BARRY KAY ARCHIVE

London

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Creating a new logo for SIBMAS

Bibliographic Notes

Graphic Design

At the 26th SIBMAS Congress in Vienna, 2006, the Barry Kay Archive suggested the Organization consider a new logo, meaningfully reflecting its mission as the International Association of Libraries and Museums of the Performing Arts.

Subsequently, we started designing the logo in the spring of 2007 and made our presentation to the President of SIBMAS in the summer of the same year. To read about the design development and view variations of the logo please go to Noticeboard - News.

Barry Kay Archive - February 2008

On this page are recorded the Barry Kay Archive's essential activities concluded in respect of cooperation, data exchange and research with and for professionals and academic institutions, of collaboration with commercial enterprises, and in pursuits of the Archive's own interests and goals.

Cooperation afforded us by professionals and organizations are chronicled under Acknowledgments.

Acquisitions
for the Archive

Scenery and Costume Designs

In April 2007, at a Melbourne auction sale of the artefact collection of the late Australian impresario Clifford Hocking MA, the Barry Kay Archive managed to secure four set designs by Barry Kay for The Rake's Progress. These works, dating from 1953, represent the only complete set of scenery designs for a single production that the Archive now holds of Kay's very early career. Whether they were intended for the ballet or the opera, both of the same title, requires research, as do all other production details.

Further acquired lots consisted of a costume Design for two Russian Boyars, guests at Aurora's wedding in The Sleeping Beauty (Ballet Deutsche Oper Berlin, 1967), and a signed artist's proof, mezzotint cum lithograph, of the set design for Métaboles (Ballet de l'Opéra de Paris, 1978).

Barry Kay Archive - June 2007

Frank van Straten & Live Performance Australia

Reciprocal
Data Exchange

In the summer of 2006, Frank van Straten - performing arts historian and founding director of the Performing Arts Museum at the Victoria Arts Centre, Melbourne - got in touch with the Barry Kay Archive. Frank was commissioned by the Australian Entertainment Industry Association, since known as Live Performance Australia, to provide short biographies about eighty artists, including Barry Kay, plus twenty other professionals, selected to be honoured with an award for their outstanding achievements in the performing arts. The biographies were intended to accompany the awards.

Due to the recent death of the impresario Clifford Hocking AM, who held the most information on Barry Kay's early professional career than anyone else, Frank found himself in a similar situation as we did, in that neither of us had a chance to obtain the information from Cliff before he died. Consequently, throughout July and August, frantic research on both our parts ensued, followed by an exchange of in-hand and newly found data.

This fruitful exchange resulted in Frank being able to write his biography about Kay which, alongside all other biographies, constitutes the cornerstone of the virtual Hall of Fame, that Live Performance Australia inaugurated in lieu of the initially intended physical award. The Archive benefited in that the Biography page, covering Kay's career from 1932 to 1955, could be expanded substantially.

Barry Kay Archive - August 2006

Congress
Participation

26th International SIBMAS Congress

As an Institutional Member of SIBMAS the Barry Kay Archive participated in this bi-annually recurring event for the first time in its short history. Held under the title Performing Arts Collections on the Offensive / Les collections d'arts du spectacle passent à l'offensive, the Congress took place in Vienna, 28 August - 1 September 2006.

Present at the Congress were Michael Werner, Founder, Director and Curator of the Archive - and Swen Tromm MBCS CITP, IT Technician and the Archive's Webmaster. At the home front Dr Peggy Pawlowski, Curatorial Consultant to the Archive and primarily responsible for Conservation and Research, was instrumental in organizing and preparing Michael's and Swen's congressional papers.

Michael introduced Barry Kay, the Artist - and the Barry Kay Archive, outlining why and how the latter came into existence, its purpose and objectives. He reported on the Archive's involvement and co-operation, cited its achievements as well as its needs to enable it to be of service to both professionals and the public, and adumbrated some of its future projects.

Swen presented the first stage of software he is developing for the Archive's researchable cross-reference database.

Barry Kay Archive - September 2006

Archive Viewing

Arnold Wengrow

For the purpose of research, Arnold Wengrow - Professor Emeritus of Drama, University of North Carolina, Asheville - paid the Barry Kay Archive a visit to view its contents in the autumn of 2005.

Impressed and captivated by the details present in Barry Kay's numerous preliminary sketches and drawings for both costume and set designs, he pointed out that they constitute the most important hard-fact evidence documenting the various approached that eventually lead to the final design and its ephemeral presentation on stage.

Arnold expressed surprise that no biography about Barry Kay has as yet been written and published in print.

Arnold is an arts writer and contributing editor of Theatre Design & Technology, the journal of the United States Institute for Theatre Technology. Among many of his engagements he was also responsible for organizing the exhibition "Observe and Show: The Theatre Art of Michael Annals", held at the London Theatre Museum in 2003-2004.

Barry Kay Archive - October 2005

Home
About Us
Biography
Design Opus
Photography Opus
Notes & Texts
Homage
Ex Operibus
Noticeboard
--> News
--> Progress
--> Activities
--> Acknowledgments
--> Feedback
Archive Plaza
Overview
Site Map
Links
Contact

Collaboration

Comme des Garçons

In the spring of 2005 the Barry Kay Archive collaborated most successfully with Comme des Garçons, Rei Kawakubo's distinguished Japanese couture house. Their London advertising agency had already earmarked designs by Ralph Koltai to accentuate their mailer of the 2005 spring collection when, at the last minute, they turned to us having located our website and found Barry Kay's designs to be superiorly suited to their purpose.

Chosen were one image each of Kay's maquettes for two ballets - Les Quatre Saisons and Solitaire. These images, printed in Japan on semi-translucent parchment in poster format and elegantly packaged, accompanied other promotional material distributed to a selected international clientele in the USA, Japan, the UK, Germany, France, Russia and Eastern Europe.

As a result an increased number of visitors to the Archive's website was registered.

Barry Kay Archive - March 2005

Cooperation

Charles Spencer

In 2004, Charles Spencer, dance critic and author, granted the Barry Kay Archive permission for the online publication of his essay Isadora Dances Again which, in conjunction with Barry Kay's photographic feature of Kenneth MacMillan's ballet Isadora, originally appeared in the Sunday Times Magazine in April 1981. At a later date, the Archive reciprocated in providing Spencer with photographs depicting him with Kay in Athens while setting up an exhibition of stage and costume designs by the latter.

Charles Spencer is the author of "Erté", "Leon Bakst and the Ballets Russes" and "The World of Serge Diaghilev".

Barry Kay Archive - October 2004

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