The Jerome Robbins Dance Division Fellows Project

The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts has launched a new Fellows of the Jerome Robbins Dance Division program. This class of six fellows was chosen by the Committee for the Jerome Robbins Dance Division and granted an honorarium to support their research and writing during six months of immersion in the collections of the Division. The resulting works—texts illustrated with materials from the collection—are available here. Such scholarship will serve the Library’s community by providing new, informed perspectives on its unmatched holdings while showcasing the relevance of these collections to a broad audience.

These personal reflections of the fellows, dancers and writers, are:

About the fellows

Malaika Adero

Malaika Adero is a veteran editor in book publishing and author of Up South: Stories, Studies and Letters of This Century's African American Migrations (The New Press 1992-93) and coauthor of Speak, So You Can Speak Again: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston with Dr. Lucy Hurston. Publisher and founder of Home Slice Magazine (www.homeslicemag.com). She is a former vice president and senior editor at Simon & Schuster. She has worked with several dance companies, including Almamy Dance Ensemble and Babatunde Olatunji's Drums of Passion.

Yoshiko Chuma

Yoshiko Chuma (artistic director and choreographer of the School of Hard Knocks, USA, and of Daghdha Dance Company, Ireland) was born in Osaka, Japan, and has lived in the United States since 1978. Chuma has created more than forty-five full-length company works, commissions, and site-specific events for venues around the world, constantly challenging the notion of performing for both audience and participant. Her work has been presented in New York in venues ranging from the Joyce Theater to the legendary annual Halloween Parade, and abroad in such locations as the former National Theater of Sarajevo, the perimeter of the Hong Kong harbor, and at an ancient ruin in Macedonia. Yoshiko Chuma is the recipient of several fellowships and awards, including from the Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, Japan Foundation, Meet the Composer Choreographer/Composer Commission, and Philip Morris New Works. She received a New York Dance & Performance Award ("Bessie") in 1984 and has led workshops and master classes throughout Eastern and Western Europe, Asia, Russia, and the U.S.

Silas Farley, Photo by Paul Kolnik

Silas Farley is a member of the New York City Ballet. He started dance training with Sal and Barbara Messina at the King David Christian Conservatory in Charlotte, North Carolina, at age seven. At the age of nine, he was accepted into the North Carolina Dance Theatre School of Dance (now Charlotte Ballet), where his teachers were NYCB alumna Patricia McBride, Kathryn Moriarty, and Mark Diamond. At the age of fourteen, Mr. Farley attended the summer course at the School of American Ballet (SAB), the official school of NYCB, and was then invited to enroll as a full-time student. Mr. Farley has also choreographed for SAB Choreography Workshops, the SAB Winter Ball, and the New York Choreographic Institute. In 2012 he was one of two advanced SAB students selected by Peter Martins for a student teaching pilot program at SAB. In August 2012, Mr. Farley became an apprentice with NYCB and joined the Company as a member of the corps de ballet in August 2013.

Joseph Houseal performing Noh

Joseph Houseal is the director of Core of Culture, a non-profit organization working in cultural preservation, specializing in dance. His expeditionary work in the Himalayas has informed museum exhibitions across the globe and contributed to the NYPL Digital Collections as well. An internationally respected writer on dance, Houseal's association with Ballet Review, NYC, has lasted thirty years. Former artistic director of Parnassus Dancetheatre in Kyoto, Houseal also worked as artistic director for soul singer Chaka Khan and choreographer for the United States Naval Academy. In 2014, Houseal directed a project for Ballet Society, producing an app for mobile devices, engaging young dancers with the humanities and allied arts. In 2007 Houseal's work was awarded the Conde Nast Global Vision Award for Cultural Preservation.
 

Gus Solomons jr Photo by Jordan Matter

Gus Solomons jr was an undergraduate in Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Gus began modern dance training in Laban Technique with Jan Veen at the Boston Conservatory of Music and Graham Technique with Robert Cohan. Upon graduation with his Bachelor of Architecture degree he decided to pursue dance in New York, where he performed as soloist in the companies of Donald McKayle, Joyce Trisler, Pearl Lang, Martha Graham, and Merce Cunningham, among others, before and after forming his own troupe,The Solomons Company/Dance, in 1972. Since then he has become a leading figure in postmodern and experimental dance, creating over 170 dances for his own company, as well as dances commissioned by professional companies across North America.

