Posts from the Jerome Robbins Dance Division

The first of our Spring Oral History Project interviews was just recorded and it was a true breath of fresh air. On March 19 and 26, 2012, Eva Yaa Asantewaa sat down to interview Marya Warshaw.

150 years after her birth in Fullersburg, Illinois on January 15, 1862, Marie Louise "Loïe" Fuller is less well known than her peers. Yet her work, flowing and abstract and free from the constraints of classical ballet, predated and paved the way for more familiar modern dance pioneers like Isadora Duncan and Ruth St. Denis.

The Jerome Robbins Dance Division Oral History Archive is home to unique and rare dance-related audio recordings that capture the voices of dancers, choreographers, composers, lighting designers, costume designers, and dance scholars from the mid-20th Century through today. These recordings encompass a wide range of original and donated content, including Dance Division-produced oral history interviews, radio show broadcasts, speeches, lecture/demonstrations, panel discussions, dance classes/workshops, and personal recordings.

The headlines about her death called her the first African American ballerina of the Metropolitan Opera, but Janet Collins was much more than that. A new biography, Night’s Dancer: The Life of Janet Collins, highlights the career of this pioneering artist, drawing partly on materials donated by Collins and others in the Library's Jerome Robbins Dance Division. Author Yaël Tamar Lewin will be speaking about her book on Thursday, February 16 at 6 p.m. in the Bruno Walter Auditorium, and we have put together a small exhibit of materials on Collins on the third floor of the Library for the Performing Arts in celebration of her life and work. The exhibit will only run 

A few weeks ago, NYPL's Jerome Robbins Dance Division made headlines when it received a major gift of materials from Mikhail Baryshnikov,* the celebrated dancer, actor, and founder of the Baryshnikov Arts Center.

We’ve only scratched the surface in terms of the processing needed to make the archive accessible to the public, but in the meantime, we’ve put together a sneak preview showcasing what we’ve found so far!

Mikhail Baryshnikov: An Archival Preview is on view in the Donald and Mary Oenslager Gallery at The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts until December 20, 2011. Take 

... sometimes we write them too!

NYPL is proud to announce a new book written by a Library staff member on the subject of film noir, just in time for the latest exhibition at the Library for the Performing Arts, Out of the shadows: The Fashion of Film Noir. 

In William Butler Yeats' poem "Among School Children" the poet famously asks "How can we know the dancer from the dance"?  Many interpret this line as an observation that some creative acts are so intimately connected to the artist who created them that separating the two is almost impossible.  However interesting or beautiful this idea might be, its reality makes the work of dance preservation a difficult one.  Literary or musical art can be transcribed to paper using a widely understood encoding system (e.g. the alphabet) and passed on to future generations.  Documenting and preserving dance is not so easy.

In the heart of Lincoln Center, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, nestled between the Metropolitan Opera and the Vivian Beaumont Theatre, thrives in its role as a vibrant circuit between historical research and cutting-edge performance. And few researchers illustrate the Library's unique vitality for the performing arts community better than Ben West.

Ben West is a regular at LPA, where theatre professionals who shape the performing arts scene come for inspiration through their research in the LPA’s vast archives. Ben is the artistic director of UnsungMusicalsCo. Inc., and in that capacity he searches for lost musicals from Broadway’s golden age, 

Social Dancing, which consists of various forms of dance, such as square dancing, is a communal tradition brought to the American continent by its earliest immigrants. Big in centuries past, social dancing is still practiced today, even in New York City. I know because I attended my first dance very recently: a barn dance.

In honor of April Fool's Day, I bring you an image of a jester and a ballerina which I found the other day in the Dance Division's photo collection. We don't know much about this photo, except that it's an example of the kinds of variety dancing performed in the early part of the 20th century.

Last Wednesday's New York Times article about the upcoming ­¡Sí Cuba! festival reminded me of a recent addition to the Dance Division of a film most of you have never heard of: it's a brand new documentary called Alicia Alonso: Orbit of a Legend, about the life and career of Cuba's most famous ballerina* and the founder of Ballet Nacional de Cuba (for * links in this post you'll need an NYPL library card number). The film had its world premiere this past December in Toronto, but is not yet being distributed in the U.S.

First in a series

Each day, professional, aspiring and student film and media-makers come through the doors of the Library for the Performing Arts (LPA) seeking resources that will aid in making their creativity become a reality.

If the 16th century focused on painting, the 19th on photography and the 20th on cinema, the 21st is all about integrated media.

Along with Sarah Ziebell and Lisa Lopez, I work on the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation Project, whose mission is to program and document live music (mostly jazz), theater, and dance in connection with the 10 year anniversary of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation's grant program.

In addition to the programming aspects, the grant also covers the preservation of a collection of oral history interviews conducted in the early 1970s by the dance critic, Don McDonagh, on people associated with the iconic dancer/choreographer, Martha Graham.

Lucky me, I get to listen to the interviews and am in the proces of cataloging the hours of conversations. After working with Safe Sound 

One of Calvin Tompkins' Bachelors has shuffled off stage left. As the New York Times obituary makes clear, Rauschenberg's impact on the Visual and Performing Arts is pretty much incalculable.

I can't remember when I didn't know of Rauschenberg's work, having probably been exposed to a few pieces in my teens on a weekend getaway to the Art Institute of Chicago, but one of my favorite experiences that encompasses Rauschenberg and his cadre of New York pals was seeing the Merce Cunningham Dance Company perform at Lincoln Center in 1999. There in one place--literally and figuratively--were Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, David Tudor, Merce Cunningham, Jasper Johns, Morton Feldman,