The top five is full of romance again this week. For readers who are feeling a bit edgier, there is a new David Baldacci adreneline ride in the mix as well.
#1 Recommendations for readers who enjoyed The Last Mile by David Baldacci, more intricately plotted suspense:
Staff picks are chosen by NYPL staff members and are not intended to be comprehensive lists. We'd love to hear your ideas too, so leave a comment and tell us what you’d recommend. And check out our Staff Picks browse tool for more recommendations!
In 1925, the young Ernest Hemingway published his second collection of short stories. While the individual stories were praised, critics seemed baffled by the collection's unique construction—each story is prefaced by a brief, unexplained vignette, while events and characters from one story appear and are referenced again in the next. D.H. Lawrence, reviewing the collection, wrote that, "In Our Timecalls itself a book of stories, but it isn't that. It is a series of successive sketches from a man's life, and makes a fragmentary novel."
Lawrence, in his review, was attempting to define the nebulous nature of what would later be referred to as the short story cycle, the composite novel or, sometimes, a novel in stories. However, it wasn't until 1971 that Lawrence's "fragmentary novel" was redubbed the short story cycle by Forrest L. Ingram and defined by him as "a set of stories so linked to one another that the reader's experience of each one is modified by the experience of the others."
Then, in 1995, Anne R. Morris and Maggie Dunn expanded on Ingram's definition, explaining that there are five ways in which stories could be linked to one another:
Stories share a setting.
Stories share a narrator/protagonist.
Stories feature at least one character from a shared group of protagonists.
In turn, these great collections of the early twentieth century are influencing the writers of today. Short story cycles are regularly being published, some to great critical acclaim; two short story cycles, Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout and A Visit From the Goon Squadby Jennifer Egan, have won the Pulitzer Prize within the last decade. One could even argue that the prestige cable dramas of the twenty-first century, many of which are all built from linked individual episodes, owe some debt to the short story cycle—an HBO miniseries adaptation of Olive Kitteridge won eight Primetime Emmy awards in 2014.
So, in honor of Short Story Month, we have some recommended short story cycles you might want to pick up in your local library.
The Beggar Maid by Alice Munro (1978)
Nobel Prize winner Alice Munro traces the relationship of Rose and her step-mother, Flo, in Twentieth Century Ontario, Canada.
A Contract with God and Other Tenement Stories by Will Eisner (1978)
Considered the first "graphic novel," Will Eisner's opus is actually a series of linked stories about Jewish-American life in the tenements of the fictional Droopsie Avenue in the Bronx.
The Women of Brewster Place by Gloria Naylor (1982)
Like Eisner's Droopsie Avenue, Naylor's fictional Brewster Place acts as the backdrop and one of the connecting threads in these stories about African American women at the end of The Great Migration.
The Emigrants by W.G. Sebald (1992)
In each of these four stories, an unnamed German narrator tells of his encounters with German Jews in the decades following the Holocaust.
Lost in the City by Edward P. Jones (1992)
Following in the footsteps of James Joyce in Dubliners, Jones presents a series of stories about the lives of characters in a single city: Washington D.C. Like Joyce, Jones begins the collection with the youngest character and ends the collection with the oldest character.
The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven by Sherman Alexie (1993)
These stories chart the coming-of-age of Victor Joseph and Thomas Builds-The-Fire on the Spokane Indian Reservation in Washington, as well as the histories of their families and neighbors.
Drown by Junot Diaz (1996)
Diaz's first collection introduces readers to Yunior, who also narrates A Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao and This is How You Lose Her. The stories in this collection follow Yunior as he emigrates from the Domincan Republic to New York and, later, New Jersey, and struggles with his brother's battle with cancer.
Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout (2008)
The titular Olive appears in the foreground and background of these stories about the residents of Crosby, Maine, as the town and its residents age into the early twenty-first century.
Normal People Don't Live Like This by Dylan Landis (2009)
Landis' stories trace the coming age of a young woman, seen from the varied perspectives of her family and friends; beginning on the Upper West Side in the 1970s and extending through her adolescence and adulthood.
In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin (2009)
These short stories follow a set characters, all connected to the fate of an aging landowner, through the cities and villages of Pakistan. (Also listed on Fiction Set in Pakistan by Gwen Glazer)
A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (2010)
Egan uses a series of stories to follow a group of teen bandmates after they part ways and forge their own paths to success.
Redeployment by Phil Klay (2014)
Each of these stories presents a moment in the life of a member of the U.S. military, deployed in the Iraq or Afghan wars.
In the Country by Mia Alvar (2015)
This collection presents stories about the lives of Filipino citizens, portraying the different lives of those who left for the United States or Saudi Arabia, and those who stayed in their own country.
If the short story cycle you love isn't listed here, let us know in the comments below!
Part of FDR's New Deal, the Works Progress/Projects Administration (WPA) was created in 1935 to provide paying jobs for the unemployed at every skill level. Workers built bridges, dams, roads, libraries, courthouses, schools, parks and gardens... they created art... and they wrote.
Now, newly available on NYPL's Digital Collections site, are biographical sketches, sociological studies, essays on history, economics, sports, theater, religion, and many other subjects that informed the world of blacks in New York City in the 1930s and '40s. Authors include Ralph Ellison, Abram Hill, and Ellen Tarry, among many others. Also in the collection are edited chapters of The Negro in New York: An Informal Social History, edited by Roi Ottley, which was originally prepared under the auspices of the Federal Writers' Project of New York City.
NYPL’s Matthew Boylan has always loved asking and answering questions, even as a curious and inquisitive little boy. Now, as a member of the team at AskNYPL, Matthew fields research questions both big and small from curious people all over the globe — questions that even the internet cannot answer. Find out more about the passion that drives Matthew’s work, and how the librarians at AskNYPL have become the information detectives for everyone from second graders to seasoned authors, in this week’s Library Story.
Library Stories is a video series from The New York Public Library that shows what the Library means to our users, staff, donors, and communities through moving personal interviews.
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In May 2015, Brooklyn-based developer Dan Vanderkam launched OldNYC, providing users a new way to experience NYPL's Photographic Views of New York City collection and discover the history behind the places New Yorkers see everyday. Now Orian Breaux and Christina Leuci—fans of NYC history, maps, and technology—have brought the OldNYC experience to mobile phones. I spoke with them to find out more about the development of this app, which is now available in the iTunes App Store.
Who are you, and what do you do?
Orian: We both work in NYC’s tech world. I’m a product manager, currently focused on user growth at LiveAuctioneers. I love exploring topics like data visualization, urban science, and user behavior. On the side, I mentor aspiring technologists at a tech school called General Assembly and build projects like NYC Time Machine. Before entering tech, I studied aeronautical engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI).
Christina: As for me, I'm a software developer at Cyrus Innovation, where we help companies build and scale their software products. Previously, I studied web development at Flatiron School, after attending Rutgers University for two years. When we’re not working, you can find us dancing Swing or Argentine Tango!
How did you decide to make a mobile app for OldNYC?
Orian: It was totally spontaneous. Since OldNYC launched last May, I had spent many hours admiringly exploring its photographs. In a November mailing list update, creator Dan Vanderkam asked if anyone wanted to build a mobile app for OldNYC. As someone who loves this intersection of NYC history, maps, and technology, it was an automatic “Yes!” for me. Coincidentally, Christina had been talking about creating an iPhone app, so I immediately volunteered ourselves.
Christina: It was an exciting project to start, and we’re thankful for Dan’s openness to our building off his work. After exchanging emails, we all met for coffee one winter morning, then Orian and I got to work. Admittedly, neither of us had built an iOS app before, but with our combined coding, product, and design experience, we thought we could learn quickly enough to build a solid app.
What was your process?
Orian: We started with a question: “How can we use the mobile platform to enable an experience not possible on a regular desktop website?” From the beginning, we had this vision where you could walk down a street and easily access historical photos nearest to your location. Like a self-guided historical tour, where you’re encouraged to discover “what was there” anywhere you go.
We worked backwards from that idea, breaking down the pieces of design, development, and research work we needed to do. Dan had already built some infrastructure for storing photos and related data, so we spent some time figuring out what we could use and what we had to build ourselves.
Christina: For our version 1 release, we focused on foundational features, like map navigation, photo viewing, and allowing the user to center on their location. We did several iterations of wireframes on paper, thinking about how the user would interact with each of these features. From there, mocking up the experience in Sketch, a digital design tool, helped us refine the user interface and interactions further.
Of course, we spent most of our time coding the app. We were both new to iOS development, so for everything we built, we spent time teaching ourselves.
Orian: All throughout, we tested the app often. I made it a point to test not only while walking in the streets, but on boats, in the subway, and deep inside buildings. Since our app relies on location and downloading images from the NYPL’s website, testing helped us find and fix bugs to ensure the app runs smoothly.
What is most interesting about bringing 1900s photographs to 2016 phones?
Orian: The idea that technological progress is constantly redefining our relationship with the past. To retrieve a historical record 100 years ago meant pinpointing its specific location within a specific library or museum. Only in the last few decades have computers and the Internet allowed us to centralize, organize, and distribute that information throughout the world.
Beyond making information accessible and searchable, I think the next problem is discovery. With so much of the world’s information available online, it’s easy to find something when you generally know what you’re looking for. But how do you find information that you would love when you don’t know it exists?
This fundamental problem of discovery is why Amazon and Spotify build recommendation engines and why Pinterest tells you about trending pins. They are methods for surfacing content you’re unlikely to find by yourself. I see OldNYC’s map interface + location tracking as an extension of that idea, where a user can discover new photos highly relevant to where they are in the present moment.
It’s fun to envision what new ways future technology will help us discover the past. I’m personally waiting for the day I can take a virtual reality tour of 1600s New Amsterdam!
Christina: For me, the most interesting thing is the discussion that will rise from these resurfaced pieces of history. By exploring photos from New York City’s past, you really get a sense of the society that was present from the late 1800s into the early 1900s and how it has changed throughout the years.
People are now able to step through the city’s life and watch as it has grown and changed into the metropolis it is now. Can you imagine, hearing stories from your Grandmother who lived in New York City in the 1930s and being able to find the intersection she lived at and explore that photo in detail?
The stories we discover are preserved through their documented photos and text and provide a sense of identity for the city. As we expand our dataset, users will be able to trace any NYC intersection’s life from a drawing of farmland to a modern skyscraper.
What’s next for your app?
Christina: We’re just getting started! We have a full backlog of features and improvements to make the app experience more special. Our app users can give feedback from within the app, which also helps us prioritize what to build next.
For incremental improvements, we’d like to increase photo resolution, improve the photo viewing interface, and enable search by location. We also need to include Dan’s feature of allowing users to submit corrections of photograph descriptions.
Not all improvements are user-facing though; there’s a lot we can do to improve our data architecture and make the app run more efficiently.
Orian: That said, we’re most excited for the bigger initiatives, including:
Commenting on photographs, so app users can tell their stories. The OldNYC desktop site captured thousands of comments, so we’ll make these readable from the app, as well.
Enabling users to easily generate and share before-and-after photos. It’s a thrill to discover “what was there” in the areas we live and visit often. We want to help people share that moment of discovery with the world.
What other NYPL data sets or resources would you like to explore or build on?
Christina: If we could wave a magic wand, every historical record would be discoverable by location. All datasets are fair game, but the next logical step is to incorporate more photographs. Currently, OldNYC only uses photographs from the Milstein Collection’s “Photographic Views of New York City, 1870s-1990s”
Beyond that, we’d love to include lithographs that capture scenes from the 1600s to 1870s, as well as any oral records. Imagine walking around the city with the ability to explore every facet of your current location’s history!
Orian: We’re also exploring using rectified maps from NYPL Map Warper, like the 1920s Aerial survey map. The idea is that app users can use a “timeline slider” to sift through the layers of history, to see photographs in their historical context.
How can libraries—or any holder of large open datasets—make it easier for developers to make new things with our collections?
Christina: I think the key ingredients are: 1) helping developers feel supported and 2) maintaining clean and open datasets.
As a developer, I feel supported when an organization is actively giving me the tools and instruction I need to start working with the data. A library can do this by offering tutorials/code samples and walkthroughs and by describing interesting use cases for the datasets. All this cuts down on “research time” and empowers developers to take action. The NYPL Digital Collections API is a great approach for libraries to model. It’s an open database that gives developers the chance to build applications that access NYPL data.
Over time, as developers build applications off a dataset, you can foster community by showcasing work. This encourages more developers to join and extend the work of others, like how Orian and I have done with Dan’s OldNYC.
This post was co-written by librarians Josh Soule, Spuyten Duyvil Library, and Meredith Mann, Stephen A. Schwarzman Building.
George R.R. Martin's epic fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire has existed in book form for twenty years and in television form for five. We're now at the exciting moment where the TV narrative has begun outpacing the books, so that means it's the perfect time to debate the events about to unfold. To that purpose, Josh Soule and I embarked on a freewheeling conversation on the future of the Seven Kingdoms and its surrounds. We cover book and TV series plot points throughout, so proceed with caution if you're wary of spoilers. And if you want to catch up with either medium, the Library has you covered!
Note: Each season is paired with its corresponding book, though the TV show tends to blend books as it progresses.
A photo from Jon Snow's upcoming Tiger Beat feature
Meredith: Let's just jump straight into the thick of it. George R.R. Martin has flirted pretty heavily with predestination over the course of the series. There are prophetic figures like Azor Ahai; there are prophecies told to major characters, like Cersei's encounter with the witch. And that's not even getting into the fact that Martin was inspired by England's War of the Roses, so there are all sorts of potential parallels with various Edwards and Henrys. But the one most on my mind is in A Clash of Kings, when Dany visits the House of the Undying. In the book version, she walks through a maze of prophetic visions, eventually encountering a man and woman, presumably her elder brother Rhaegar and his wife Elia, holding their newborn child Aegon. Rhaegar says, "[Aegon] is the prince that was promised, and his is the song of ice and fire," and then to Dany, "There must be one more...The dragon has three heads."
So, what do you think? Is the-dragon-has-three-heads going to be end-game significant? Who do you think the three heads of the dragon will be? Or is there a different prophecy that you're more excited about?
Josh: Of course the three-headed dragon will be significant. You have Ice and you have Fire, but the phrase is "a song of ice and fire," so who's doing the singing? That will be the third head. I know the popular fan theories about who Ice and Fire are but who will tell (sing) their story? This is all about bringing them all together. People have a funny habit of assuming prophecy applies to them. How do we know Dany is truly the fire part of the equation? Do the dragon heads even need to be people? The prophecy could refer to extraordinary beings and powers coming forth that were previously dormant or unknown. R'hllor is Fire, the White Walkers are Ice. What do you think?
