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The Dance Heritage Coalition: Passing onthe Vitality of American DanceImogen SmithPublished online: 29 Jun 2012.

To cite this article: Imogen Smith (2012) The Dance Heritage Coalition: Passing on the Vitality ofAmerican Dance, Dance Chronicle, 35:2, 250-258, DOI: 10.1080/01472526.2012.685007

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Dance Chronicle, 35:250–258, 2012Copyright © 2012 Taylor & Francis Group, LLCISSN: 0147-2526 print / 1532-4257 onlineDOI: 10.1080/01472526.2012.685007

The Dance Heritage Coalition:Passing on the Vitality of American Dance

IMOGEN SMITH

Dance, an art that Merce Cunningham described as “impermanent as breath-ing,” faces greater challenges than any other in the establishment and preser-vation of its heritage.

∗Furthermore, dance remains perennially too little

known, understood, or appreciated by the general public. The Dance Her-itage Coalition (DHC), the only national organization dedicated to docu-menting and preserving America’s dance legacy, exists to respond to thesechallenges. Through diverse initiatives undertaken with many partners andmember institutions, the DHC supports the dance community and the fieldof dance scholarship by seeking to improve the sustainability and accessibil-ity of collections relating to dance and to promote the best practices for theorganization, preservation, and use of legacy material.

The DHC was founded in 1992 as a response to the findings of a field-wide study of how dance was documented and preserved, funded by TheAndrew W. Mellon Foundation. These findings suggested that dance archivesand collections would be strengthened by the formation of a national allianceof institutions, scattered across the United States, holding major collectionsof dance material—a move that would also promote communication acrossorganizations, joint programming, and coordinated policy-making and advo-cacy. The DHC has grown to include eleven participating institutions, eachof which is represented on the organization’s board of directors:

• American Dance Festival (www.americandancefestival.org)• Arizona State University School of Dance in the Herzberger Institute for

Design and the Arts (http://dance.asu.edu)• Dance Notation Bureau (www.dancenotation.org)• Harvard Theatre Collection (http://hcl.harvard.edu/libraries/houghton/

collections/htc/)• Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival (www.jacobspillow.org)• Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee Theatre Research Institute at the Ohio

State University (http://library.osu.edu/find/collections/theatre-research-institute)

∗Merce Cunningham, “The Impermanent Art,” 7 Arts, 3 (1955): 77.

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• Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library for the Per-forming Arts (http://www.nypl.org/locations/lpa/jerome-robbins-dance-division)

• Library of Congress (www.loc.gov/index.html)• Museum of Performance & Design (www.mpdsf.org)• Newberry Library (www.newberry.org)• UCLA Library (www.library.ucla.edu)

The DHC’s mission focuses on four areas: access to dance material; doc-umentation of dance; preservation of existing documentation; and educationregarding methods, standards, and practices for the other three. To pursuethis mission, the DHC has initiated and carried out an array of projects fundedby government and private foundations, in addition to maintaining a pres-ence at national conferences in the fields of dance, archives, and libraries.Detailed information on past initiatives and long-term plans can be foundon the Dance Heritage Coalition website (http://www.danceheritage.org),under “Projects/DHC Publications.” The documents available here providepractical guidance on documenting dance and preserving, handling, and us-ing dance-related archival material; there are also in-depth reports on copy-right issues relating to dance archives. (See “Beyond Memory: Preservingthe Documents of Our Dance Heritage,” “Documenting Dance: A PracticalGuide,” “Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use of Dance-Related Material,”and others.)

The DHC has offices in Washington, D.C., and New York City (whereit shares space in the offices of the Dance Notation Bureau). The DHC’sstaff includes executive director Libby Smigel, Ph.D., who brought to thejob almost two decades of teaching in the performing arts and research inhigher education, as well as administrative and grant-writing experience atthe National Endowment for the Humanities; and Imogen Smith, the author,who came on board as project manager following six years as a videocataloger at the Jerome Robbins Dance Division of the New York PublicLibrary and freelance consulting work for the DHC and the Dance NotationBureau. The DHC also relies on freelance and temporary project staff withexpertise in information technology, grant-writing, and archival practices.

The DHC’s current slate of projects covers all areas of its mission, andbrief descriptions of some of these projects will convey the goals and achieve-ments of the organization.

