Creative Collaborations: Outreach and the Performing Arts in Special Collections

Abstract

For Valentine’s Day 2019, the Lilly Library collaborated with the IU Department of Theatre, Drama, and Contemporary Dance on Lovelorn Lilly: Love Letters Read Live. This program featured dramatic readings by actors of selected love letters from the Lilly’s collections, including Edgar Allan Poe, Vita Sackville-West, and John Keats. The readings allowed attendees to engage with the letters, and the lives and narratives within them, in a creative and deeply moving way. IU Dramaturg Madison Colquette and Education and Outreach Librarian Maureen Maryanski worked together to select, transcribe, and arrange the letters into a program. Well-received by attendees and the local community, this creative collaboration revealed the power of decentering the interpretation of special collections materials from librarians and archivists to artists and members of the public. Such an approach to storytelling in special collections speaks to the great potential in artists engaging with materials, interpreting them in innovative ways, and using them as inspiration for new art. These interactions reimagine the essential dialogue that occurs within special collections libraries, between past and present, materials and people. This dialogue, and what results from it, whether scholarly research or artistic expression, can both challenge preconceptions and illustrate news ways of viewing and commenting on both the past and the present.