The dragon has four heads...no wait, three. Three heads. Image ID: 807711
I know Jon is supposedly the Ice to Dany's fire according to fan theories but some developments in the last book and on the show lead me to believe that Jon is not the missing child of Rhaegar and Lyanna Stark. Do you think he is or do you have an alternate theory of your own?
Meredith: Interesting point about the singing — if we're looking for storytellers, Tyrion and Sam Tarly spring to mind as the most bookish of the characters, but I see them less in the "leading the charge" camp than the "holding down the fort and making life actually function" one. To really stand a chance against the White Walkers, the other side is going to have to do some major coalition-building, so that's why I'm going Dany-Jon-Bran for the three heads. Among them, you have Westeros and two of its major houses well-covered, plus added alliances with Essos (Dany), the wildlings (Jon), and the Children of the Forest (Bran). And since Bran is a proven warg-er and Jon an assumed one, you have a pretty solid means of controlling two dragons. Jon is so self-serious that I have a hard time picturing him doing something so fun as actually riding a dragon.
I'm curious to hear what makes you skeptical, but to me Jon being Rhaegar and Lyanna's child seems so telegraphed that I find it hard to imagine it's a fake-out — though we know Martin likes to toy with his readers' expectations. It explains the "Promise me, Ned" scenes, it fits with Ned Stark's morality and sense of duty, and it sets up a potential brother-sister ruling alliance that those Targaryens are so fond of. And if it's in true Targaryen fashion, maybe there's a romance down the road for Jon and Dany. What do you think — is there room for a loving relationship in ASOIAF that doesn't end in murder and misery?
Josh: Ah but Tyrion did lead a charge, literally, in Clash, at the Battle of the Blackwater. He may not relish it but the Imp can bring to fight to anyone he needs. Samwell does not lack for courage either although you are right. He's not the up-and-at-them type. Besides, he's off to become a maester and that precludes any major fighting on his part. How do you see Bran as the third, singing, part of the three heads? Bran can warg but how would that work with such willful, cantankerous beasts like dragons? Wolves at least have a sense of being part of a pack, and Hodor is too simple-minded to resist Bran's warging. Dragons seem to respond only to a mother's touch from Dany or brute willpower like that of the Targaryen kings.
I also don't see any major coalition building going on. If nothing else, these kings and lords have proven incapable of working together any longer than it takes to make a sandwich. Daenerys has been abominable at creating a coalition. Usually the first step in alliance-building is not to slaughter only some of the ruling malcontents, thereby creating the Sons of the Harpy. Jon can't even get his own Night Watch brothers to work with the Wildlings without getting shanked for his efforts. It is going to take brute conquest to unite Westeros against the White Walkers.
Robert Baratheon and Rhaegar Targaryen at the Trident. Not pictured: coalition building.
It's why I'm now a little skeptical about Ice and Fire referring to Jon and Dany, and also why I'm skeptical about Jon's origins. It's too easily telegraphed, like you said and nothing is simple in Martin's world. Jon also doesn't seem to exhibit any Targaryen traits: no drive to rule, no affinity for flame, etc. Is there a romance in the future? Maybe. But it's not going to end well. None of them have. Catelyn's blind love and loyalty to Ned sparked the war. Dany's still, in my opinion, pining for her lost Khal and found a weak substitute in Daario. Jon and Ygritte ended in tragedy. Also, wasn't all that brother/sister inbreeding among Targaryens what got everyone in this mess?
Besides, I like the idea of the the White Walkers being the Ice part of the three-headed metaphor because nothing is colder than their dead hearts. Besides, we have received hints throughout the books and solid evidence in the show that there is intelligence and malignant will driving them.
But let's go on another path. We know the Great Masters are the likely source of money and men for the Sons of the Harpy, but for them to succeed as they have would require someone in Dany's camp. Who do you think it would be? My money's on Daario. Who else knows her movements and habits like our mercenary friend?
Meredith: Oh, I'm not doubting the Imp! I probably should have phrased that better. It's not that Tyrion would be ineffectual in a battle, but rather that he's needed more in the boardroom. Tyrion's one of few characters (and fewer still surviving characters) who can conceptualize the big picture and the long game. Dany and Jon have the charisma and the morality (maybe too much of the latter, in this universe), but Tyrion has the knowledge and the realpolitik. As for Bran, he may not have had the psychic oomph when last we saw him, but I think there are going to be some Rocky-training-montage interactions between him and the three-eyed raven that will increase his warging abilities. And after all, he has been promised that he'll one day fly — why not in the body of Viserion?
Oh, Daario. I'll confess that I'm finding the whole Meereen storyline not terribly compelling, so perhaps my annoyance at Daario is making me hope for his exposure as a traitor. His loyalty is certainly suspect, since he betrayed (some of) his fellow mercenaries to join up with Dany in the first place. And he's also in a position to influence her decision making with both sweet nothings and well-placed lies. Maybe another prophecy comes into play here? The House of the Undying also told Dany she would be betrayed once for blood, once for gold, and once for love. If Mirri Maz Duur was "blood" back in Game, and Jorah Mormont was "gold" in Storm, are we up to the third and final betrayal?
Speaking of Dany's crew, book fans were pretty crushed when Strong Belwas was excised from the TV series. Showrunners Benioff and Weiss are clearly doing some condensing of characters and storylines necessary for telling this saga in eight or so seasons. Part of this means removing characters that ultimately do not play a major role in the larger plot — what we might call the Quentyn Martell Phenomenon. Have any of these decisions surprised you? Is there anyone who's been killed off or not included in the show that you think has a bigger part to play in the books?
Josh: Hmm ... you have a point there. Bran could very well increase his powers but I really, really hope there isn't a montage. Those are so overdone and would be jarring in this grimdark fantasy. If Bran is the third head though, wouldn't he just as easily fit into the Ice, Fire or Song part of the prophecy? Controlling a dragon would be fire, being from the North would be ice, and being the chronicler of events would be the song. So many ways this could go, really.
Tyrion, Tyrion, Tyrion. I love the dude but that's exactly the point at which Martin will have him knifed in the dark somewhere. I hope he makes it but I'm not holding my breath. He does play an incredible long game as he's managed to survive this long in a world that's harsh to disabled people.
I think Daario will be the one who betrays Dany for gold. He IS a mercenary and the Masters have gobs of the stuff to spare. Jorah entered Dany's service for Varys' gold but he stopped reporting to the Spider a while back. However, Varys is oddly loyal to the Targaryens which means having Jorah keep tabs on Dany was never a betrayal. No, I think it's more likely Jorah will betray her by doing something utterly boneheaded because he's blinded by his love.
Betrayal seems to be the theme of this session and I'd say the fans are feeling betrayed a bit by some of the production decisions. As a Belwas fan myself, I understand why he was excised. He did not really add anything to the narrative and when you're in a time crunch, he would be dead weight. I am surprised by Barristan's demise, though. He was popular with fans but it seems like they're going to push Grey Worm in his place which really makes no sense. Grey Worm is not that significant in the novels, whereas Barristan has viewpoint chapters. What also surprised me was Stannis. I was rooting for him and even thinking he'd be a good candidate for the Fire part of things if he got more of a push but then that horrible moment ... Oh man, Stannis, how COULD you?
With him out of the picture though, Melisandre has to find a new champion. Will it be Jon Snow in one of those unholy resurrections of hers? And what about Davos? He's fundamentally decent and has managed to survive the whole crisis. The Onion Knight has a huge role to play; I can feel it in my bones. I think I need to watch the new season now and devil take the spoilers.
Where are her dragons?
Meredith: I was pretty surprised when Jeyne Westerling made no appearance in the TV adaptation — doubly so when her doppelganger was another casualty of the Red Wedding. In book world, Jeyne is still kicking around, a captive of the Lannisters, and potentially carrying The King in the North, Jr. So is her omission from Game of Thrones a spoiler that this plotline will amount to naught? There's a similar concern for the lack of Young Griff/Aegon-in-hiding. Are they waiting to introduce him further down the road, like the relocated Kingsmoot plotline? Is he an imposter? Or does he just have bad news in his immediate future?
I am going to miss Stannis. He was kind of the Liz Lemon of Westeros — you've gotta obey the rules, whether it's rightful succession or standing in line for hot dogs — and I'll miss his stubborn, lawful neutral take on things. You seem skeptical of prophecies, so maybe you will scoff at me, but I'm pretty sure that Jon Snow is going to be the real-deal Azor Ahai here. That'll give Melisandre a clear ally going forward.
As for Ser Davos, I agree he is going to be crucial. In Dance, he was doing some recon with House Manderly, and is now well-positioned to bring Rickon Stark back into the narrative. Winds will definitely contain a Davos-led trip to Skagos to find the youngest Stark and his wildling companion Osha. What will this mean? Rickon's pretty undeveloped, given that he was so young when he was an active character, so he's a huge wildcard for me. One of my favorite fan theories was the (nonserious) suggestion that this entire story is one elaborate joke by Martin. Everyone will scheme and plot and wipe each other out, then Rickon will stroll onto the last page of A Dream of Spring, Fortinbras-style, and declare, "I have won the game of thrones!" The name for a long-winded joke with a cheap punchline? A shaggy dog story. The name of Rickon's direwolf? Shaggydog. Coincidence? (Yes.)
Any off-the-wall theories that you've particularly enjoyed?
Josh: I kind of hope the Shaggydog thing is not a coincidence if only so we don't have to get yet another character to keep track of. I also think Griff is an impostor. If there were another legitimate Targaryen alive Varys would know. Nothing gets past that spider's web. I also think the Jeyne storyline is done and so are the Lannisters as a power. Anyone with a brain in that family is either dead or exiled. However, keep in mind the producers have free reign now. Martin has given them his outline for the plot but Benioff and Weiss are not obligated to follow it faithfully. We could be looking at pretty radical departures since the show might be more concerned with fan service while Martin is focused on the integrity of the saga as a whole.
Scoff? Who me? Nah. I just think fans and characters read too much into them or overthink them to the point where even Martin is saying, "Nope." However it does look more and more like Jon will be Azor Ahai but then that means he could fill either the ice or fire part of the prophecy too. See what I mean about overthinking?
Stannis the Mannis, noted grammar enthusiast
Stannis the Mannis, oh how you've fallen. I admired the cranky king until that last episode in season 5. Ugh. I think part of it was because the man took being king more seriously than the politicking to become king. He was rightful king so it was his job to safeguard the realm. I think he forgot that, in the end, the realm includes the smallest and most vulnerable of your family and he wandered into territory I despise: the religious fanatic blinded to everything good about being human.
I digress. My favorite fan theory, which has been shot down if spoilery pics on the Internet are any indication, was Jon Snow being resurrected as a White Walker. How's THAT for being the Ice part of a Song of Ice and Fire?
Meredith: Your point re: potential deviations between books and show is an excellent one. It might not even be purposeful, depending on the detail of the outline they have, as well as Martin's right to change his mind as he writes. I'm thinking that definitively stating who/what is ice vs. fire is potentially not even that useful for the story as a whole. As you noted, it could be a person, a group, an abstract concept like Winter and Summer — or it could stand in for multiple, parallel themes.
I almost forgot my other noted divergence of the show — Mance Rayder! Former Night's Watch member, leader of the wildlings, no longer of this world show-wise, but a prisoner of the Boltons at Winterfell books-wise, with a son in the care of Gilly and Sam Tarly. Will he act as a lure, bringing Jon to Winterfell? Could he or his son be a potential alliance-marriage? And he is one of the universe's few musicians, if you're looking for singers of the song of ice and fire.
As someone who's up-to-date on show episodes, I won't spoil your enjoyment of the start of season six, but I will say that they succeeded in drawing out the "suspense" of the fate of Jon Snow as much as they reasonably could, and now we can just get on with things, already.
I'll wrap up our conversation, fittingly I think, on how the series itself will wrap up. Alliances will be made, alliances will be broken, lands will be conquered, favorite characters will be ruthlessly killed, Arya will come back from Braavos, Dorne will get it together. Do you think this is all going to end on a hopeful note? When I scheme about the future of the series, I'm still picturing the good guys winning, despite all evidence to the contrary in the preceding books. Am I just totally naïve? Are we going to close out the pages with Petyr Baelish gloating over a pile of ashes? Or will it be the start of a new world, a new season, full of promise, yet with the seeds of an underlying conflict that could get everyone back where they started once the horrors of ASOIAF fade in everyone's memory? I can't imagine Martin giving us a conclusion that isn't ambiguous. Seasons are cyclical after all — winter will always come. What are your final thoughts, Josh?
Josh: Exactly my thinking on the ice/fire/song business. And yes, Mance is one of the few singers in the Westerosi milieu. I don't think he's actually the Boltons' prisoner. All we have is a letter from Ramsay claiming he has Mance; not exactly a reliable source. His son, I don't think, is long for the world. He was cooped up on a ship with Aemon who died of illness and disease is ever rampant in medieval settings.
No matter what, it's not going to end well for anyone. If there is one lesson Martin has taught us, it is that no one is safe; not the saints and not the sinners and not the ones in between. Ned's fate should have taught us that and just being the good guy will not get anyone the win. To quote Dark Helmet from Spaceballs, "... evil will always triumph because good is dumb." Stupid Ned ...
Don't worry, Sansa. Josh has a good feeling about you.
Here's my wish list for the series' ending:
Arya comes back and slays everyone involved in destroying her family. (Everyone left, that is.)
Dany finally throws her hands up and sets the dragons loose on Meereen before flying back to Westeros to conquer the Seven Kingdoms and failing miserably.
Tyrion finds a nice little house close to a favorite tavern, with a lifetime supply of beer and all the ladies of ill repute he wants.
Sansa flays the flayers.
Jon Snow gets ticked off, kills the Night's King, seizes control of the White Walkers and sweeps down south of the Wall, proceeding to crown Sansa as ruler of the Seven Kingdoms.
I will be catching up on season six shortly and looking forward to my wish list getting destroyed.
Meredith: I don't think I can improve upon Queen Sansa and Jon Snow, Lord of the Ice Zombies, so with that, we're out! Thanks for reading along, everyone. If we didn't get to your favorite theories, or if we got everything wrong, join the discussion in the comments!
