SAPA Foundation, Swiss Archive of the Performing Arts
SAPA strives to preserve and highlight the heritage of the Swiss performing arts. SAPA collects documents and objects shaping the history of the performing arts in Switzerland and makes them available to all publics. Its aim is to preserve the traces of these ephemeral and complex art forms in order to pass them on to the future generations. Its collections are allocated over three cities (Bern, Lausanne, Zurich) and divided into three types (archive, media library, documentation). The heart of the collection consists in the Helvetica of dance and theatre, mainly in the form of paper, photographic and audiovisual documents and of objects. Among SAPA’s emblematic collections are those of Adolphe Appia, Maurice Béjart, Oskar Eberle and Sigurd Leeder. Scientific research and cultural mediation are an integral part of SAPA’s activities.