Victoria Tennant, photo by David Michalek

Victoria Tennant trained at the Central School for Speech and Drama in London before playing the title role in her first film, The Ragman's Daughter at twenty-one. She has since acted extensively in film, television, and theater, receiving Golden Globe and Emmy nominations. Her book Irina Baronova and the Ballets Russes is a memoir of her mother with over three hundred vintage photographs that chronicle Baronova's life and the birth of ballet in America, set against the backdrop of the Russian Revolution and World War II.

 

Since the fall of 2014, the Dance Fellows have worked closely with Jan Schmidt, recent curator of the Jerome Robbins Dance Division, and enjoyed full access to the incomparable research collections and online resources at the Library, as well as the invaluable assistance of the Library’s curatorial and reference staff. Charles Perrier, retired Assistant Curator of the Jerome Robbins Dance Division, served as research coordinator for the Fellows Project. 

Charles Perrier studied with the former Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo dancer Alan Howard, Marin Ballet’s Leona Norman, San Francisco Ballet’s Anatole Vilzak, and later, in New York, with the beloved Nina Stroganova. He performed with Pacific Ballet, Marc Wilde Ballet, Marin Ballet, San Francisco Opera Ballet, San Diego Ballet, and San Francisco Moving Company. He partnered with Angene Feves for twenty years creating and performing programs of 16th  to 18th  century dances at museums and universities. An interest in choreography led to a long association with the Pacific Regional Ballet Association. He taught at Mill Valley in  California for eleven years as a teacher of ballet and modern dance. After twenty-five years on the West Coast, he returned to his East Coast roots, continuing his teaching at the 92nd Street Y and the Brooklyn College Prep Center. He worked with Debra Weiss for fifteen years, dancing and creating programs for schools and museums, including the highly successful The Romantic Age: Nineteenth Century Dance and Manners, the video of which can be seen at the Performing Arts Library, Lincoln Center. He still takes ballet class every week.

"This is a very exciting moment for The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, and for the Jerome Robbins Dance Division," said Jacqueline Z. Davis, Barbara G. and Lawrence A. Fleischman Executive Director of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. "This first class of Dance Fellows includes an amazing group of people who each approach our dance collections in a new and exciting way. As we continue to develop the Dance Fellows program, I look forward to seeing the exciting new work these fellows will produce, and how they inspire more creative ways for students, artists, researchers, and everyone to explore and use our collections."

Committee For Jerome Robbins Dance Division

Mission Statement

The Committee exists to support the curatorial staff of the Jerome Robbins Dance Division (JRDD) and further its mission by playing an instrumental role in acquiring rare and important materials, in suggesting and arranging exhibitions and public programs, as well as fundraising for acquisitions and special projects. Its members serve as ambassadors of the JRDD and nurture its unique role as the foremost repository of historical materials and documentation for dance.

Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts

The Jerome Robbins Dance Division of The New York Public Library is the largest and most comprehensive archive in the world devoted to the documentation of dance. Chronicling the art of dance in all its manifestations—ballet, ethnic, modern, social, and folk—the division is much more than a library in the usual sense of the word. It preserves the history of dance by gathering diverse written, visual, and aural resources, and it works to ensure the art form's continuity through an active documentation program. Founded in 1944 as a separate division of The New York Public Library, the Dance Division is used regularly by choreographers, dancers, critics, historians, journalists, publicists, filmmakers, graphic artists, students, and the general public. While the division contains more than 42,000 reference books about dance, these account for only 3 percent of its vast holdings. Other resources available for study free of charge include: more than 26,000 films and videotapes in the Jerome Robbins Archive of the Recorded Moving Image; audio recordings that bring to life the personalities and forces that have shaped and will shape the course of dance history; clipping and program files; iconography, including prints, original designs, posters, and photographs; manuscripts and memorabilia, ranging from choreographic notes and diaries to contracts and financial records of major companies.