December 2024 Group of the Month: Leeds Children's Theatre Archive Group
Leeds Children’s Theatre Archive Group was first created back in May 2000 with the specific purpose of creating an archive that captured the long history of our drama society; somewhere to share all those programmes, posters, press clippings and photographic images that have been gathering dust in our homes for many decades.
The archive is part of the drama society’s online presence and is currently undergoing an overhaul, ready to relaunch in 2025 as part of our 90th anniversary celebrations.
Tell us about the communities you work with and how you engage with them.
The online archive is being designed to be accessible to anyone interested in our activities; current, past and prospective members & their families; past audience members; the wider community.
Please tell us how you feel your work has contributed to preserving community heritage and/or broadened the appeal of community archives to a wider group of people?
Voluntary and amateur theatre can be very fluid as it offers a huge range of opportunities to people, not just performers. Some people get involved for a single production or activity; others remain active within the group for many years. Having the archive, which will hopefully include evidence of these multiple tasks and roles, will educate visitors about the entire range of skills and tasks undertaken by members of our theatre community over the years.
The archive aims to provide evidence of our regular drama workshops, our mainstage productions, any outreach projects we’ve been involved in, as well as a few testimonials from past members describing how they have benefited from their time with the society. Examples of lifelong friendships gained, as well as some who decided to develop their passions into a career as performers, educators, producers, theatre and TV industry professionals.
Can you provide us with examples of running activities that have beneficial impacts on the physical, mental and social wellbeing of individuals and communities?
Although the archive hasn’t ‘run archive activities’ for many years now, it does allow us the means to record evidence of our theatre groups’ activities.
Our twice-yearly theatre productions involve many people working together over many months, and each play is usually only performed five times to an audience, so having a photographic record alongside a poster and programme is all the physical evidence most people will have to record the experience. Whilst the society has in the past gifted a photo album of each show to its director, these were usually unique one-offs due to cost and not available to anyone else involved in the production. These albums have been a wonderful resource for populating our electronic archive.
Do you use a website and/or social media to promote your organisation’s work? If so, please provide details.
Leeds Children’s Theatre has had a website for many years, used to promote the society and its activities. When COMMANET became obsolete we did put much of our archive material online via a separate website. However, much of the work fell to one of our members and the project stalled for a while. As it’s the society’s 90th anniversary year in 2025 it’s hoped that a redesign and relaunch of the archive website can be done during the year. The ongoing costs for hosting an online archive does have to be a consideration, as well as the practicalities / usability for doing regular updates going forwards. We still produce our plays and run workshops which will all need to be included.
We would like you to tell us what makes you special? What do you do amazingly well or perhaps differently to everyone else? Is there someone working in your group who’s gone the extra mile? We really want to know how you’re showing innovation in areas that are important to you.
Before the days of television and the internet there was cinema and theatre, and our archive is a useful tool to show how children’s literature as well as theatre production techniques/technology have developed since 1930s. Evidence of the changes in theatre attendance by schoolchildren and families, the choice of plays and changing production values are all to be found within our archive.
Sadly, most members involved in the setting up of the original archive group back in 2000 are no longer alive, and it’s now being looked after by just one of the team. A lot of material has been donated over the years and as a ‘passion project’ there have been times when work has been paused, but the aim is to relaunch the complete archive online as part of Leeds Children’s Theatre’s 90th anniversary celebrations.
As a ‘living archive’ there will need to be regular updates too, recording details of all future productions and activities as they happen.
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