Researching for the person-paper was a fairly standard research procedure. I wrote about Coco Chanel, and one of my main motivators for choosing her was name recognition. I knew there would be lots of sources and information on her. What I found was less than I was expecting, but my expectations had to be limited to her connection to the music and fashion scene specifically in the 20s. There was quite a bit of filtering, specifically with historical newspapers, due to the number of advertisements of information and the small number of articles useful to me.
After spending time actually having to leave some resources out of my research for Chanel, my research on the Theatre de la Cigale is fairly frustrating. For the second paper regarding a performance space, there are fewer direct sources of information such as a biography or journal article, at least for my venue.
A comedy routine at “La Cigale” justacote.com
I am finding that fleeting pieces of information are going to be some of my only pieces of information. For instance, a 1921 article from the Atlanta Constitution reads: “Ninette and Pauline, two women who play minor roles in the Theater de la Cigale, a fourth-rate theater in Montmatre, came to this cafe for supper and sit around talking and drinking…”1 The rest of the article articulates how the two actors were involved in a scam to bully an American Hero out of his pocketbook. Here, I have fairly in-depth story on the social lives of some actors who work at the theater, as well as an opinion of an American newspaper writer. The only concrete information given here is the location and the name of the theater. Going forward with my research, I hope to find both more sources like this that give me information second hand, for some context, and I really hope to find more concrete information such as proprietors or artists or a manager. At this point, Wikipedia is giving me more information than any scholarly sources, but I must persevere.