La Bellone and the FAME festival are co-organizing a symposium to collectively reflect on the future of performing arts archives through the prism of gender. The history of the performing arts is widely documented in Belgium, and theaters and artists have centralized their archives in various places (Archives et Musées de la Littérature, Bellone, Archives communales, etc.), but as is often the case, making the history of women artists is proving more difficult than that of the great men of the theater.

Over the course of the day, we’ll hear a number of presentations designed to highlight the difficulties that can be encountered when trying to make the history of women artists, and then continue with a round-table discussion during which we’ll question what tools could be put in place to collect, enhance and research women in the theater more easily in archives. The afternoon will close with the public broadcast of the first episode of a podcast produced by Caroline Berliner, in collaboration with the FAME festival and Ecarlate la Compagnie as part of their Herstories project, which retraces the history of theater in Belgium in the second half of the 20th century to the present day through the eyes of women actors.