History | American Dance Festival Archive Project 2013

For my second project at the American Dance Festival archives, I arranged and described a collection of materials from Dance Pages, a quarterly dance magazine published from about 1983 to 1997. Kenneth Romo and Donna Gianell, a husband and wife team of professional dancers, originally created the magazine as a way to consolidate and distribute information about New York City dance studios and teachers for local and visiting dance students. Soon, the magazine grew in size and scope, featuring not only metropolitan New York, but also national and international dance. In addition to publishing articles on a range of dance styles and performances, the magazine featured articles on dance history, physical therapy and conditioning exercises, and book and video reviews.

Processing this collection was quite a change from my previous project, the Mark Dendy Papers. With that collection, I basically created an order for all of the materials, since they arrived at ADF with no real organizational system in place. This time, most of the records in the Dance Pages collection arrived at ADF in labeled folders, which I initially thought would make arranging the collection much easier. However, adapting to a creator’s filing system brings its own challenges. Striking a balance between remaining true to the creator’s organizational system and ensuring that the collection is arranged logically for future researchers can be a difficult task at times.

The Dance Pages collection, before I started processing the materials.

The Dance Pages collection includes an interesting mix of materials that were created and collected over the course of publishing the magazine. The majority of the materials are subject files pertaining to dancers, dance companies, performances, festivals, and events. These typically include photographs and publicity information, such as press releases and press clippings. I particularly enjoyed coming across files about dancers that I had idolized when I was younger, like Michelle Wiles and Marcelo Gomes. I also found some files with information about young dancers whose dance studio or parents had requested that the magazine feature them. Some of them even included handwritten resumes, which I found kind of adorable.

: Michelle Wiles with Josh Brooksher, photo by Paolo Galli/The Kirov Academy, Dance Pages Records, American Dance Festival Archives

: Marcelo Gomes, Dance Pages Records, American Dance Festival Archives

Interestingly, in addition to subject files about dancers and performances, there are folders containing information about physical therapists, dance photographers, visual artists, filmmakers, and musicians. The collection also holds materials specifically related to magazine publishing, such as paste-ups of advertisements and magazine layouts.

Magazine paste-up, Dance Pages Records, American Dance Festival Archives

Some other surprising materials that I discovered as I processed the collection were photographs of a dancing pigeon (according to the file label the magazine actually published an article about it), adorable dancing sisters, and an ice dancer.

: Dancing pigeon, Dance Pages Records, American Dance Festival Archives

: June and Freda Lippel, Dance Pages Records, American Dance Festival Archives

: John Curry – Ice Dancer, Dance Pages Records, American Dance Festival Archives

My last two weeks at ADF passed by so quickly, with finishing processing the collection, a site visit from Kat at the DHC, and watching more amazing dance performances. For my last night in Durham, I had the perfect final ADF experience – attending a performance of Trisha Brown Dance Company. It’s sad to leave Durham and the American Dance Festival, but I am excited to begin my new adventure working with Spectrum Dance Theater in Seattle!

The finished product.

Over the past couple of weeks, I have certainly enjoyed settling into the routine of working at the American Dance Festival. In other words, I have grown accustomed to attending amazing dance performances two to three times a week by companies like Pilobolus, the 605 Collective, Kyle Abraham/Abraham.In.Motion, and Mark Haim.

As I mentioned in my previous blog post, my first project at the American Dance Festival Archives was to inventory, arrange, and describe the Mark Dendy Papers. Mark Dendy is a Bessie and OBIE award-winning choreographer, writer, dancer, and actor, whose career spans experimental dance theater, grand scale site specific work, pure movement dance pieces, opera, and theater. He has also founded and served as Artistic Director of two dance companies: Mark Dendy Dance and Theater and Dendy Dancetheater. First attending as a student for several summers and later returning a number of times as a choreographer and performer, Dendy is very connected to ADF. In fact, in celebration of the 80^th anniversary of the American Dance Festival, Dendy will premiere a site specific work featuring 80 dancers at Lincoln Center in New York City later this summer. I feel lucky to have had the opportunity to work on the papers of such an accomplished artist, especially one who is still actively creating new work.

I found that this collection was both interesting and challenging to process. It includes over 90 videos and DVDs, about 70 notebooks, and a variety of project files, press clippings, programs, flyers, posters, photographs, and publicity materials. Since the materials did not arrive in any order, there was a lot of reorganization involved, which often meant spreading out across multiple surfaces. The summer is a crazy time during ADF, with a number of new summer staff and interns. That means sharing the space with other archives intern projects, which can result in some mild chaos (or perhaps “coziness”) at times.

Multiple projects taking over the office

By processing Mark Dendy’s materials, I could truly get a sense of who he is and how he works. I only wish that he were premiering his new work in Durham instead of New York City so that I could meet him! My experience arranging this collection definitely underscored the importance of preserving dance heritage and in particular choreographers’ papers. These types of materials are extremely valuable and can give not only great insight into the working methods of choreographers, but also into the lives of performing artists.

Last Friday, I completed arranging the collection, writing the finding aid, and encoding it in EAD. See below for some photos from the process! My next project is arranging the records of Dance Pages, a dance magazine published in the 1980s and early 1990s. I have already starting looking through the records, and I am excited to see what I find as I continue to go through the boxes!