Image Credits:
Jon Snow image via HBO
Robert Baratheon and Rhaegar Targaryen illustration via Winter Is Coming
Charlie Price’s mom died, and his sister has found a passageway into a mirror universe where everything is as it was before her death. But each time Charlie returns to the real world, things are a bit different.
George wants a new bike, so he takes a job at Wormestall Farm tending to extinct, imaginary, and extraordinary animals. This is an offbeat adventure with conservation themes and dialog that will make you laugh out loud.
A Victorian-era childhood adventure, Stella Montgomery lives in the Hotel Majestic with her aunts and nothing ever happens. Until it does, and Stella is on the run from an evil magician. For fans of Lemony Snicket and Roald Dahl.
Lilly is the last surviving member of the House Shadow. Luckily she is plenty spunky and snarky to handle the responsibility. For fans of Harry Potter and Rick Riordan.
Emma comes form a long line of Wildflowers, special women who experience a Destiny Dream that reveals the path to each of their extraordinary lives. When Emma’s dream arrives, it reveals a mystery that has been plaguing her town for centuries, one she is destined to solve.
Set during WWII, Katherine and her siblings flee London for safer ground in the Scottish Highlands. When the children arrive at Lord Gregor’s manor, they sense right away that something is amiss.
An action-packed adventure in which four kids are tapped by a mysterious billionaire to time travel for the purpose of photographing (previously un-photographed) historical events.
Staff picks are chosen by NYPL staff members and are not intended to be comprehensive lists. We'd love to hear your ideas too, so leave a comment and tell us what you’d recommend. And check out our Staff Picks browse tool for more recommendations!
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:
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 (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 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 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 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 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.
All art is cultural expression, but none is more integrative than dance, which is made of our bodies—how we move, where we move, what we wear—to tell every story there is to tell of how we, humanity, live. This project is about black bodies that dance and, in doing so, tell a story that is about politics, sexuality, religion, economics, and mortality more than art. Dance is for the stage, but dance is also for life. This is a narrative outline based on research done at the New York Public Library on African and American contributions to culture and dance from the autobiographical point of view of a black female student/practitioner of dance in the twenty-first century.
Image 1: Dinizulu Dancers and Singers Company.
Photographer unknown.
New York City is a mecca for anyone who takes the study and performance of dance seriously, especially if that person is Black. New York City represents many things in the world, it is also an African City—in the words of Robert Farris Thompson—the destination of blacks in search of an environment where their creative spirit can thrive. On any given day of the week you can do world dance, folkloric dance, black dance, to acoustic music in classes taught throughout the five boroughs in school gymnasia and studios small and big. Many of the classes, taught by master dancers from around the world, are attended by a mix of professionals and lay dancers who bring together an extraordinarily diverse group of people who form a local, national, and international community. Among the 25,000 moving image titles available for viewing in the Dance Division are several videos of classes from the 1990s at Fareta School of Dance and Drum.
Finding Community in Dance
Raised in the South, I migrated to New York to pursue literature, dance, and filmmaking as a career and lifestyle. I had been living in Atlanta for the last eleven years. I’d gone there to study at Clark College and Atlanta University, now joined as Clark Atlanta University. I also studied dance with Barbara Sullivan and became a member of the Apprentice Company of Barbara Sullivan’s Atlanta Dance Theater. The apprenticeship grew into a regular and full-time (if not lucrative) job—a pleasant surprise I never thought possible for myself.
Inasmuch as I loved dance, my upbringing never allowed that it could be something I’d ever do professionally or even publicly, though I would discover that some of my family, long before me, had. One of my Atlanta University Center friends was Leon King, who was a dancer in Sullivan’s Company (and would later join Dianne McIntyre’s Sounds of Motion company in New York City). He repeated, “You should dance” to me enough times that I got the nerve to attend classes. The studio happened to be across the street from my then apartment on Auburn Avenue; I had no more excuses. I walked into the studio one evening and basically didn’t leave—for long—for the next 5 years or so.
Image 2. Katherine Dunham.
S. Hurok Presents Katherine Dunham as Queen in Rites of Passage.
Photographer unknown.
My first teacher in New York City was Lavinia Williams, who is well documented in the Jerome Robbins Dance Division, including twenty-one videos. Paulette Gary aka Yesembiat had turned me onto her Haitian class at STEPS on Broadway at that time and I remain grateful to her for it. This would be the only class I’d take in New York since I had decided—against my better judgment—to set dance aside to focus on a career-track job I’d gotten in book publishing. If I had to come to mecca and had to decide on just one teacher, she—contemporary of Katherine Dunham, mother of Sara Yarborough (with whom I’d taken ballet in Atlanta), a legend and beautiful spirit—was the one. The Jerome Robbins Dance Division has more than twenty videos of Sara Yarborough and over three hundred items on or about Katherine Dunham, over one hundred of these are videos, many directly from the collective title Katherine Dunham Centers Collection.
Image 3. Brochure from Lavinia Williams clippings file.
Image 4. Sara Yarborough, studio portrait.
Photographer unknown.
In retrospect it should have occurred to me to seek out Eleo Pomare as a teacher given that Barbara Sullivan, my first significant teacher, had studied and performed with him. But, I’d long decided that I’d leave modern and ballet behind to focus on ethnic and/or folkloric African-based dance. I’d had gotten enough of a taste, learning what I did from Sullivan and seeing fantastic performers, including the Senegalese Ballet when they came to Georgia State University in the 1970s. The Dance Division has forty-seven videos of Eleo Pomare, including an early film from 1967, Blues for the Jungle, danced by members of the Eleo Pomare Dance Company: Chuck Davis, Michael Ebbin, Strody Meekins, Al Perryman, Eleo Pomare, Ron Pratt, Bernard Spriggs, Shawneequa B. Scott, Lillian Coleman, Judi Dearing, Carole Johnson, Jeannet R. Rollins, Shirley Rushing, and Dolores Vanison (call number: *MGZHB 16-833).There is also an audio recording of an oral history interview of Pomare by hostLucile Brahms Nathanson. Broadcast on the radio station of Nassau Community College, WHPC-FM, New York, on its series Making the Dance Scene. (call number: *MGZTC 3-408).
Image 5. Eleo Pomare.
Photographer unknown.
Image 6. Eleo Pomare as Junkie
in Blues for the Jungle,
Photograph by Leroy Henderson.
Image 7. Eleo Pomare.
Photographer unknown.
The NYPL’s Jerome Robbins Dance Division has many audio/visual documents of dance companies of African nations, including a seven minute promotional video of The National Dance Company of Senegal (call number *MGZIA 4-2646). I found some twenty-seven video recordings of dance using the search keyword "dance—Senegal," including many from Brooklyn Academy of Music’s DanceAfrica series, Evidence Dance Company’s trip to Senegal (call number *MGZIDVD 5-6870); Dance in Africa: the first World Festival of Negro Arts produced by Gallery Amrad, filmed in performance in Dakar, Senegal, in April 1966. (call number *MGZIC 9-4395), and National Dance Company of Senegal from the 1980s (call number *MGZIA 4-1287).
As a parting gift, Atlanta-based mentors and friends had given me lists of names of places to find all of what I was looking for in the city. Dancewise, the Clark Center was at the top of the list. But, by the time I arrived in April 1984, the Clark Center was no more. Included in the many articles in the Dance Division’s catalog is a review entitled “Of Shouts and Stomps and Cultural Achievements: Clark Center Dance Festival," written by Jennifer Dunning for Dance magazine, (October 1976, pp. 33, 77-78, 80; call number *MGZA). The dancer/choreographer Charles Moore had a long association with the Clark Center. Included in the Dance Division’s archival collections is the 38-box collection of Clark Center papers documenting its activities from its founding by Alvin Ailey until its complete collapse in 1989 (Title: Clark Center records, 1960-1995, call number *MGZMD 176).
Image 8. Photographer unknown.
The Bathhouse aka the Hansborough Recreation Center on 135th Street between Lenox and Fifth Avenues was a popular place for African dance on Saturdays—Bernadine Jennings taught Congolese and, following her, other classes were taught by a number of teachers. Among the teachers were the Senegalese Jasmin, Amadou Boly Ndaiye, and Lamine Thiam who was introduced and coached in teaching by Amadou, and M’bemba Bangoura from Guinea. There are six videorecordings in the Dance Division documenting the work of Bangoura as a choreographer, composer, and instrumentalist, including one that also included the Dinizulu Dancers and Singers. Scores took both hour and a half long classes, happily dancing for three hours to the sound of beautiful percussive music and sometime the singing of such greats as Mor Seck, a brilliant traditional singer from Senegal and a Harlem resident.
Image 9. Photographer unknown.
The recent Dance Division African Dance Interview project has interviews with Lamine Thiam and others available online. The links for these are:
Lamine Thiam interviewed by Carolyn Webb (*MGZIDF 1136), May 23, 2013.
Maguette Camara interviewed by Ife Felix (*MGZIDF 4093), August 6, 2014.
Mouminatou Camara interviewed by Malaika Adero (*MGZIDF 4095), August 27, 2014.
Youssouf Koumbassa interviewed by Dionne Kamara (*MGZIDF 4096), August 28, 2014.
N'Deye Gueye interviewed by Malaika Adero (*MGZIDF 4097), September 18, 2014.
These are now all available on the library website's Digital Collections page.
The Students
The class students included Butterfly McQueen, the actress known best for her unforgettable role in Gone with the Wind, the (would-be major bestselling) poet and novelist Sapphire, the actress and comic Phyliss Stickney, and jazz musician/band leader Cassandra Wilson. This class led me to others like it, sponsored by community organizations and taught by Esther Grant, Nafisa Sharrif, Wilhemina Taylor, and others. And then there were the classes offered by Forces of Nature Dance Company lead by Abdel Salaam and Dele Husbands, then held at the Synod House on the grounds of the Cathedral St. John the Divine. Esther Grant was teaching some of these classes as well. The Dance Division created a nearly six-hour oral history of Abdel Salaam in 1995, which can be listened to or the transcript read (call number *MGZMT 3-1870 [transcript] or *MGZTC 3-1870 [cassette]).
In this community, I befriended one dancer, Celeste “Aduke” Bullock, who introduced me to Baba Olatunji with whom I would study, work, and perform until his passing in 2003. One of the longest lived performing groups, when I came into the fold in 1991, the company was rising back up after a slump. New dancers were needed for the new phase, but there were dancers and musicians scattered all around the country who played with Drums of Passion over many years as circumstances allowed. Our most senior dancer during my tenure was Hasifa Rahman, Alalade Dreamer Frederick was dance captain, and there was “Bobo” Ben Sealy and Yak Tamale, Oyabunmi Rhoda Pfeiffer (mother of actor Mekhi Pfeiffer), Olabisi, Modupe Olatunji (daughter of Olatunji), Alesha Randolph, Myna Major, Deborah O’huru and many that I know and many I haven’t yet learned about.
Image 10. Photographer unknown.
If you studied dance, music, and culture under Olatunji and went on to perform with Drums of Passion you became a part of a family, a close community that transcended decades and geography. The group was a study in multiculturalism with performers coming from and living in regions across America, the Caribbean and Africa. Olatunji was a contemporary and acolyte of Kwame Nkrumah and his pan-Africanism was never more apparent nor consistent than in his dance company. The rank of the musicians was even more diverse, including as it did from time to time, non-black performers from all over the world.
Aduke Celeste Bullock became a mentee of Olatunji as a teenager. She published an essay describing her “personal feelings about taking African dance class” in Attitude: The Dancer’s Magazine [Summer/Fall 1991] p. 6; (African dance, call number *MGZA 93-327).
Drums of Passion, a recording by Babatunde Olatunji, released in 1959 or 1960, changed the game in black popular culture by reconnecting up with Africa. I was three years old in 1960 so I don’t remember a time before it was a part of our family collection. The album sold 5 million copies and became a part of our family collection by way of the Columbia Record Club. It operated like the Book of the Month Club where members received one item per month and four bonus titles when you signed up. Drums of Passion was one of the record club's bonuses, and that it was. I fell in love with the music and the images of the dancers on its cover. I don’t recall how long it took for me to actually see a Drums of Passion performance nor what television program I saw them on.
Michael Babatunde Olatunji arrived in the United States with his friend and cousin Akinsola Aiwowo in 1950, entering at the Port of New Orleans to reach Atlanta, Georgia, where he attended Morehouse College. He didn’t come to launch a career as a performer. He came to earn a degree and return home to be a leader in his community and nation. But he began performing informally on the campus of his college in part to dispel the myths his fellow American students held on to about Africa. Most Americans were tainted by stereotypic images in mass media, e.g., the Tarzan television series and many Saturday morning cartoons, and by our formal education, which reduced and maligned African culture to at best something primitive, exotic, and, at worst, depraved.
Baba considered returning to Africa from time to time, but lived out his life in the United States. He was, however, on faculty of the University of Ghana, in the dance department, and traveled there often from his base in America in addition to touring around the world—Europe, Canada, Latin America—to do workshops and performances for a wide range of audiences, from doctors at a convention in Italy to the New Age retreats across North America.
My initiation to the Babatunde Olatunji Drums of Passion family occurred at the start of the 1990s, but the seed was planted when I first heard the album Drums of Passion (1959). Michael Baba Olatunji was the headliner and band leader. I saw his original group on national television in the 1960s. The seed of African consciousness in Black Americans was watered by the influence of Olatunji’s music, fertilized by the black arts and consciousness movement that defined the times in America, and was in solidarity with the independence movement that swept across the continent of Africa.
More Drums of Passion, issued by Columbia Records in 1966 is in the Rogers and Hammerstein collection (R&H) at the Performing Arts Library. (call number * LZR 17035 [disc]).
Image 12. "A True Report on the All African Peoples Conference Given by Mr. Michael Olatunji."
“The first American tour of Les Ballets Africains in February 1959 must have inspired Olatunji. So, too that troupe’s ‘superb’ (Martin 1959) jembe (djembe) drummer, Ladji Camara (1923-2004), who would move to the United Stated in the early 1960s, play with Dunham, and father a jembe movement in New York” (introduction by Eric Charry to The Beat of My Drum, 2004)
In its Original Documentation program in 1994, the Dance Division recorded Papa Ladji Camara, drumming and dancing (call number *MGZIC 9-4655). Performed by Les Ballets Africains de Papa Ladji Camara the drummers and singers include Papa Ladji Camara, Robert Palmer, James Cherry, Kehinde Donaldson, Vernon Brannon-Bey, Kevin Nathaniel Hylton, and Carolyn Webb.
