Welcome!
We are LuLing, Megan, and Alex, and we are PhD students from three different divisions across the university. As current fellows at the Center for Archival Research and Training (CART), we have been tasked with presenting, processing, interpreting the Shakespeare Santa Cruz Records.
Shakespeare Santa Cruz (SSC) was a professional repertory theater company based in and supported by UC Santa Cruz (UCSC). The non-profit theater company produced an annual summer festival that was started in 1981 and ran until 2013. The archival collection contains production files, administrative files, and key historical documents from almost every production put on by the company. It also contains various media, including recordings and soundtracks of productions and artist interviews. Together, UA 41: Shakespeare Santa Cruz Records is one of the largest archival collections housed in Special Collections, and the largest CART project ever.
This website serves two functions: first, it is a brief introduction to the more comprehensive finding aid to the collection, where you can explore the unique history of how Shakespeare Santa Cruz emerged (and only could have) in UCSC’s experimental, creative, and bucolic setting. But secondly, we’ve filtered the material through our own practice of archiving. In grappling with how to select materials from the archive to feature here, we decided to organize the website with three goals: to give a behind-the-scenes look into the production of the festival, to highlight each individual festival and the content of the productions, and to provide a window into the many publics that SSC engaged— from the university setting, to the local community, and even into the larger Shakespeare festival circuit nationally and globally. The website dovetails with a physical exhibition on the third floor of Special Collections at the UCSC McHenry Library, on view until October 2017.
