Jerome Robbins Dance Division Including Jerome Robbins Archive of the Recorded Moving Image
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
JEROME ROBBINS DANCE DIVISION INCLUDING JEROME ROBBINS ARCHIVE OF THE RECORDED MOVING IMAGE ANNUAL REPORT FISCAL YEAR 2013 COVER IMAGES First row: Her Royal Highness Princess Norodom Buppha Devi; photo by Darial Sneed. Second row: Robert Farris Thompson, Master T; photo from video shot by François Bernadi for the Jerome Robbins Archive of the Recorded Moving Image. Royal Ballet of Cambodia, 1927; photo courtesy of the National Museum of Cambodia. Maxixé Brésilienne, ca. 1914; postcard by Aimé Dupont. Third row: Merce Cunningham and Carol Sumner rehearsing Summerspace for New York City Ballet, 1966; photo by Martha Swope. Margot Fonteyn as Princess Aurora in the Royal Ballet’s Sleeping Beauty; date and photographer unknown. Fourth row: David Vaughan, dance historian. Arcell Cabuag, Clarice Young, Ronald K. Brown, and Otis Donovan Herring; photo by Dance Division staff. Fifth row: Djoniba Mouflet, Lamine Thiam, Mangue Sylla, Sekou-Dembele Pablo, and dancer; photo from video shot by François Bernadi for the Jerome Robbins Archive of the Recorded Moving Image. Carlota Santana; photo by Victor DeLiso; courtesy Flamenco Vivo Carlota Santana. Jerome Robbins Dance Division Annual Report 2013 Design by Arlene Yu Printed by GHP (Gist Herlin Press) Printing costs graciously provided by The Committee for the Jerome Robbins Dance Division © 2013 The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations Table of Contents Letter from the Curator 4 1 Profile of the Division 9 1.1 Staffing ........................................................................................................................................................................ 9 1.2 Mission Statement ...................................................................................................................................................... 9 1.3 Size of the Collection ................................................................................................................................................ 10 2 Activities 11 2.1 Overview ................................................................................................................................................................... 11 2.2 Collection Development and Notable Acquisitions .................................................................................................. 15 2.3 Services to the Public ................................................................................................................................................ 28 2.4 Processing and Bibliographic Control ....................................................................................................................... 36 2.5 Preservation and Conservation ................................................................................................................................ 41 2.6 Exhibitions and Public Programs .............................................................................................................................. 44 3 Core Supporters of the Dance Division 55 3.1 The Committee for the Jerome Robbins Dance Division .......................................................................................... 55 3.2 Friends of the Jerome Robbins Dance Division ........................................................................................................ 55 4 Grants, Projects, and Initiatives 58 4.1 Khmer Dance Project with Funding from Anne H. Bass............................................................................................ 58 4.2 Dance Heritage Coalition .......................................................................................................................................... 58 4.3 Core of Culture ......................................................................................................................................................... 59 4.4 The New York State Council on the Arts ................................................................................................................... 59 4.5 The National Endowment for the Arts...................................................................................................................... 59 4.6 Doris Duke Charitable Foundation Grant ................................................................................................................. 60 4.7 Rockefeller Brothers Foundation Grant for Original Documentations ..................................................................... 61 4.8 Dance Historian Is In with David Vaughan ................................................................................................................ 61 4.9 Adham Hafez, of Arc.Hive of Contemporary Arab Performing Arts in Cairo ............................................................ 62 4.10 Dance Prints and Designs Digitization Project .......................................................................................................... 63 4.11 Preserving Dance Division Obsolete Umatic Tapes .................................................................................................. 64 5 Staff News 65 5.1 Personnel Changes ................................................................................................................................................... 65 5.2 Staff Development .................................................................................................................................................... 66 5.3 Committee Activities ................................................................................................................................................ 67 5.4 Publications, Press, and Social Media ....................................................................................................................... 68 5.5 Volunteers, Interns, and Fellows .............................................................................................................................. 70 6 Concerns, Goals, and Objectives 72 JEROME ROBBINS DANCE DIVISION ANNUAL REPORT FY 2013 | 3 Letter from the Curator In a library, no empty shelf remains empty for long. Like Nature, libraries abhor a vacuum, and the problem of space is inherent in the very nature of any collection of books. This is the paradox presented by every general library: that if, to a lesser or greater extent, it intends to accumulate and preserve as comprehensive as possible a record of the word, then ultimately its task must be redundant, since it can only be satisfied when the library's borders coincide with those of the world itself. The Library at Night, by Alberto Manguel, p. 66 This “paradox,” between comprehensively collecting for the future and the space to hold those materials, has grown exponentially with the addition of photographs, video, and audio to a world that was once only the word. The digital ideal is often considered the answer to this space dilemma for a collection, such as the Dance Division’s, that has the mission to accumulate and preserve as comprehensive a record of dance as possible. To advance in this direction, this year The New York Public Library (NYPL) is working to finalize the Trusted Digital Repository and a delivery system for digital files that now even includes video. For preservation, video is especially difficult because of the size of the files. An hour of video can become about 100 gigabytes of high resolution preservation digital files. For delivery, digital The digital ideal is preservation means no longer relying on a human being to find a videotape on the shelf, put often considered the it in a deck, and pipe up the video signal through cables to the viewer on the Third Floor. As answer to this space materials are migrated to digital files, they will be available to the viewer by a click of the dilemma for a mouse or a touch of a screen. collection, such as the This daring step into the digital realm means that in any single day I am caught in Dance Division’s, that conversations about the differences and usefulness of such things as Fedora, (Flexible has the mission to Extensible Digital Object Repository Architecture); RDA (Open Metadata Registry Project accumulate and Resource Description and Access) and MARC format cataloging; METS to MODS crosswalk (a preserve as new tango step?); 100 gigabyte files and 4 petabyte storage; 10 bit uncompressed files and comprehensive a H.264 files. The complexities and enormity of the digital changes happening today can make record of dance as a person reel with the implications, complications, and rapid change. Innovative today, possible. obsolete tomorrow. As I spend so much time thinking and talking about present and future digital realities, the very process turns my thoughts to the past, to my last twenty-five years at the Library. In the late 1980s, when I began to work at the Jerome Robbins Dance Division, then called the Dance Collection, at The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, then called the Performing Arts Research Center, the Library had no online catalog. Books, videotapes, manuscripts, photographs, clippings, and programs were arranged in the exquisite order of the Library's own system invented by John Shaw Billings, typed on cards that were arranged in alphabetical order by title, author, or subject, and in alpha numeric order by call number. These cards were stored in long drawers in beautiful old oak cabinets. Else Peck, then the head of the Jerome Robbins Archive of the Recorded Moving Image, and I