Between 1991 and his passing in 2003, I was on the roster of dancers who performed and assisted the workshops in places, including at Esalen Institute in California; Hollyhock (Cortes Island, B.C.); Rhinebeck, New York, festivals and events across the United States and nearly in a half-dozen cities in Switzerland and other countries and places.
The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts has much in its collection on Olatunji, most in the Music Division. Folkloric performing arts and culture can’t be fully appreciated when broken up into separate categories and disciplines though. Olatunji insisted that the music, song, dance and dress be addressed and included in workshops and performance. The holistic approach is a question of authenticity, but also a question of potency and impact of what the witnesses or audience will experience in the presence of the art being practiced or performed. Likewise, a student, scholar, or writer whose subject is dance must gain knowledge and understanding of music, song, dress, and everything else that comes along with the dance experience of their focus.
In discussing this, Jerome Robbins Dance Division curator Jan Schmidt told me: “In the Performing Arts Library, the materials separated as subjects, are actually available in this wholistic approach in the one combined reading room. The music is heard at listening stations near the dance viewing stations, the photographs from all the divisions are requested in the same place and delivered to the same Special Collections area. Materials on Babatunde Olatunji include a wide range of formats including 4 print sources, 9 videorecordings, and 10 audioreocordings.”
Baba’s Early Years in the U.S.
Michael Henderson, a fellow alumnus of Babatunde Olatunji, or Baba (which means father), as many of us called him, described Baba in a release on the occasion of his passing in 2003: “Early career milestones [of Babatunde Olatunji] included performances at Radio City Music Hall, the 1964 New York World’s Fair, and TV appearances on programs like the Tonight Show, the Mike Douglas Show, and the Bell Telephone Hour. [He] has written many musical compositions, including scores for the Broadway and Hollywood productions of Raisin in the Sun."
Henderson further wrote “By the time Olatunji arrived in New York in 1954, [Asadata] Dafora, [Katherine] Dunham, and [Pearl] Primus had already developed an appreciation for staged African and Afro-Caribbean dance with African-based drumming accompaniment. Some of Olatunji’s drummers and dancers had worked with Dafora and Primus, and carried with them material and expertise, on which Olatunji built. For example, the Derby sisters, Merle ('Afuavi') and Joan ('Akwasiba'), contributed Fanga, which they learned from Primus" (Derby 1996).
Image 13. Asadata Dafora,
Photograph by Barbara Morgan.
The Beat of My Drum: An Autobiography by Babatunde Olatunji with Robert Atkinson and a foreword by John Baez was published a couple of years after Olatunji's passing. Merle (aka Afuavi) Derby and her sister Akwasiba Derby were among the original Drums of Passion dancers, the latter becoming the dance captain and Baba’s right hand. She died young at age, but was elevated to legend by her contemporaries and the dancers who came after her. Her surviving sister, Merle Derby, was a quiet force who continued to dance late in her much longer life. She didn’t perform with Drums of Passion in the 1990s and later, but did consent to attend a rehearsal with the dancers who did, sharing what she remembered of choreography that remained a part of the repertoire and especially of dances—such as “World Without End”—that had been lost to the collective memory of the active group of performers. “Drumming It Up for Africa: Michael Babatunde Olatunji, the Drumming Virtuoso” is a piece she wrote for Tradition, a journal published out of Uniondale, New York (call number *MGZA 96-581 Tradition [Uniondale, N.Y.] v. 2 #3, p. 10-11).
“His dedication to the preservation and communication of African culture led him to establish his ‘dream’—the Olatunji Center of African Culture. . . providing low cost classes in a wide range of cultural subjects to adults and young people.” – Office of Alumni Relations, Michael Henderson (a fellow alumnus, class of Morehouse 1965). Yusef Lateef (born in Chattanooga, Tennessee) played with Baba and talks of the experience in an interview conducted by musician Larry Ridley for the NYPL’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, September 27, 1996. (call number Visual VRA—181 Service Copy Sc Visual DVD 1065)
Fanga and Pearl Primus
Anyone claiming a serious interest in black dance, especially the traditions of the African diaspora in America must know about a dance called Fanga and the dancer/choreographer, Pearl Primus. Fanga is the first African dance many of us, this writer included, were exposed to and taught. This welcome dance was a standard performed at the top of every Olatunji Drums of Passion Show, after Ajaja, a processional number.
Image 14. Pearl Primus in "African Ceremonial,"
Photograph by Gerda Peterich.
The Trinidadian artist and activist learned the welcome dance in Liberia, where it originated and brought it back to New York where she lived and did most of her work. The Dance Division has more than 100 records of Pearl Primus, including reviews, photographs, books and more than 20 videos of interviews, dancing, or her choreography. Among them is an early film from Jacob’s Pillow of Spirituals [excerpt] choreographed and performed by Pearl Primus, 1950 (Destiné and Ramon, Primus, Shivaram, call number *MGZHB 4-363). There is also a nearly two hour video interview of Pearl Primus (Five Evenings with American Dance Pioneers : Pearl Primus, Third Evening , call number *MGZIDF 1466).
What Farah Jasmine Griffin says of Pearl Primus in her book Harlem Nocturne: Women Artists and Progressive Politics during World War II (available in NYPL’s circulating collection; call number: 704.042 G), applies to the significance that African dance would take on for many African Americans who came after her. She wrote:
Primus was not only engaged in a leftist political and artistic community, however; she was also part of a group of New York-based artists who wished to bring the culture of Africa and peoples of African descent to the attention of white audiences. Instead of evolving from a leftist to a black nationalist, instead of transitioning from an artist interested in social realism and modern dance to one interested in what would later be called "Afrocentricity," Primus always merged these political stances and aesthetic commitments. She did so by situating African dance alongside modern dance, and in so doing creating a dialogue between the forms, showing them both to be representations of a longing for freedom and human dignity. . . the language of dance to represent the dignity and strength of black people and to express their longing for freedom. Primus saw dance as a means of contributing to the ongoing struggle for social justice. (p. 31)
Image 15. Pearl Primus in Folk Dance, 1945,
Photograph by Gerda Peterich.
The Dance Division has a video of Pearl Primus dancing Fanga (call number *MGZIDVD 5-6216) There is also a fifty-minute interview with Pearl Primus by Walter Terry (call number *MGZTC 3-110). James Briggs Murray of the Schomburg Center produced a videotaped interview with Primus documenting her early years in dance and anthropology and life growing up in Trinidad (call number Sc Visual VRA-71).
“Modern dance had been ensconced in radical politics since its formation; traditional African dance sought to give expression to the community’s history and aspirations. In creating a dialogue between these two forms, Primus helped to introduce a new context for the marriage of black aesthetics and politics. For Primus, traditional African dance and contemporary black vernacular dance were more than mere inspirations for modernist choreography; they were equal participants in helping to create a modern dance vocabulary.” (Harlem Nocturne, 2013, p. 25).
There is enough of a market and following for African folkloric movement to support classes seven days a week in New York, year in and year out. There are now dance conferences held from Maine to California and points in between such as Atlanta, Tallahassee, New Orleans, and Chicago. The students are artists of course, but they are also medical doctors, academics, scientists, lawyers, publishers, and more.
The teachers hail from and represent the nationalities of the various dance vocabularies: Senegal, Mali, Guinea, Congo/Zaire. These are among the most popular and influential teachers/choreographers/performers in this community. Most are based in the New York/New Jersey area, but others are scattered around the country. There are vibrant dance communities, for example, in the Bay Area and Los Angeles in California, in the Washington, D.C., metro area, New Orleans, and Atlanta, though none match New York in quantity and quality.
Finding Legacy in Dance
I apply the principle of sankofa—I look back in order to look forward—to sort out the roles of dance and the significance of traditional and ethnic dance in contemporary culture. The question is personal with me because dance is more than an individual interest or passion, it represents a way to make a living, an affirmation of identity, an aspect of ritual that is dynamic in home and the community—locally, globally, and historically. It is a way of getting to know myself.
“The Africans who came to Latin America, the Caribbean and the United States as slaves brought with them their own social, ceremonial and religious dances. Over the centuries these slaves descendants developed rituals and ceremonies, both social and religious, using dance as a medium of expression. Though rooted in the New World their dance derived from Africa.” — Alice J. Adamczyk, from the Introduction of Black Dance: An Annotated Bibliography (Garland Publishing, 1989) (call number *MGP 89-11473) .
Adamczyk’s Black Dance: An Annotated Bibliography is one of the best sources I’ve used. The book is a compilation of material on black involvement with dance in all forms—much of it found in the New York Public Library’s Jerome Robbins Dance Division and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
One of the most surprising bodies of work discovered in this research project is the collection of Mura Dehn, a Russian woman who made film, wrote, and studied black American dancers and dance traditions and innovations. She became a documentary filmmaker and an artistic director of Traditional Jazz Dance Theater. She spent many years documenting social jazz dancing at the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem in the 1930s. She’s best known for two films: The Spirit Moves and In a Jazz Way. The former is a history of black dance from 1900 to 1986; the latter is a biographical film about Dehn. The Dance Division has the four-volume recordings of The Spirit Moves (call number *MGZIC 9-743) and In aJazz Way: A Portrait of Mura Dehn (call number *MGZHB 12-2407).
The Mura Dehn collection documents Mura Dehn's professional life as dancer, choreographer, scholar, and filmmaker and, to a lesser degree, her personal life through notebooks, poetry, and correspondence. Most important are the research notes and drafts of her many scholarly writings on the development of Afro-American social dance in this country. The following are quotes from Dehn's papers, which the library acquired in August 1987 (call number *MGZMD 72).
When Africans were brought to this country, the white Americans could not conceive that there was an African Culture. The tom-toms frightened the white masters. African drumming brought a liberating energy. It was too dangerous a weapon to leave in the hands of the slaves. The drums were destroyed and forbidden.
The African dance horrified the puritanical whites. They saw it as hideous contortions, lascivious, abomination and bestial sensuality. The celebrations in Congo Square in New Orleans were finally forbidden. From the start the most precious gifts of Africa were misunderstood and defiled. They were made to appear hideous even to the African slaves themselves.
—Mura Dehn, “Black Awareness Through Folk Art,” in the Dance Division as Papers on Afro-American social dance, circa 1869-1987 (call number MGZMD 72 - #120, Box 5, p.2).
My Family Dance Story
My earliest known ancestor who danced was John Green, my maternal great-grandfather, born in the late 19th century. I learned about him first from his wife, my great-grandmother, Allie Caldwell Green Rucker (married three times, there is another surname between that of Mr. Green and Mr. Rucker). But my grandmother Eula Lee Green Crump and her son, my uncle James Robert, aka J. R. Crump, all talked about him, giving me bits of information that fed my curiosity about the past, especially the history of my family and of dance—two things I love dearly.
John Green made his living dancing and taking advantage of whatever kind of—limited—work an early-20th-century black man was allowed. He often had to travel away from his home in East Tennessee to do so, hopping trains to get from one place to the other.
He took his wife and children along too, at least for a while. Mama Allie, as we called her, talked about how often he’d say, “Allie, there’s work in West Virginia,” letting her know he had to go. He did so one time too many and her reply was “okay, but I’m staying right here,” in Rogersville and Knoxville, two of the places where they had established roots and family.
John Green was a buck dancer who did some of his performances on stages at the circuses and fairs. Daughter Eula recalled to me the times during her childhood—after her parents separated—when a neighbor child would “run from town” to let her know “your daddy is dancing on stage.” She and her older brother and sister would run to see him. A love for dance and other arts runs through our family and a few, like John Green, made a little money not only dancing, but playing music and painting. Our women and men were quite talented but, as in the larger society, men had more opportunity and even credibility than women.
My grandmother Eula, John Green’s youngest, loved to dance. Buck dancing wasn’t her style, the Charleston was. She boasted to me—to my embarrassment—that she could "kick her legs over daddy’s (her husband’s) head." Alvin Lavon Crump was not a tall man, but nonetheless, the idea that my prim and proper grandmother would come even close to kicking her stockinged legs that high was impressive and shocking. Included in Papers on Afro-American social dance, circa 1869-1987 is an article titled, “Josephine [Baker] and [the] Charleston invaded Paris like a drug” (call number *MGZMD 72, box 5, folder 125).
I lived in my maternal grandparents' home to witness and hear these stories of how dance was woven into our experience and our history. My curiosity became a passion that grew as I did and led to me being the practitioner, student, and scribe of dance subjects that I am today.
Buck & Wing Dance
In most cases, when I brought up the subject of Buck dancing, family members and friends would roll their eyes, some saying, “I don’t want to know anything about that.” I understood the negative reaction: the name and dance itself in many ways represents the oppression of Black Americans. Buck is racist slang term for Black males and dance is a skill and activity stereotypically assigned to and associated with African and black Americans. So some regard it as simply the “natural” dancing done by black men in order to earn the coins of white audiences.
I've discovered in my research that there was much more to know about Buck dancing than the 52 steps, which Uncle J.R. got from his grandfather John Green. Uncle J.R. told me that John Green taught him 52 steps of the Buck dance. 52 steps suggested to me that what John Green did was more than improvisation (or free-styling as we’d call it now). For all of his boasting, I was never able to get Uncle J.R. to show me much. He remained a good looking, well-dressed man all his life, but an alcohol habit took most of his talent and ability to play music or dance. He’d do a few seconds on the piano, get up and show me a move and go on reminiscing.
Two moving image records in the Dance Division are:
The History of Jazz Dancing , videotaped 1970, a lecture demonstration in which Les Williams presents the black man's role in the history of jazz dancing. Includes demonstrations of the Irish jig, minstrel dances, buck and wing, vaudeville dancing, modern tap patterns, discotheque dancing (call number *MGZIC 9-96).
Old time dancing in the Appalachian Mountains (call number *MGZIDF 2217 ) Reel 6 (62 min. total). After the conclusion of Whisnant's speech (11 min.), there is "African-American traditions," a lecture-demonstration by John Dee Holeman and Quentin Holloway, with Friedland (44 min.). The lecture covers buckdancing, tap dancing, and the "tap Charleston." " Videotaped for the Jerome Robbins Dance Division.
