SAPA Foundation: The history of an archive
Three become two and finally one - ASD, mediathektanz.ch, STS, CSD/STA become SAPA. The SAPA Foundation, Swiss Archiveof the Performing Arts ( Schweizer Archiv der Darstellenden Künste/CollectionSuisse de la danse ), which emerged from the merger of the Swiss Dance Archive/CollectionSuisse de la danse and the Swiss Theater Collection in 2017, can build on a long tradition of collecting. One of the aims of the Swiss Theater Collection, which emerged from what is now the Swiss Society for Theater Culture (SGTK) founded in 1927, was to collect not only domestic and foreign theater literature but also visual material and models of theater buildings, which were later made accessible to the public in a museum. There are numerous traces of this earlier collecting activity, even if other goals are pursued today.
In Lausanne, the dance researcher and journalist Jean Pierre Pastori took the initiative in 1993 to preserve the rich choreographic tradition around Lake Geneva, and the legendary costume of Flore Revalles, the star of the Ballets Russes, soon became one of the showpieces of the Archives Suisse de la danse.
Wolfgang Brunner in Zurich recognized better than anyone that times and collection items change. Together with Eva Richterich, he founded the mediathek tanz.ch in 2005 for the long-term archiving of audiovisual recordings of dance productions.
It soon became clear that a merger between East and West would serve the common cause - in 2011, the foundation stone was laid for the Swiss Dance Archive/Collection Suisse de la Danse.
The example set a precedent - with the merger of STA and STS, a new whole was created. Thanks to the different collection profiles of the predecessor institutions, the archive holdings complement each other and cover the performing arts from all over Switzerland and in all disciplines - SAPA has been diverse and multilingual since 2017.
