Event Documentation with Kelly Strayhorn Theater
Alton Merrell performing at Kelly Strayhorn Theater's Suite Life event, November 2023. Video still by Bright Archives.
As Bright Archives nears our fourth month of business, we are curious to see how our proposed services — archival consulting, oral history, videography, and media production — match up with our clients’ actual needs. We are grateful that work with organizations and entities like Kelly Strayhorn Theater, Mattress Factory, slowdanger, and Meshwork Press has provided us opportunities to try out our services.
Since July 2023, we’ve made three trips to Kelly Strayhorn Theater (KST) for three different projects — KST’s annual House Party fundraiser, the jazz benefit concert Suite Life, and most recently, a performance by multidisciplinary performance entity slowdanger. For each of these events, we brought a few video cameras and documented performances, dance parties, and crowds.
The resulting deliverables serve multiple purposes. 1) They form an archival record of what happened, be it Alton Merrell’s solo piano arrangement Billy Strayhorn’s “Day Dream” or slowdanger’s visceral response to the climate crisis and media sensationalism with the dance work SUPERCELL. 2) These video deliverables can be used for promotion. In the first half of 2024, we’ll be cutting together a few trailers to promote future KST events, which will surely arrive at a YouTube or Instagram near you. 3) These videos can help to foster new work if included as work samples in grant applications.
Working with KST is also personally rewarding, as I have, in the past, graced their stage as a dancer and musician. I’ve danced in KST’s adventurous Freshworks residency series, led a band for one of the annual fundraisers, and curated the short-lived Hear/Now Series, which helped to spawn Lightlab, a performance series that I co-ran with slowdanger for six years. So, KST has been important for my own artistic growth, and it’s great to help document the ongoing history of an institution that is so important to the neighborhood of East Liberty and up-and-coming artists in Pittsburgh.