Philosophies of Dance and Innovation
“Learn neatly and with artistry. And then originate through yourself.” —A. L. Liegens, Savoy Lindy Hopper, from “Jazz Dancing: Folklore in the Making” (call number *MGZMD 72)
“When I did the Buck & Wing dance, we had to stick to a routine. If my teachers saw me miss a step he would hit me with a stick. My teacher was Rick Simmons of the team Simmons & Baby. They won first prize in a World Fair in St. Louis around 1900, doing 137 different steps in Buck dancing.” —Miss Lillian Brown, interviewed in 1960 by Mura Dehn (call number *MGZMD 72)
We were encouraged to study music, make things with our hands, and use our bodies to express ourselves. But, the latter had to be done with the utmost caution, the statements made with body movement, clothing and adornment could get you in—even deadly—trouble.
The following quotes from a paper titled “From the Horse's Mouth” are examples of the observations made by Mura Dehn (call number *MGZMD 72, box 5, folder 123).
“Questioning the Blacks about their Art I found that they seldom give a direct answer. They will talk about conditions of life, problems, religion, racial questions, jobs, philosophy in general and then conclude with a description of the Dance. All of which made me understand that their Dance was inseparably connected with life and only speaking about life could they convey the meaning of Dance. 9 (p. 2)
"The Black artist is in a process of making his own folklore—he does not inhereit [sic] it.” (p. 2)
“I learned that to the average Black, art is a proof of general ability. If they are good in art, they will be just as good in anything they become.” (p. 6)
The Spirituality of Dance
Theater, play-acting, was more common to my experience coming up in the Baptist and AME Zion Church in Tennessee, but I would hear references to a kind of sacred dance called the Rings Shout. In general though, religious dancing was an oxymoron in our world. You just couldn’t call movement in the name of the Lord dancing. You were very much supposed to move to gospel and spirituals, but “your feet can’t cross.” And, you certainly couldn’t use hips and torso.
What people did was “get happy.” They “shouted.” They would be filled with emotion or the Holy Spirit and express the joy of that with their bodies: some skipped, jumped, etc. I’ve seen a familiar quick step done by many who got the spirit. And, I’ve been thrown to the floor when great grandmother Allie jumped up from her seat as I laid my head in her lap during Sunday service.
The Ring Shout
When I learned about Ring Shout as an adult, a lightbulb went on. I was able for the first time to understand what people meant by saying it couldn’t be sacred dance if the feet crossed. The Ring Shout is characterized by a low shuffling of the feet and a slightly bent torso by a group of people moving in a circle. The arms and hands are deployed to deliver the specific message or story. Like many African dances that also happen in a circle, there is a time and place for someone to dance solo inside the ring. In the Dance Division there is a videotape of McIntosh County Shouters (call number *MGZIC 9-2698) recorded by the Dance Division through its original documentation project.
In 1786 the law forbade slaves to dance in public but in 1799 a visitor saw vast numbers of negro slaves assembled on the Levee dancing in large rings and an another Sunday inside the city upwards of one hundred negroes of both sexes were dancing and singing on the Levee.
Christian Schultz describes twenty different dancing groups of negroes: "They have their national music: a long kind of narrow drums of various sizes from 2 to 8 feet long, three or four of which make a band. The dancers and leaders are dressed in a variety of wild and savage fashion ornamented with a number of tails of the small wild beasts.”
—Mura Dehn (call number MGZMD 72 , “Night Life in Georgia,” Jazz Monthly 6, no. 9 [1960]: 11-12)
Swing
The Papers on Afro-American social dance, circa 1869-1987 from Mura Dehn (call number (S) *MGZMD 72), form a collection that, for its subject matter, is among the most rich collections housed in the Jerome Robbins Dance Division. Documents gathered in this collection—from media reviews of performances to interviews and oral histories of dancers and choreographers—cover the years 1869-1987.
She was a dancer herself and, for example, writes of being taught black dance, including ones called “the itch,” “the hammer,” and the “Havayan.” She saw the connections between these movements and those which were elements of dances originating in Africa. They were “very close to the basic African dance Asadata Dafora taught in our joint school, The Academy of Swing in New York.”
Standard Bearer: Joe Nash
This pioneer black and male ballet dancer, Joe Nash, served as a historian and researcher of black dance. In his later years he could be seen moving about Harlem wearing a fantastic African textile coat and kufi. He was a short man who moved with the grace of a king. There is a photograph of him as a young classical dancer, in a full split on the sand of a beach, having fun. He was a moving archive who documented and acknowledged with his work the contributions of dancers, choreographers, and dance companies from the 1930s to the 1980s. He brought together published and unpublished writing, art, lectures, and images about dance including ballet, modern African, African interpretive, and theatrical dance.
Understanding the Library’s Catalog
Researching in the library, I found the system of discovery in the Dance Division was difficult. Curator Jan Schmidt explained the library’s system of subject headings:
While black dance itself is a very large subject, in the Library, black dance encompasses many styles, genres, and countries and dance has styles and genres that are without relation to ethnicity or background, such as modern dance. The Library of Congress and the New York Public Library have developed subject headings that are specific. Searching the NYPL catalog using the subject heading Dance, Black, there are only 3,464 items. These do not include dancers, choreographers or companies that are mainly black. The subject Dance, Black refers to materials “about Black dance.” At the Dance Division, these searches of dance, Black will include such things as the DanceAfrica series from Brooklyn Academy of Music and The 8th International Conference of Blacks in Dance and Dance Black America II.[Talking Drums! The Journal of Black dance, vol. 5, no 1 (Jan. 1995), p.11-19, call number *MGZA].
So, Alvin Ailey in an interview tape about civil rights will have a subject heading as: Dance, Black—United States. But otherwise, in the performance videotapes, he will only be identified as choreographer. There are too many Africans and African Americans, to be included in such a large subject heading as Black dance, just as there are too many Caucasians or Asians to be in a subject Caucasian or Asian dance.
A keyword search of dance, African American, an older subject heading, brings up a list of 761 items, many of which are also contained in the dance, Black search. Under the subject heading Dance, Black, the materials are listed by state and sometimes city, such as Dance Black—New York (State)—New York. Here, for instance, you can find records like this more recent video from 2012: PLATFORM 2012 : Parallels, From the Streets, From the Clubs, From the Houses, curated by Ishmael Houston-Jones and presented by Danspace Project. [call number*MGZIDVD 5-7130].
What won't be under Dance, Black are the huge number of black choreographers, companies and dancers in all fields of dance. Though with a digital catalog, the issues of subject headings are less critical, in that keyword searches can often get a researcher to their desired materials. An example of the issues is that for such genres as tap dance, many of which could be labeled black dance not all tap dancers are black. Though Alvin Ailey is a major black choreographer, the library does not label him as such. So he will only be found under black dance when he is talking about black dance. A keyword search of Alvin Ailey brings up a list of 1,163 items. These may be about him, by him, of his choreography, his dancing. But they are not labeled Dance, Black unless someone in the article, book or tape is talking “about” the subject black dance. It also brings up another issue in black dance. If a Japanese group performs Alvin Ailey's choreography of Revelations, would that be cataloged as black dance?
If you look at dance directly from Africa, the subject heading Dance—Africa will get you to materials about the continent of Africa, not individual countries. A keyword search of Dance—Africa will bring up a list of 363 items. A subject search of "Dance--Africa"will bring up a list of 192 items. But this does not encompass the materials from or of Africa in the Dance Division, only the materials “about the continent of Africa and dance."
When you search by countries, for example Dance—Guinea, you will find 42 items, including 33 videos. One group of videos that are especially interesting are the 1991 documentation of part of a three-week trip to the interior of Guinea, made by Kemoko Sano and Hamidou Bagoura, respectively choreographer and technical director of Les Ballets Africains of the Republic of Guinea, in search of promising musicians and dancers who might be recruited for the company and source of material for new works. At each site they visited, they were received by local authorities, and watched local troupes. They are often glimpsed observing, recording, and occasionally taking part in the performances.
So searching the catalog of the New York Public Library is a complex process. Each time, new things emerge, new links to follow, new subjects to consider. Like black dance, the catalog has many genres, styles, and practitioners.
Asadata Dafora and the Birth of African Dance in America
Image 16. Asadata Dafora in Kykunkar.
Photographer unknown.
Another pioneer of African dance in the United States was Asadata Dafora, who arrived here in the 1930s. The Dance Division holds the register of the manuscripts and other items in the Asadata Dafora Papers, 1933-1963, MSS. 48 in the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the New York Public Library. There are also a number of articles, clippings and photo files. The videos include re-creations of his most famous choreography, such as Spear Dance and Awassa Astrige. Parallel Visions: Design in Three Eras of African American Concert Dance (call number *MGZIC 9-4918) is a video of a symposium held in conjunction with the exhibition Onstage: A Century of African American Stage Design, presented in the Amsterdam Gallery of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts in 1995. In this video, among other speakers, Richard Collins Green, using examples drawn from the 1930s and 1940s, explores questions of the relation of dance design to the aesthetics of its time. Among the dancers and choreographers he discusses are Asadata Dafora, the Hampton Creative Dance Group, Pearl Primus, and Katherine Dunham.
African Dance Spaces and Community
African Dance spaces and the communities that have developed within them constitute one of the most diverse art and culture scenes ever—racially, ethnically, and otherwise. Survey the faithful who’ve attended classes and events around dance several times a week for decades and you’ll find Iranian, Swiss, German, Italian, Argentine, Polish, Russian, Japanese, representatives of every corner of Africa and the Diaspora. These—mostly women— are doctors, lawyers, teachers, scientists, artists, stay-at-home mothers, retirees, and teens. Some are professional dancers or were, many have migrated over to the African styles from more Western-centric ballet and modern, but many began their dance experience with African and it stuck.
The understanding and execution of the movements of traditional dance is not easy for most. They are often intricate, quick, and demanding. But, unlike European ballet, they are kind to the body, not requiring that it be molded and manipulated in unnatural ways, as is the case with dancing on pointe. The vocabularies are extensive and varied, they cannot be easily characterized and break through all stereotypes. And, they are dynamic, the styles, the cultures change from one generation to the other, one community (even inside Africa) to the other, one family to the other.
The cultures and nations represented in these schedules of classes include: Brazil, Congo, Cuba, Egypt, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Mali, Nigeria, and African America. And these are primarily the geographical references for this journey into the documentation of what this writer refers to as black dance.
Black refers to race, a construction maybe, but one that effectively links people to the common experience of racism. The black body, especially outside of our own environments, finds itself in unique conflict with the dominant culture, because we tend to have a physicality and worldview more in common with each other than with non-blacks.
There is a treasure trove of documents, information, and especially images of great dancers and great dance moments in the Jerome Robbins Dance Division—a sample represented here. Get familiar with the classification system, follow your instincts and interest, and you’ll find them. You’ll uncover much more though by getting to know and working with the staff.
Librarians and support staff will understand the nuances and quirks in the way items are organized and maintained. I am an alumnus of the Atlanta University School of Library and Information Studies, who has worked in public and private libraries and learned the value of the training librarians receive and the passion they often have for their work. You can learn directly from them as keepers of the documentation who often can even tell you how items came to the library’s collection.
Items in the Jerome Robbins Dance Division
Dinizulu Dancers and Singers (Company) no. 6, call number *MGZEA
Katherine Dunham, no. 5, call number *MGZE/MGZEA
Lavinia Williams, [Clippings], call number *MGZR
Sara Yarborough, no. 3, call number *MGZEA
Eleo Pomare, no. 5, call number: *MGZEA
Eleo Pomare, no. 6, call number: *MGZEA
Eleo Pomare, no. 9, call number: *MGZEA
Charles Moore, no. 1, call number *MGZEA
Dinizulu Dancers and Singers Company no. 4, call number *MGZEA
Babatunde Olatunji and Company no. 4, call number *MGZE
Babatunde Olatunji and Company, no. 5, call number *MGZEA
Pearl Primus, Portraits, no. 2, call number *MGZEA
Asadata Dafora, no. 17, call number *MGZE
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.
I have been a member of the Burckhardt family since 1979, through my relationship with Jacob Burckhardt, filmmaker and photographer. Edwin Denby was also a member of this family. By way of association, I can say that Edwin Denby is family to me.
When Rudy Burckhardt was twenty-one years old, Edwin Denby was the person who brought Rudy to New York and introduced him to the arts scene. Rudy was a photographer and Edwin was a writer. Edwin and Rudy met in Switzerland. Edwin’s passport had expired, so he was looking for somebody to take his new passport photograph, in Basel, Switzerland. They soon became very close friends there and then Edwin convinced Rudy to move to New York.
The first time I met Edwin was at his loft, 145 West 21st Street, top floor. I think it was autumn of 1978. At that point, I didn’t know who he was. He was a very impressive elderly gentleman with white hair. He had a charismatic look that one could not forget. He lived at that loft until he died in 1983. 1978 was also the year that I had started presenting my work in the downtown New York dance scene. I had no dance background and my presentations were more like happenings. At this point, I knew nothing about American dance history, but my encounter with him was electrifying.
I grew to understand that he was a very important figure as a dance critic, even though he was already retired at that point. He was very fond of George Balanchine’s work, but he followed many other new choreographers. Later on, I found out that he wrote the first article that recognized Merce Cunningham’s importance.
Edwin came to see all of my works. Each time, he would leave a message for me on the phone.
The Jerome Robbins Dance Division has some photographs of Edwin. A few of those photographs show Edwin Denby performing with Claire Eckstein. Claire was a choreographer in Germany, until the Nazis took over. I had first seen her photograph in Edwin’s apartment and was told by Jacob that she influenced Edwin immensely. I am not sure if this is the same photograph as the one in the Dance Division, but they are very similar.
Image 1: Claire Eckstein and Edwin Denby in Gaetano Donizetti’s “Die Regimentstochter”, Berlin Deecmber 20, 1930. Gift from Christiane Zautgraf Forschunginstitut Universitat Bayreuth Image 2. Claire Eckstein and Edwin Denby in Gaetano Donizetti’s “Die Regimentstochter”, Berlin December 20, 1930. Gift from Christiane Zautgraf Forschunginstitut Universitat Bayreuth.
Claire Eckstein was a choreographer of stage dancing and operettas, and Edwin, as seen in the photographs, was a performer. I am not familiar with Claire Eckstein’s work. But the photograph that I saw in Edwin’s home had a title, and I remember it being something similar to “ What You Can Do in an Island in 24 hours” —the title was very ordinary, and abstract, which I found unusual for an operetta. Edwin was a dance critic who saw dance as a collection of codes strung together rather than a narrative. In addition to Edwin being a performer with Claire Eckstein, I can imagine how Claire’s approach to dance may have influenced how Edwin viewed dance later on.