DANCE COMPANY ARCHIVES: HELPING WORKING ARTISTSTO PRESERVE THEIR LEGACY

With funding from the Mellon Foundation, the DHC has undertaken a multi-year project to assist significant single-choreographer companies to improve

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FIGURE 1 Archive room in Dance Theatre of Harlem’s library before inventory and organiza-tion as part of Dance Heritage Coalition’s Mellon archives project. Photograph by DHC fellowPatricia Gay. Courtesy of the Dance Heritage Coalition, Inc. (color figure available online).

the preservation, organization, and accessibility of their archives. The initialstage of this project produced assessments of the scope and condition oftwenty-three company archives, and in the second stage, currently under-way, the DHC is working with seven companies in New York State andthe San Francisco Bay Area to produce inventories and scholarly assess-ments, improve storage and organization, and make long-term plans fortheir archives. These tasks will not only mitigate immediate threats to mate-rial, they will prepare companies to provide greater research access to theircollections and to pursue funding for additional work or partnerships witharchival repositories (see Figures 1 and 2).

Portions of this project have been completed or are currently underwayat Dance Theatre of Harlem, David Gordon/Pickup Performance Co(s), JoeGoode Performance Group, Margaret Jenkins Dance Company, and Eiko& Koma. Work will begin at Garth Fagan Dance and Lar Lubovitch DanceCompany in 2012. Among the achievements of the project so far have beenthe discovery and safeguarding of overlooked archival treasures (such asan original telegram from Lincoln Kirstein to Arthur Mitchell, and costume

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FIGURE 2 Archive room in Dance Theatre of Harlem’s library after materials were weeded,organized, and inventoried. Photograph by DHC fellow Kathleen Bell. Courtesy of the DanceHeritage Coalition, Inc. (color figure available online).

“bibles” providing designs and documentations for Dance Theatre of Harlemproductions) and significant improvements in the storage and organization ofmaterial. Most excitingly, choreographers have been engaged in and inspiredby the inventorying and organization of their archives, and the project hassuggested new templates for the integration of archival best practices and theindividual creative visions of artists for their legacy. DHC archival fellows areperforming some of the work in this project as part of an ongoing programthat gives students and recent graduates of library studies programs hands-on experience with collections, helping to launch librarians and archivistsspecializing in dance (see Figure 3).

In addition to helping the companies selected for this project, the DHCis drawing broad conclusions about the needs and capacities of dance-company archives, which will be used to develop services, workshops, andpublications to benefit the field. There is no shortage of commitment amongartists and companies to saving and sharing their legacy material, but theyexperience a chronic shortage of resources, including funding, storage space,staff time, and expertise. The DHC’s current project provides insights into re-alistic ways for companies to develop sustainable plans for their collections.

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FIGURE 3 From left to right: DHC fellows Patricia Gay and Kathleen Bell, and DHC projectmanager Imogen Smith examine archival videos at Dance Theatre of Harlem’s off-site ware-house in the fall of 2011. Photograph by Dance Theatre of Harlem archivist Judy Tyrus.Courtesy of the Dance Heritage Coalition, Inc. (color figure available online).

To this end, the DHC will begin offering, as a fee-based service, archivalassessments and consultation in records management, which facilitates theefficient organization of information. The DHC is also engaged in creatingthe “Artist’s Legacy Toolkit,” a document intended to provide practical advicefor dance artists on how to care for their archival material, as well as asearchable online database of dance-related libraries and archives, whichchoreographers can use to find a suitable home for their legacy material. Bothof these projects have received seed funding from the National Endowmentfor the Arts.

A SECURE MEDIA NETWORK: DIGITIZING DANCE VIDEOSFOR EDUCATIONAL ACCESS

In the area of access, the DHC runs an ongoing program to digitize findingaids for dance collections housed in libraries and to make them availableonline.

∗Moreover, the coalition is working on the development and launch

∗A finding aid is a document created by a library or archive describing the contents and

organization of a collection of archival manuscripts, designed to enable researchers to findspecific items within the collection.

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of a secure media network, in partnership with the Bay Area Video Coalition(BAVC), recognized leaders in the preservation of archival video. This projectaims to create a digital humanities center for dance studies that aggregatesunique primary source material from many dance archives. To this end, theDHC has begun work on digitizing archival dance videos and making themavailable to students and researchers within a password-protected onlinedomain in schools and libraries. The videos will be accompanied by ancillarymaterial, such as reviews and scholarly writing, and will be fully catalogedwith descriptive credits. This site (http://archive.danceheritage.org) also hasa searchable catalog of more than 27,000 dance-related films and videos,which is already leading scholars and dance aficionados to the institutionswhere these moving images are housed. As part of the secure media networkproject, the DHC is setting up hubs for digitization, and currently has twofunctioning: in New York City at the Dance Notation Bureau and in SanFrancisco at BAVC. Currently, the hubs are digitizing material solely for thesecure media network, but as capacity grows the DHC is exploring thepossibility of offering, as a fee-based service to the public, conversion ofanalog videos to archival-quality digital files (see Figure 4).

