In February 2024 began the work of creating an online platform to organize and safeguard the archives of the Roy Hart Voice Centre, with the aim of making more widely accessible this intellectual and artistic patrimony which includes an immense volume and variety of documents, correspondence, conferences, programs, scores, posters and performance texts dating back to the inter-war period and an invaluable sound archive spanning eighty years from rare recordings with Alfred Wolfsohn to recent performances, and the inestimably valuable photographic archives, in particular the personal archives of Ivan Midderigh and his virtual photographic history of the work since Alfred Wolfsohn with audio narration. The video archives span seven decades.

This project has been made possible through a generous grant from the French Ministry of Culture’s regional direction in Occitanie.

Our core partners are  the Société Civile Immobilière de Malérargues, the Malérargues Endowment Fund, and the Universidade Federal do Maranhão (UFMA), Brazil, assisted by the Departmental Archives of Nimes and the University of Rennes II.

Thanks to the partnership with UFMA, negotiated and led by Paula Molinari, professor at UFMA and teacher at the Roy Hart Voice Centre, with the collaboration of Roosewelt da Silva, expert in Bibioteconomia at the Universidade Federal do Maranhão, Brazil, the ArcheCOM project is supported by a team of students under their supervision. Pamela Christiana de Almeida, resident in Brazil, and Rosa Linate, resident at Malérargues are responsible for the scanning and indexation of the archives with the support and oversight of the team in Brazil.

Roosewelt da Silva is creating the website that will interface with the online secure platform where the archives are stored. This website will then be the media pathway for the public to access these archives. This will prove to be a resource for not only the general public interested in the story these archives unfold, but will be a source of information for teachers, students and all those concerned with voice in performance and the pivotal role of the human voice in life.

Fund-raising efforts and private donations have raised considerable funds, but we still lack the 5700 € required to match the grant from the French Ministry of Culture in order to receive the full grant. We ask you therefore to consider supporting this project through donation via the GoFundMe online crowd funding portal here.

Your generosity will assist us in completing the scanning and indexation process. It will ensure we have the funds for Ivan Midderigh and his team to complete the visual history and it will enable us to access the essential equipment and expertise we need to complete the digitization of the audio archives, mainly constituted by hundreds of spools and even long player vinyls engraved in the fifties. It will enable us to create a website that is not simply a repository of information but is active in presenting the archives in a way that invites curiosity and supports research.

We owe a debt of gratitude to Roy Hart Theatre founding members Clara Silber-Harris and Paul Silber had the foresight to bring together and commence the process of organizing the scattered archives at the Roy Hart Voice Centre almost twenty years ago. Thanks to their long-term commitment to this work these archives were preserved and Paul Silber digitized a number of rare recordings and films. Since then several other founding members of Roy Hart Theatre have made their personal archives available to the ArcheCOM project.

How can you help?

The most direct way is by making a donation via the online crowd funding portal here.

TAX DEDUCTIONS

Residents of France, Germany, Italy, and Spain can claim tax relief for all donations.

FRANCE: Residents of France are automatically eligible to claim tax relief for all donations and tax receipts will be issued on request to contact@centreroyhart.org

GERMANY: Residents of Germany can claim tax relief for donations. For further information please contact Marie-Christine Schwager-Duhse M.A., Head of Programme Transnational Giving, Maecenata Foundation

Email: mcs@maecenata.eu 
Tel: +49 30 283 87 909

ITALY: Residents of Italy can claim tax relief for donations. For further information please contact the Fondo Filantropico Italiano

Email: tge@fondofilantropicoitaliano.it
Tel: +39 02 49412960

SPAIN: Residents of Spain can claim tax relief for donations. For further information please contact the Fundación Empresa y Sociedad

Email: fabad@empresaysociedad.org
Tel: +34 676 270 816

For further general information on the archives project please contact archecom@centreroyhart.org