Image 3. Claire Eckstein and Edwin Denby. Photo Hans Haustein.
Image 4. Edwin Denby in the air, Claire Eckstein clapping, Photo Hans Haustein.
In 1986, I went to Munich to present my work. Edwin had passed, but Jacob and I went to visit Claire Eckstein while we were in Munich. He still had her telephone number and address from his visit in 1972. We called and luckily Claire Eckstein answered and she agreed to come watch my performance. After the performance she told me that “it was very interesting but was too long.” The way in which she delivered that critique to me reminded me of Edwin and his way of giving me feedback.
I went to Claire Eckstein’s home to eat dinner. She was a choreographer and dancer in Germany until the rise of the Nazi Party. Her husband , Wilhelm Reinking ,was a set designer. But they both stopped as the pressure of war escalated, and she never made anything after the war. After dinner, I knelt by her and asked, “I want to know, what was. . . ?” She was reluctant to tell me anything about her past work. I think it was because she didn’t want to bring back her memories of Nazi Germany. She brought out a brown folder to show me with about ten newspaper clippings that were falling apart.
Four or five years before Edwin died, we spent a lot of time in Searsmont, Maine. He talked to me about many of things. For example, he described to me the first time he saw Cunningham. Or the time when Paul Taylor opened a curtain, the dancers stood there motionless, and how the curtain closed. I didn’t read this in a book; Edwin would just tell me. He wouldn’t tell me what he thought about it. He would just describe it. He would talk about evidence, not his impression.
Image 5. Edwin Denby, left, with two unidentified men.
Photograph by Victor Kraft.
Edwin thought George Balanchine was a genius. I went with him a few times to the New York City Ballet. George Balanchine died the same year Edwin died. When George Balanchine died, Edwin said to me, "The choreographer has died, so the next year or two, the dance will become much richer. You should go to see it." He told me that I should look at choreography like a music score. I started seeing it that way, and so when I went to see George Balanchine’s ballets, I found that the works were amazing.
After Edwin came back from Maine in 1982, we would watch Merce Cunningham, and I really learned how to watch Cunningham’s work. After thirty minutes, I felt something very strong, I don’t remember which dance it was, but after fifty minutes, the dance ended. Karole Armitage, Joseph Lennon, Ellen Cornfield and Chris Komar were in it. When the dance ended, I heard, Edwin shout, “bravo” with a very young voice. I felt the same. The fact that he shouted was a huge affirmation of my sensibilities.
At the Dance Division, you can read Edwin Denby's collected works in books, listen to audio recordings of people who refer to him in their own oral histories, and even see the film (call number *MGZHB 6-2559) made by Rudy Burckhardt circa 1983, Dancers, Buildings and People in the Street, a cinedance inspired by Edwin Denby’s book.
Image 6. Claire Eckstein and Edwin Denby. Photo Atelier Robertson.
Thread #1
I’d like to find the exact Cunningham work that I saw with Edwin Denby and I would like to research Karole Armitage (who currently shares a dancer with me) as well as Chris Komar, who died in 1996. At the Jerome Robbins Dance Division, I can do this. For Chris Komar there are over two hundred items, including videos and a nearly six-hour oral history recording with him interviewed by Susan Kraft in 1993-94, titled Interview with Chris Komar (call number *MGZTC 3-1823).
Looking from home at the catalog, I can see that there are over 583 Merce Cunningham videos already digitized and on the library’s digital collections. I was also surprised to see that the Dance Division has over 166 items under Karole Armitage’s name in a keyword search, including photographs, reviews, and many videos. Some of the videos go back to the 1970s, with her performing in Merce Cunningham’s company.
Image 7. Karole Armitage. Photograph by Patrick Bensard.
In my generation, we went to the library, searched through index cards, and pulled out numbers and names and got books and articles. Now, online, at home, I can do the same search in a more complex way to get more and more types of materials, including all these videos and audiotapes. The library still has the books and articles, and you still have to fill out a form to see them, but sometimes, with the new digitized materials, you can simply click and watch. When the library has been able to clear the rights to show an item on the Web, you can watch the videos or see the photographs from your own home computer. Some digitized materials and analog tapes can be only accessed in the library.
I like looking at materials in the library. The atmosphere of the library is like the theater in some ways. It requires a commitment and concentration that allows you to go deeply into the dance world. With YouTube or DVDs you can see the works, but I prefer the movie theater. It is connected with the fact that the dance on the screen was performed in three dimensions. So I like watching video in the library, but I would suggest that the library should have bigger screens, maybe even screen films in 3D. (I understand that David Vaughan screens video from the Dance Division’s archive the last Wednesday of the month on the third floor. I have not yet attended, but now that I have been working on this Fellows Project, I see that this is something I would like to attend in order to see these videos on a big screen.)
I only learned about the issues with copyright and putting dance video on the Web when the Dance Division videotaped my works. I thought, like with YouTube, just put it up. But the library staff informed me that in order to do this under copyright law, they had to have all the rightsholders, including musicians, dancers, unions, and others, all in agreement that the video could be available online.
Going to the library to see the videos is a very special thing. The act of being in a space dedicated to study facilitates the study, an important consideration for the future for library facilities.
Thread #2
When I started having a relation with Paris Opera GRCOP (Groupe de Recherche Choregraphique de l'Opera de Paris), through Dancing in the Streets in New York, I was one of the selected choreographers for the bicentennial of the Statue of Liberty exchange program U.S.-France. Among the other choreographers selected were David Gordon, William Forsythe, Karole Armitage, Ulysses Dove, Andy DeGroat, and Lucinda Childs. I remember interacting with Susan Marshall who was also chosen. She found out that I was related to Edwin Denby and Rudy Burckhardt. She told me that she would love to have her work seen by Edwin if he was alive, and also that she considered herself greatly influenced by him. I would like to research a little bit more about Susan Marshall’s work. I looked at the Dance Division catalog and found 109 items. Of these, over fifty are videotapes for Susan Marshall.
Thread #3
In 1980, I was introduced to a Kabuki actor, Matazo Nakamura. He was supposed to do a choreography in Kabuki style in the musical Into the Woods. I was asked to be an interpreter by the Broadway producer. Matazo Nakamura was an unknown actor. At that point, well known Kabuki actors never gave workshops. Workshops were a very Western idea. In the 1970s, there was some talk in the Kabuki world that they needed to teach this in the Western world. And so, this not well-known actor, Matazo Nakamura, did workshops in Germany, and was then sent to the United States. I thought I should introduce Matazo Nakamura to Edwin Denby.
After the war, Kabuki was briefly prohibited in Japan. In the United States there was somebody who said that Kabuki needed to be protected and brought Kabuki to be performed in the States. Edwin saw Kabuki performances whenever they came to New York City.
While meeting with Matazo Nakamura, Edwin described to us in detail how the Kabuki actors came through a small sliding door, and suddenly, there was an actor in white sliding onto the stage, and then raising his right hand and creating a spiderweb with tossed out strings. Matazo was excited to hear how Edwin described this, as Edwin’s description was very accurate, even though he had seen it so long ago and the performance style was so unfamiliar to him.
Finally I stumped the Dance Division; the only thing they have on Matazo Nakamura are two editions of his book Kabuki, Backstage, Onstage : An Actor's Life, by Matazo Nakamura, translated by Mark Oshima (call number *MGS (Japanese) 90-2595) and one indexed review of it. However, the Dance Division does have much on Kabuki. A keyword search for materials on Kabuki shows nearly four hundred items, including books, videos, and photographs.
Matazo Nakamura and Edwin Denby got along very well and connected to each other through the love and understanding of the abstraction of the movement of the Kabuki actors. I was the translator for them and Matazo was impressed with Edwin’s memories.
Thread #4
What does the Dance Division have of my work? After all this, I thought I had an idea of what the Dance Division had of my work, as I had worked with the library a number of times to record my works. A keyword search of my name in quotes brings up one hundred items.
Image 8. Yoshiko Chuma and Harry Whitaker Sheppard, The School of Hard Knocks, 1990, at Dance Theater Workshop. Photograph by Lois Greenfield.
Among those items, I found the videotapes that I knew were there, because the Dance Division had recorded them. One was Unfinished Symphony, performed at Danspace Project (call number *MGZIA 4-3034). Another was a series called the Living Room Project that took place over several years from 1997 to 1999, recorded by Charlie Steiner (call numbers for five tapes: *MGZIA 4-3936 , *MGZIA 4-3935*MGZIA 4-3933*MGZIA 4-3934*MGZIA 4-3997).
The Dance Division also created an oral history with me in June of 1998 that is three and a half hours long. Elizabeth Zimmer interviewed me at the New York Public Library (call number *MGZTC 3-2171 [cassette]; for transcript, see *MGZMT 3-2171).
I found that in the Kaja Gam Records, (S)*MGZMD 204, there are folders on her work with my company. There are also videotapes from the Tina Croll, James Cunningham’s Horse’s Mouth series that I participated in.
Some of the recordings that I did not know were at the library are:
Homecoming [videorecording] : celebrating twenty years of dance at P.S. 122 / a film by Charles Dennis (call number *MGZIDVD 5-2407)
Crash orchestra Japan Society, 1995 (call number *MGZIA 4-2756 )
Jo Ha Kyu Danspace Project St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery, New York, on February 20, 1993 (call number *MGZIA 4-2161)
Following through continuity & context in performance / Movement Research Inc. presents The Studies Project: A Panel Discussion Moderated by Marc Robinson (call number *MGZIA 4-8061)
Dress up!: P.S. 122's Tenth anniversary benefit, presented by Performance Space 122, 1990 (call number *MGZIC 9-4636)
Dive in/3 Danspace Project's third annual festival of improvisation. Curator: Ishmael Houston-Jones. October 22, 1989 (call number *MGZIC 9-2579)
Thick as Thebes , Choreography, set, and costumes: Pooh Kaye; Performed by Pooh Kaye, Yoshiko Chuma Claire Bernard, and Nina Lundborg. Videotaped in dress rehearsal (?) by Eric Bogosian at The Kitchen, New York, on November 26, 1978 (call number *MGZIC 9-4143)
There are also recordings of my choreography by other companies, such asReverse Psychology in Gear presented by the Daghdha Dance Company; choreography by Yoshiko Chuma (call number *MGZIA 4-5943).
Though there was not enough time for me to look at all this material located at the Dance Division, this project allowed me to glimpse the vast number of materials that are available to the public on nearly any dance subject in the Dance Division.
This project made me think differently about my own work. My apartment is a general mess of documents, videos, papers, sketches, program notes, and photographs. I didn’t think I really cared about documentation and the art of organizing and saving my works in any serious way. I used to say that after twenty years, no one will know me. Trisha Brown, Bill T. Jones, some number of contemporary dancers will remain in the public memory, but I might fade out.
Now, partly because of the passage of time and partly through this project looking at Edwin Denby’s archive and history, I have changed my mind about this. I used to be a person who said that I didn’t really care, but now I say, documentation, documentation, documentation. Now, in the beginning of the twenty-first century, time and space in video are so edited and collapsed together into small bits on the Internet that the library’s act of preserving, cataloging, and making this material in full available to the public, at no cost, is enormously important to recent dance history.
Besides that, this period of American dance history is itself enormously important to the world. For people like Sasha Waltz, Pina Bausch, Rosemary Butcher, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, and others, American dance allowed them the freedom to create in a new way.
Sasha Waltz studied at the Amsterdam School of New Dance Development, where I was also a frequent guest artist with Simone Forti and Steve Paxton in 1980s. I was happy to spend many months there. In Europe there was a great support for the arts and Libraries. This drives me to say at the end of this article that, though I know the city does give the New York Public Library some funding, I would be in support of more funding for the arts from the city, state, and federal governments. I believe that the libraries, as repositories of the arts, also need additional support, especially the New York Public Library and the Jerome Robbins Dance Division at Lincoln Center. The importance of the responsibility taken on by the Dance Division to be the archive of the history of dance was made clear to me in this project. Looking at my own notes about Edwin Denby and the documentation at the library combined to help me understand the importance of all of the elements that make our memories more accurate. If you don’t have the information, the cultural heritage will be lost for the next generation.
Items in the Jerome Robbins Dance Division
Edwin Denby, #1 and 2, call number: *MGZEA.
Edwin Denby, #1 and 2, call number: *MGZEA.
Edwin Denby, #6, call number: *MGZEA.
Edwin Denby, #7, call number: *MGZEA.
Edwin Denby, #18, call number: *MGZEA.
Edwin Denby, #5, call number: *MGZEA.
Karole Armitage, #18, call number: *MGZEA.
Yoshiko Chuma, #3, call number: *MGZEA.
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 across 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 those 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 United States.
Upon moving to New York City at age fourteen to complete my dance training at the School of American Ballet (SAB), I made a very important discovery. My new address, 70 Lincoln Center Plaza, was directly across West Sixty-fifth Street from a true international treasure, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. For a young ballet dancer like myself, one immeasurably passionate about the history and life of my art form, I had found a second home in the library’s Jerome Robbins Dance Division.
My use of the library has become more layered over time. In my first days as an SAB student, I studied countless New York City Ballet (NYCB) archival performance films of Patricia McBride. This remarkable George Balanchine muse had been my teacher in my early dance training in my hometown of Charlotte, North Carolina. Ms. McBride’s instruction and her direct link to George Balanchine were my primary motivations for coming to NYC. I longed to be part of Balanchine’s company and to immerse myself in his aesthetic. Training at his school was the first piece of realizing that dream.
I had spent much of my childhood in North Carolina reading and watching everything that I could find about ballet. So I felt immensely privileged to have many of the same luminaries I had grown up researching as my SAB instructors. I began to study the Dance Division’s moving image recordings of these teachers in their performing years with the NYCB. In this manner, the library’s collection powerfully underscored my daily classroom training at SAB. For example, I could learn the intricacies of pas de deux work from Jock Soto in the studio, and then cross the street to watch him embody those very qualities in an archival videorecording of Balanchine’s Allegro Brilliante (Call number: *MGZIDVD 5-2154). I have had many delightful conversations with my teachers through the years that began along the lines of, “I just saw a tape of you dancing in ______ at the library.”
