place, focussing on a particular location, or genre, or performer, or all of these at once. This is one way of wrestling with the materials we collect about the historical events we want to understand better. The assembling of such a 'Calendar' helps us to organize the archival material we have found, and it allows us to grasp, in part, the changes in the character of these events over time.
Most historians have a few of these 'performance calendars' in their archives. For those of us old enough, they are made up of stacks (and stacks...and stacks...) of file cards, stored in purpose-made boxes...or shoeboxes. More recently, they are stored one of the many generations of database software, or simply in word-processing programs.
Some studies of performance are, in effect, prose performance calendars, organized chronologically and providing all the material information necessary to draw that timeline. Some studies only make passing reference to this tool, at which point it becomes an appendix, or an endnote, or is erased forever from the published work, though it is one of its foundations.
Recently I was given two shoeboxes, found in a corner of a storage room at my university. In it were hundreds of cards, each with an individual reference to a performance in Southern Ontario during the 19th Century. As it turned out, this was the raw material for a Calendar published as part of the book Early Stages: Theatre in Ontario 1800-1914, compiled by Richard Plant. It is now stored with Canada's Theatre Museum, and it will be included the database listed below.
The Database of performances has more or less replaced the hand-compiled calendar, for the simple reason that many searches can be carried out in a moment, with the same material. The power of these databases has changed considerably over the decades, something I know because I have been using them for decades. Saying this may seem archaic, because anyone reading this can create a database without difficulty. But at one point, I assure you, it was difficult--and it was new.
I began twenty years ago to compile databases on two subjects, one focussing on the development of early blackface minstrelsy in Britain, and the other on the movements of itinerant 'popular' performers in Southern Ontario (known at one time as 'Canada West'). The results of these research projects can be seen in any of the publications they have generated; but as for the information itself, it would remain inaccessible to other researchers, on paper and in a box, if it wasn't for the databases you can link to below.
These databases are part of a larger project using the same essential online tools, now housed at the University of Toronto Mississauga. That project is called On the Road Again (OTRA), and includes databases focussing on the touring professionals of late-medieval England, a part of the Records of Early English Drama, as well as my own. See the links below for more information:
The Fringes of Show Business in Canada West traces the history of Western-European itinerant performance throughout Southern Ontario from the early colonial settlement of the area prior to 1867, through to 1920. You can find out about the history of this database at
https://library2.utm.utoronto.ca/otra/canadawest/about
The database itself is available at https://library2.utm.utoronto.ca/otra/canadawest/
From the Website: "Searching period newspapers, journals, and archives, this database will record and make accessible information on a wide range of events, using a broad definition of the word performance--amateur and professional, resident and itinerant, narrative and variety, street performance and Grand Opera, church recitals and burlesque.
And about the Performance Calendar as a Research Tool: "Researchers in any area of theatre history typically create, at an early stage of their project, a performance calendar (or itinerary) that structures and relates the 'brute events' of study--the performances. Only then can the historian of performance proceed to locate potential repositories of extant archival materials--through this 'mapping' of a performer's movements--and begin the process of accumulating documentary evidence, and writing history. The performance calendar is all the more important for popular performance, because the performances were unsettled, itinerant, ephemeral."
There are many other such Performance Calendars, though few that relate to performance in these lands referred to as 'Canada,' and most of them are inaccessible, private. We hope, as a part of the Gatherings Project, to find ways to provide greater access to this 'raw data' in ways that will help to diversify the subject of performance.
For reference:
The Juba Project--Early Blackface Minstrelsy in Britain, 1842-1852 is a legacy project (that is, it is no longer active) that traces the growth and dissemination of the racist practice of blackface minstrelsy during the earliest years of the professional 'minstrel show,' particularly in the United Kingdom. It exploded in its popularity during these years, forged most of the characteristics we associate with that form, and became one of the pre-eminent entertainment 'businesses' in the English speaking world for decades afterward. Its effect was extreme, and its influence remains. See: https://library2.utm.utoronto.ca/otra/minstrels/about