PROCESSING COLLECTIONS AND LAUNCHING CAREERS INDANCE ARCHIVES

At the start of 2012, the DHC was on the cusp of undertaking two new largeprojects. With a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Servicesthrough the Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program, the DHC is ex-panding its fellows program, which will provide places for twenty-one newfellows over the summers of 2012, 2013, and 2014. These fellowships are in-tended for current library studies students, who, after participating in trainingand workshops in Washington, D.C., will undertake two practicums—onewith a DHC member institution and one with a dance company or otherarchival repository. The fellows will receive stipends to offset housing andtravel costs and will pursue career advancement opportunities by attendingprofessional conferences, networking, and receiving ongoing mentorshipduring their job searches. The program, which will also enable institutionsto complete valuable work on unprocessed collections, has received an en-thusiastic response from students.

With a Mellon Foundation grant administered through the Council forLibrary and Information Resources, the DHC will facilitate the processing oftwenty-two “hidden collections” in its member organizations’ archives. Theseas yet inaccessible collections include significant material relating to mod-ern dance pioneers Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn, Shawn’s associates JessMeeker and Barton Mumaw, postmodern dancer and choreographer Kenneth

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FIGURE 4 Videotapes in Dance Theatre of Harlem archives, some destined for digitizationin the secure media network project, in spring 2011. Photograph by Kathleen Bell. Courtesyof the Dance Heritage Coalition, Inc. (color figure available online).

Rinker, mentor to the Judson Dance Theater Robert Ellis Dunn, film dancerMarge Champion, mime specialists Sandra Hughes and Robert Post, balletdancer and company director Michael Smuin, scholar and ethnologist AllegraFuller Snyder, critic and scholar Janice Ross, Dalcroze eurhythmics teacherJohn Colman, Dalcroze biographer and musicologist Irwin Spector, and La-banotation creator Rudolf Laban, not to mention institutional records of theSan Francisco Ballet, the Dance Notation Bureau, and the Dalcroze Societyof America.

∗These collections also include archival papers and performance

videotapes from artistically innovative West Coast dance companies and

∗Emile Jaques-Dalcroze, a Swiss musician and music educator, developed eurhythmics—a

teaching method that improves understanding of music through movement.

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organizations, such as AXIS Dance Company, Lily Cai Chinese Dance Com-pany, Joe Goode Performance Group, San Francisco Butoh Festival, San Fran-cisco Jazz Festival’s Jazz Tap Summit, and Theatre Flamenco. The processingof this material will provide additional hands-on experience for students andgraduates of library studies programs, even while expanding scholarly accessto vital historical resources.

AMERICA’S IRREPLACEABLE DANCE TREASURES: CELEBRATINGCULTURAL HERITAGE

One of the DHC’s most exciting projects is the creation of an online exhibi-tion devoted to America’s Irreplaceable Dance Treasures: The First 100. Thislist of dance artists, companies, institutions, and styles that have enrichedour cultural heritage and contributed to the evolution of dance as an artform was created in 2000 through nominations from the dance community;each proposed treasure was then vetted by a committee made up of expertsin the field. (The full list can be found on the DHC website, under “DHCPublications.”) The list is intended to display the diversity and richness ofAmerican dance, in forms from classical to popular, and to highlight the vitalrole dance has played in America’s cultural life.

America’s Irreplaceable Dance Treasures became the basis for a success-ful exhibition that toured nationwide between 2003 and 2009, comprising stilland moving images from DHC’s member institutions, accompanied by briefessays written by ten contributing scholars (see Figure 5). Now, the travelingexhibition is being adapted so that it can maintain a permanent online pres-ence. Each of the one hundred treasures will have a new, longer essay on itssignificance, accompanied by photographs, links, and recommendations forfurther research. The diverse contributors include scholars and academics,critics and journalists, advanced students, and working or former dancersand choreographers. This site will offer not only a tribute to America’s danceheritage, but also a highly accessible source of reliable and fresh schol-arly writing on dance, a gateway for students starting their research intorelated topics, and a vehicle for improving dance literacy in the generalpublic.

In conjunction with the creation of the online exhibition, the DHC willname ten new treasures, again soliciting nominations for subjects worthy ofinclusion. The list of dance treasures, which will continue to grow, providesa way to celebrate achievements in American dance, to honor the careers ofartists who have made enduring contributions to the field, and to explorethe ways in which dance has been integral to the dynamic evolution ofAmerican society. Traditionally, dance is passed from body to body throughtactile and kinesthetic (as well as visual and aural) one-on-one coaching.

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FIGURE 5 America’s Irreplaceable Dance Treasures: The First 100 traveling exhibition ondisplay at the Museum of Performance & Design, San Francisco. Courtesy of the DanceHeritage Coalition, Inc. (color figure available online).

While the DHC works with documentations and representations of this vitalprocess—papers, photographs, videos, notation scores, digital files, and soforth—its process is ultimately no less reliant on the passion and knowledgeof individuals, and no less vital to the continued survival and vitality ofAmerican dance.

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