The Dance Division’s holdings also helped me prepare for two special milestones in my final year at SAB, the first of which was having the opportunity to teach class at SAB. Peter Martins had selected me as one of two students who were to be SAB’s first-ever student teachers. Through this program, I taught four Intermediate Men’s ballet classes. Mr. Martins observed my teaching and then met with me to offer constructive feedback. As part of my own pedagogical preparations, I revisited the library’s videorecordings of George Balanchine’s NYCB company classes and of Stanley Williams’s SAB men’s classes, so that I could incorporate some of their particular exercises and nuances into my own teaching. (Balanchine Class, call numbers *MGZIDVD 5-5887 and *MGZIDVD 5-5886; Williams teaching can be found in call numbers *MGZIA 4-5514,*MGZIA 4-6092 JRC, *MGZIA 4-6097 JRC, *MGZIA 4-6090 JRC, *MGZIA 4-6089 JRC.)
The library’s collection also assisted me as I rehearsed for my graduation Workshop Performances at SAB in my final semester as a student. I danced the classical lead in Balanchine’s Cortège Hongrois. The films that I watched of past NYCB and SAB Workshop presentations of the ballet proved to be an excellent resource. I found inspiration in Adam Lüders’s technical refinement and in Sean Lavery’s warm exuberance as they danced the role, especially because they were both, like me, towering dancers (I am six foot four) (Lüders, call number *MGZIDVD 5-3755, Lavery; call number *MGZIDVD 5-3428). With the case of Mr. Lavery, I had the good fortune of being his student for my first three years at SAB. He had been wonderfully nurturing and encouraging to me. I felt honored to inherit one of his roles.
The library served me very well during all my SAB days. Now, as a dancer with NYCB, it continues to do so. I now use the collection to illuminate the ballets that the company is performing at any given time, especially those in which I will be appearing. Every night of the ballet season, I am either onstage or watching in the audience. This is a constant education of practice and observation. My hours in the Dance Division bolster both. This essay documents my process of discovery as I studied the specific works presented at NYCB between the fall of 2014 and the spring of 2015.
The Same Joy
Upon beginning this project, I felt both excited about where my research into the current repertory might lead me and a bit daunted by the innumerable possibilities. The quantity and quality of the NYCB’s annual workload is unique, and I think unsurpassed, in all the world. I spent the fall season and its preceding rehearsal period performing, watching, and researching at the library about the ballets at hand. But I was still unsure about what the focus of my writing would be. I knew that any one of these ballets could be a sufficient topic in itself. But I wanted to find a broad, unifying lens through which I could consider several different works.
Then, about a week into the December Nutcracker season, I found my frame of reference. I was stretching in the back of the David H. Koch Theater’s Main Hall after my morning company class, observing the rehearsal that was taking place for the Act III “Tarantella” from August Bournonville’s Napoli. Nilas Martins was teaching these lively steps to principal dancers Amar Ramasar and Sara Mearns. Nilas, son of NYCB Ballet Master in Chief Peter Martins, is himself a former NYCB principal dancer and a product of the Royal Danish Ballet. These Balanchine-trained dancers received and realized these Bournonville movements with such ease, innately understanding their construction and musicality. The course of my study was set. I would use the library’s collection to explore the artistic bonds between George Balanchine (1904-1983) and August Bournonville (1805-1879), two balletic titans.
The timing was absolutely right. Bournonville was to be the star of the company’s spring gala. His La Sylphide was being staged for the company as well as Bournonville Divertissements, a veritable highlight reel of pure dance excerpts from his other ballets (including Napoli). I could be on the inside of both his and Mr. Balanchine’s works simultaneously, since I was already rehearsing the Act I reel from La Sylphide and performing in a string of Balanchine ballets: Chaconne, La Valse, The Nutcracker, Cortège Hongrois, and the “Theme and Variations” section of Tschaikovsky Suite No. 3.
Image 3. August Bournonville.
One of the first films I watched at the library after this clarification was a 1982 interview with Peter Martins regarding the PBS broadcast of NYCB’s performance of Bournonville Dances (call number *MGZIC 9-4815). Martins said, “I can imagine that the people who worked under Bournonville had the same joy that we people who work under Balanchine have.” Both groups had the rare privilege of working under the guidance of genius. As a Bournonville-trained Dane and as Balanchine’s successor as Ballet Master in Chief of NYCB, Martins is singularly qualified to make such a statement. I know that I have derived some of that same joy from identifying and tracking various connections between Balanchine and Bournonville. I began to see how each man was teaching me about the other. Their works and words (recorded in their own writings and in interviews) not only had striking similarities, but also provided commentary on one other. It became ever clearer to me that I was observing a dialogue across the centuries between two like-minded masters. What here follows is the fruit of that investigation.
Little Children Shall Lead Them
Boyhood Debuts
George Balanchine and August Bournonville were both products of rich balletic traditions in Russia and Denmark, respectively. Each had a pivotal, vocation-affirming experience appearing on the stage during his boyhood. The eight-year-old Bournonville made his debut as the son of a Viking king in Vincenzo Galeotti’s ballet Lagertha in Copenhagen’s Court Theater. Bournonville later wrote of that night in his epic three-volume autobiography: “The whole thing was like a dream. . . I had now received my initiation" (My Theater Life, call number *MGYB [Bournonville] 79-4109).
The ten-year-old George Balanchine performed in the act I garland dance and as Cupid in Marius Petipa’s The Sleeping Beauty in St. Petersburg’s legendary Mariinsky Theater. “Thanks to Sleeping Beauty, I fell in love with ballet,” he would later recall (Balanchine's Tchaikovsky: Conversations with Balanchine on His Life, Ballet, and Music, (call number *MGYB [Balanchine] 93-930). This comment is doubly important when one considers how up until this first performance opportunity, Balanchine was not at all convinced that ballet was for him. He wrote, “I was certain I had no aptitude for dancing and was wasting my time and the Czar’s money” (“How I Became a Dancer and Choreographer,” Balanchine’sNewComplete Stories of the Great Ballets, call number: *MGYB 75-1415). But in the act of performing before an audience, Balanchine participated in the theatrical magic that his daily classroom work could produce. He was never the same again. He had found his element. “The theatre became a home to us, a natural place to be" (“How I Became a Dancer and Choreographer”).
Perhaps due to the impact of these early experiences, Bournonville and Balanchine featured children to marvelous effect in many of their works, oftentimes giving them weighty responsibilities in the overall picture of the ballet. I have enjoyed several of these firsthand. One such example is the Act I reel in Bournonville’s Scottish-themed La Sylphide, choreographed in 1836. This Highland reel takes place as part of the wedding celebrations for James, the ballet’s protagonist, and Effie, his betrothed. This is danced by a large corps de ballet of adult couples and several children’s couples. The choreography is almost identical for both groups. Bournonville expected the children of his Royal Danish Ballet School to rise to the level of the mature dancers’ precision and professionalism. Balanchine had similar expectations for his SAB students and choreographed accordingly. The common vision of these two masters is beautifully manifest as my fellow NYCB dancers and I join forces with our junior SAB colleagues to perform Bournonville’s choreography. These little ones from SAB do not miss a beat.
There is a charming moment at the beginning of the reel when Gurn, James’s close friend, is asking around the room for a partner. After being rejected by the ladies in his age group, he asks one of the little girls at the party to dance with him. She, being far happier to dance with an adult than Gurn is to be dancing with a child, proudly takes her place with her partner in the center of the adult corps de ballet’s front line. She leads the ensemble with aplomb, dancing all the same steps as her adult female counterparts. Bournonville weaves her and Gurn into the very center of his patterns. This moment is wittily rendered in the 1988 videorecording of the Royal Danish Ballet’s La Sylphide, starring Nikolaj Hübbe as James and Lis Jeppesen as the Sylph. Petrusjka Broholm, a former Royal Danish Ballet soloist, is the vivacious and knowledgeable guest ballet mistress teaching La Sylphide to my fellow NYCB dancers and me. She appears as a sylph in Act II of this particular video (call number *MGZIDVD 5-4282).
I could not help but notice that this mismatched couple joke is delightfully reversed in the act I Christmas Eve party scene of Balanchine’s The Nutcracker, in which I played one of the guests. The first group dance is for the children. Dr. Stahlbaum, the host, conducts the little boys through a series of brisk militaristic movements as his wife, Frau Stahlbaum, leads the little girls through their own activities. When the time comes for the children to mix, they neatly pair up.
Marie, the ballet’s petite and mighty heroine, has no trouble finding a partner. But her younger brother Fritz does not fare as well. He is turned down by all the little ladies. The joke is on him. Fritz, dejected and probably a bit embarrassed, has to proceed with his mother as his dancing partner. Both Bournonville and Balanchine had a sense of humor.
The Nutcracker is Balanchine’s masterwork for the children of his School of American Ballet. Of Balanchine’s production Edwin Denby wrote, “The Nutcracker is a fantasy ballet for children, like a toy that a grown-up makes with thoughtful care.” (“More Than Sweet Fantasy: The Content of Balanchine’s The Nutcracker,” Center, March 1954, call number *MGZA). Balanchine was that thoughtful grown-up toy-maker, inventing 63 roles in this one ballet for his young students. The steps that he gave them throughout are challenging yet perfectly age-appropriate. In making these children’s roles, Balanchine was able to revisit some of his early progress as a performer. His first role in the Mariinsky Theater production of Lev Ivanov’s The Nutcracker was that of a toy soldier in the Act I battle between the Nutcracker Prince’s troops and the Mouse King’s troops, which also happens to be a particularly vivid scene in his own production. The victory of the pint-sized army of toy soldiers is made all the more impressive by the fact they are in combat with mice that are played by adult male company dancers, a group of seemingly insurmountable foes. Balanchine entrusted these little children with the formidable task of guiding the audience through the whole arc of the story: Nuremberg-set Christmas Eve festivities to a nightmarish battle to a land of sweets.
Balanchine’s recollections of Ivanov’s The Nutcracker provided him with two passages that he transplanted wholly unchanged into his production of the ballet: the Nutcracker Prince’s act II pantomime (in which he recounts the tale of his and Marie’s journey to the Sugar Plum Fairy and the inhabitants of her land) and the Hoop Dance (which Balanchine presents as “Candy Canes”). He had performed both of these roles at the Mariinsky. In both, children are critical, the young boy who plays the Prince and the eight girls who serve as the corps de ballet for the adult “Candy Cane” soloist. In observing these two sections in particular, I began to see these moments as touchstones for Balanchine’s own larger creative contribution in his Nutcracker production. In the first, we see the precedent for all the pantomime in the ballet. In the second, we see the use of ballet vocabulary as a magical effect.
Every gesture of the Nutcracker Prince’s pantomime is set to the phrases of Tchaikovsky’s score. He tells the details of his epic battle with Tchaikovsky’s quotation of the Act I battle scene music as his accompaniment. This provides a visual and aural clarity for the audience as they interpret what the Nutcracker Prince is communicating. This is indicative of all the mime gestures in Balanchine’s production of The Nutcracker. The mimed and musical sentences are wedded. When the Sugarplum Fairy expresses how pleased she is by the Nutcracker Prince’s story, she lifts her arms over her head and extends them heavenward as the music similarly swells. The Sugarplum Fairy then dismisses her subjects who have gathered to greet Marie and her Prince. She sends them off in three separate groups, and a trumpet is heard for each. In the Act I party scene, there is a chord for the party guest’s toast, and there is a musical push-and-pull as the little girls play tug of war with the little boys for the hobby horse that has been brought by Marie’s magician godfather, Herr Drosselmeier.
There is also, unique to Balanchine’s production, an extended pantomime sequence immediately following the Act I party scene. Here, Marie comes back into the living room after all the Christmas Eve party guests have left. She is trying to find the Nutcracker doll that Drosselmeier gave her. She has obviously not been able to sleep without it, since she makes this re-entrance in her nightgown. Upon finding her beloved new doll, she holds it close and falls asleep on the living room’s couch. Frau Staulbaum enters, searching for her daughter. Relieved to find Marie on the couch, Frau Staulbaum places her shawl on the slumbering girl and exits. Drosselmeier then makes a mysterious appearance, gently taking the Nutcracker doll from Marie without waking her up. He quickly uses a tool to fix the doll, which had been damaged by an earlier attack from Fritz. He then disappears into the night.
All of this scene plays out to an excerpt from Tchaikovsky’s score for The Sleeping Beauty, in which there is a haunting and otherworldly violin solo. This music is heard in The Sleeping Beauty when the protagonist, Princess Aurora, awakes from her spell-induced century of sleep. In The Nutcracker, Balanchine uses this music as Marie enters into Drosselmeier’s spell through her sleep. The concertmaster’s musical tightrope walk and Drosselmeier’s gestures combine to create a sense of slight uneasiness and intrigue for the audience. There is the sense that everything is about to transform. Indeed it is. Marie’s Nutcracker doll is about to come to life, and she is about to be caught up into a wondrous adventure. This is all so appropriate when one remembers how the spell of The Sleeping Beauty had lured Balanchine into a balletic life when he was a youth. He was never the same again. Mr. Balanchine’s great delight in this special scene is particularly evident in the December 25, 1958, CBS television broadcast of NYCB in his The Nutcracker, in which he played the role of Herr Drosselmeier himself (call number:*MGZIDVD 5-4143).
This type of highly musical pantomime is also seen throughout Bournonville’s ballets. “I understand pantomime [as]. . . a harmonious and rhythmic series of picturesque poses, gathered from nature and the classical models, that. . . is in itself a dance,” Bournonville wrote (call number *MGYB [Bournonville] 79-4109). In the words of former Royal Danish Ballet principal dancer, Alexander Kolpin, Bournonville’s mime is “chained together” with the music and the larger choreographic language of the particular ballet (Bournonville ballet and the Royal Danish Ballet Company episode of the TV program Eye on Dance, call number *MGZIC 9-3051). The pantomime does not feel disjointed from the dance action of the story in Bournonville’s works. Rather, it seamlessly connects the ballet’s various situations. Bournonville had great respect for spoken drama. He thought that what could be achieved with words would “ever ensure the precedence of declamation,” especially in recounting past events and foretelling future ones (call number *MGYB [Bournonville] 79-4109). But he felt that pantomime “more forcefully describes the present” (call number *MGYB [Bournonville] 79-4109). Thus, pantomime best served his art of dance, where the immediacy of the moment is all.
