The Artistic Staff

The company's people arrived in the record the way staff arrive at a school: by headshot. The staff pages of both site eras carried small portrait photographs with first names in the file names, Carmela, Christopher, Vicki, Jim, sized for a page where each performer got a paragraph and the children in the audience got a face to match the programme. The visitors' book tradition at a visitors' book of record works on the same principle: the record is where the people who did the work get to be seen.

What the sheet keeps

The record keeps the staff as a row of small portraits, each file named for the person it held. The practice is old-fashioned theatre: the headshot is the professional's calling card, and on a children's theatre website it does double duty, telling the school that adults will be performing and telling the performer that the gig was real enough to print their face.

The about pages fill in what the portraits cannot. The company billed its casts as professional adult actors, a deliberate choice in a field where children's work is sometimes handed to whoever is available. The staff page was where that claim got names.

What the page was for

For a non-profit touring company, the staff page carried three audiences at once. Parents checked that performers were professionals. Funders checked that grants paid working artists. And the actors themselves got a line of public credit for a job that happens in gymnasiums, far from anywhere reviews are printed.

The page also held the company's shape. A touring troupe of this size runs on a handful of performers covering every role, and the headshot count in the record matches the scale the playbills imply: enough adults to play the dragon, the monster and the principal, few enough to fit in one van.

Four names in the filenames

The portraits' file names are the only staff directory the record kept: first names, lowercase, sized 'small'. A larger company would have kept bios and headshots in a database; this one kept four JPEGs in a folder, which is its own honest measure of scale.

The rebuilt site kept the same habit, a staff page with pictures rather than a personnel directory. For a touring children's theatre, that informality was accurate: the performers were the company, the van was the office, and a first name on a photograph was as much documentation as anyone needed.

The staff sheet also quietly answers a question a school always asks: will the play hold the room? The answer the page gave was professionalism, adult actors who had done this before, in costumes built for the distance. A headshot on a theatre page is a promise about Monday morning, and the four small portraits in the record kept that promise in writing for as long as the site stood.

That is all the record kept of the troupe: four portraits, one claim of professionalism, and a page rebuilt once without losing its place in the menu. For a company whose stages were other people's rooms, the staff page was the closest thing to a home address, and the volume keeps it where the company put it.

How the volume files it

Bound second in Cahier III, between the paperwork and the reviews. The record kept four names in its filenames and the professional claim in its about page; it did not keep the biographies themselves at full length.

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