The second child-led Ivanov quotation that illuminates Balanchine’s Nutcracker contribution is the Act II Hoop Dance. This is performed by an adult male soloist and eight girls, who are here presented not as people, but as “Candy Canes.” In the 1958 Nutcracker CBS telecast, Edward Villella (who had entered SAB as a little boy) dances the adult role brilliantly (call number *MGZIDVD 5-4143, Discs 1 & 2). The eight girls run on before their music and before their adult counterpart. They strike a pose, tendu croisé devant. This unmistakably classical position sets the tone for their divertissement. Their choreography that then follows, and that of the male soloist, is basic ballet vocabulary: soutenu, arabesque temps levé, cabriole, and pas de chat. But these classroom steps are imbued with magic.
Like these dancing “Candy Canes,” Balanchine allows only the enchanted characters in his Nutcracker to perform classical ballet steps. They are thus distinguished from their mortal counterparts, whose powers are limited to Act I’s basic social dances. When Drosselmeier opens two large gift boxes at the Staulbaum Christmas party, out step two life-sized dolls, the commedia dell’arte characters Harlequin and Columbine. They proceed to perform a short dance in classical style, complete with arabesque piqué, precipité, penchée, assemblé, and chaîné turns. Though none of these movements are inherently remarkable, their visual impact is stunning at this moment in the ballet. This is the audience’s first glimpse of balletic vocabulary. Thanks to Columbine, this is also the first time that the audience sees a pair of point shoes, the unique emblem of the female ballet dancer. Once he has placed Harlequin and Columbine back in their boxes, Drosselemeier presents another life-sized doll to entertain the party guests. This is a windup toy soldier. His short dance displays tour en l’air and entrechat six, both of which are stylized with flexed feet to further clarify that this is a wooden doll, not a man. This soldier doll punctuates his variation with a pirouette that lands on the knee. The music only really allows for two or three turns. But their effect is electric, since these are the first pirouettes seen in the entire ballet. With the completion of these two doll dances, the stage is set for Balanchine to systematically unfold the magical possibilities of ballet technique.
“The long Snowflakes waltz looks as if it used only a dozen elementary steps [arabesque temps levé, chassé en tournant, tour jeté, saut de chat, relevé passé, emboîté, etc.], but it is one of Balanchine’s most magical inventions,” wrote David Denby. ("More Than Sweet Fantasy: The Content of Balanchine’s The Nutcracker," Center, March 1954, call number *MGZA). Denby’s assessment is exactly right. The magic lies in the fact that this is the first time in the ballet where a whole group of point shoe-clad creatures dance en masse. The whole stage now teems with the technique that was before just the novelty of the Columbine doll. These basic ballet steps become wonders for the audience to behold.
Balanchine’s choreography for each of the Act II divertissements (all danced by enchanted creatures) is an individually wrapped exploration of one or two basic balletic steps or themes. Denby writes, “Each dance is instantly specific, it keeps its solidity as it rushes through the air, and is instantly gone” ("More Than Sweet Fantasy"). I was thinking through this during my 48-performance run of Balanchine’s Nutcracker (November 2014-January 2015), in which I danced both the corps de ballet and principal roles in the Spanish “Hot Chocolate” dance. I began to identify what I thought the particular root was for a few of the Act II divertissements. For me, Spanish “Hot Chocolate” is about rond de jambe (à terre, en l’air, rond de jambe sauté, grand rond de jambe jeté.) Arabian “Coffee” demonstrates how a woman can move in a pointe shoe on half-pointe. “Marzipan” is a miniature treatise on pointe work. In just over two minutes, Balanchine clearly delineates all the different ways that a woman can move on and off of pointe (relevé, piqué, jumping to pointe, walking on pointe, and hopping on pointe). “Marzipan” also shows off the brilliance of petite allegro dancing. This is impeccably captured in former NYCB principal dancer Margaret Tracey’s performance of the role, part of the 1997 film version of George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker (call number *MGZIA 4-2654). The Dewdrop Fairy in “The Waltz of the Flowers,” who is all MGM golden age splendor (like a more purely balletic Cyd Charisse or Esther Williams) is the grand allegro counterpart to the “Marzipan” soloist. Mr. Balanchine’s choreography for the Sugarplum Fairy, being the ruler of the Land of the Sweets, demonstrates classical ballet’s full lexical range. In her variation that opens Act II, her pas de deux with her Cavalier, her coda, finale, and final apotheosis, she is displayed as authoritative and irresistible in moments of delicacy as well as virtuosity. Classical ballet is the language of her magical land. She has the largest vocabulary and is the most articulate communicator.
Image 6. President John F. Kennedy’s family visits backstage after a New York City Ballet performance of The Nutcracker, choreography by George Balanchine. Jacqueline Kennedy with George Balanchine and Suzanne Farrell, Caroline Kennedy in front of Balanchine, Patricia McBride as the Dewdrop Fairy. BALANCHINE is a Trademark of the George Balanchine Trust. Photograph by Martha Swope.
August Bournonville uses ballet steps in a similarly fantastical manner in his La Sylphide. Only the sylphs, enchanted women, dance en pointe in the truly classical idiom. In this way, they are lifted above Effie and the other heel-shod ladies of the Highlands. The human ones stamp. The enchanted ones bourée. The mortal human women are more or less earthbound. The few “jumps” that they perform in Act I are more like slightly augmented skipping. Thus, the Sylph’s lightness and seeming defiance of gravity is a large part of what makes her so alluring to James. Her expansive allegro movements are the evidence of her carefree spirit. She is one with the air, unfettered. For James, she represents freedom from his family relations and his community’s expectations.
It is also interesting to note that James and his friend Gurn are the only two mortal men who dance fully realized ballet steps in La Sylphide. The other Scotsmen perform a simple reel in hard clog-like shoes. These two wear ballet slippers and dance sophisticated balletic variations, complete with complicated batterie, pirouettes, and soaring grand allegro combinations. James and Gurn are also the only human characters who can see the Sylph. Only the mortal characters with an eye for the transcendent realm that the Sylph represents are allowed to share in her elevated choreographic language.
The Choreographic Classroom
The Dancing School
There is a seamless relationship between the studio and the stage in the work of both Bournonville and Balanchine. The substance of each man’s choreography was the academic ballet vocabulary, the perfection of which is every dancer’s daily focus in the morning technique class. Both men were teachers as well as choreographers. Thus they could oversee the joint cultivation of their dancers as both students and artists.
The Bournonville school is the syllabus of six classes, one for each day of the week, that was compiled in the years shortly after Bournonville’s death by the ballet master Hans Beck, who succeeded Bournonville as director of the Royal Danish Ballet. The combinations (enchaînements) in these classes were extracted from Bournonville’s own teaching and from the content of his ballets in the Royal Danish Ballet repertory. I was able to read detailed notes about all six days’ worth of enchaînements in Knud Arne Jurgensen’s The Making of the Bournonville School 1893-1979: A Survey of the Musical and Choreographic Sources (call number *MGYB [Bournonville] 95-5549). Former Royal Danish Ballet principal dancers Johan Kobborg and Rose Gad can also be seen beautifully demonstrating fifty of these exercises in the 1992 recording Bournonville Ballet Technique (call number *MGZIA 4-1619). Fully organized and definitively established in 1910, this regimen of codified exercises was the only method of ballet training used at the Royal Danish Ballet until 1932, when Harald Lander became the company’s artistic director. Though this unvaried approach may not have been the most practical way to groom dancers, it did preserve Bournonville’s aesthetic through the generation after his death. Though no longer the sole syllabus of the Royal Danish Ballet, the Bournonville School still serves as an important guide in maintaining the choreographic integrity of Bournonville’s ballets as they continue to be performed. All of this has been sustained by the work of a lineage of faithful ballet masters and teachers who have devoted their lives to passing on the Bournonville torch.
Image 7. Royal Danish Ballet School, Girl’s Class,1947. Photograph by Roger Wood.
Training, specifically Balanchine’s own teaching, played an essential role in the development of his NYCB company. His classes were a kind of laboratory for the dancers’ technical refinement and for Balanchine’s own choreographic experimentation. This was an ongoing investigation of the classical ballet language, which Balanchine could endlessly manipulate and reinvent. The further Balanchine stretched his dancers in class, the richer a palette of colors they became for his creative use in his choreography. Of Balanchine, Violette Verdy said, “He had a stable of steps so very well classified that he never confused or distorted the value of each one. If you are going to dance Mr. B.’s ballets, you had better get used to clarifying the classical technique you have” (Dancing Balanchine, Dance Magazine, July 1983, call number *MGZA). In his presiding over his company’s daily classes, rehearsals, and performances, Balanchine was always there to guide his dancers through that constant process of clarification. Verdy, like many other Balanchine pupils, thought of him as “the ultimate teacher.” She said, “All the influential teachers you ever had find their final realization in Balanchine” (Balanchine’s Men, call number *MGZIDVD 5-5976).
Image 8: George Balanchine teaching class. BALANCHINE is a Trademark of the George Balanchine Trust. Photographer Nancy LaSalle.Image 9. George Balanchine teaching. BALANCHINE is a Trademark of the George Balanchine Trust. Photographer Nancy Lassalle.
“The [Balanchine] ballets themselves are such incredible teachers,” said Edward Villella (call number *MGZIDVD 5-5976). Through his choreography, Balanchine was teaching his dancers technique and the art of performance. The qualities that he insisted upon in the classroom were made fully manifest in the repertory that he created. These hallmark qualities of Balanchine’s aesthetic include musicality, speed, attack, and what Villella articulates as “the fulfillment of movement” (call number: *MGZIDVD 5-5976). Balanchine’s ballets are invaluable instruction for me, and the many NYCB dancers like me, who will never work directly with him. Through these works, as they are taught to me by those who danced for Balanchine, I become more fully immersed in his aesthetic.
As a member of the NYCB corps de ballet, I work most closely with Rosemary Dunleavy. She is the almost infallible repository of nearly every step of the Balanchine repertory. She once wrote, “I feel I have trained the company. . . and educated them in the ballets. I’m hoping that is how it will continue. After all, a Balanchine ballet is not something you want to keep to yourself” (I Remember Balanchine, call number *MGYB [Balanchine] 91-846). I am very thankful that she has not kept her encyclopedic knowledge of the Balanchine canon to herself. Rosemary is one of the greatest examples of those who have dedicated their lives to Balanchine’s company and school. Many of my former SAB teachers and NYCB ballet masters have served in their respective positions for decades. This demonstrates an extraordinary fidelity to these two institutions. But beneath that is these individual’s abiding devotion to the man George Balanchine. In Edward Villella’s words, “He was the giver for all of us” (call number *MGZIDVD 5-5976). These former students of Balanchine have responded to his generosity by pouring out their lives in passing on what was entrusted to them.
This intergenerational transmission of artistic knowledge is the lifeblood of ballet. In the culture of both the Royal Danish Ballet and NYCB, this is particularly evident. The dancers in both companies have historically been almost exclusively selected from the two companies’ affiliated schools. The company artistic staff and school faculty in both NYC and Copenhagen are composed almost exclusively of former company dancers. Consequently, the Bournonville-trained Danish and Balanchine-trained American dancers benefit from the harmonious connection between their schooling and professional careers, and a unique uniformity of style and energy is attained. Each company is set apart on the international stage thanks to its homegrown legacy repertory, Balanchine’s ballets at Lincoln Center and Bournonville’s in Kongens Nytorv (“The King’s New Square”). For both companies, since both are now without the living presence of their guiding choreographer-teacher, the teaching and performing of that choreographer’s works preserves the company’s unique aesthetic.
Two ballets have played a uniquely important role in that constant education of the Royal Danish Ballet and the New York City Ballet dancers, “The Dancing School” section from Bournonville’s Konservatoriet and Balanchine’s Serenade. In Konservatoriet (“Conservatory”), Bournonville choreographed an homage to the classes in which he himself had been formed as a dancer under the tutelage of the nineteenth-century French master teacher, Auguste Vestris. In Serenade, begun in March of 1934, George Balanchine choreographed his first ballet in his newly adopted American homeland on the rather inexperienced students of his three month-old School of American Ballet.
The curtain rises on the first act of Konservatoriet in a ballet studio, understood to be a replica of Vestris’s Paris classroom. The ballet master, correcting stick in hand, proceeds to lead his students through their paces. In the manner of that time, an onstage violinist provides the musical accompaniment for the lesson. The dancers’ first movements are ballet fundamentals, grand plié and a series of adagio developpés and promenades. The ballet master claps his hands, and the students walk to the barres that line the two sides and back of the stage. The audience is understood to be the ballet studio’s mirror. The dancers continue with their technical demonstration (petit battements and grand battements) at the barre. During these barre exercises, the group’s younger students (another fine example of Bournonville’s choreography for children) take center stage to show what they have learned. Bournonville gives these junior dancers movement combinations of technical simplicity and rhythmic complexity. After their barre steps, the older students have their turn on the dance floor. They present a series of solo variations and small group dances. The piece concludes with a return to its beginning, with all the dancers executing another grand plié and a developpé attitude, a one-legged balance which the dancers hold until the curtain fully falls. Portions of this are beautifully captured in the 1979 Danish documentary film Dancing Bournonville (call number: *MGZHB 20-2020). Nilas Martins, whose Bournonville staging at NYCB in 2015 had set the course for my whole library project, appears as one of the children.
In its unadorned academic rigor, Bournonville’s Konservatoriet choreography provides a balletic exam of sorts for its dancers. Here the studio-to-stage bond is perhaps more evident than any other place in Bournonville’s work. This is underscored by the fact that Hans Beck, in compiling his six-class “Bournonville School,” drew almost all the enchaînements for the Friday class directly from this Konservatoriet choreography. So even if the ballet was not in the active repertory in a given season, its exacting steps were still being used every Friday morning to sharpen the dancers’ technique.
Image 10. Royal Danish Ballet production of Konservatoriet, 1947, choreography by August Bournonville. Photograph by Roger Wood.
Balanchine’s Serenade also acts as a kind of lesson for its dancers. In the words of Lincoln Kirstein, the cultural giant who cofounded both NYCB and SAB with Balanchine, Serenade was “a primer for our pupils” in “the traditional academic language, which Balanchine employed here in a rare transliteration without inversion, deformation or parody” (Thirty Years: Lincoln Kirstein’s The New York City Ballet, call number *MGTB [U.S.] 80-3585). Balanchine’s primary motivations for the piece were to make a showcase of his new American students’ technique and to teach them how to appear on the stage. He would later write, “It seemed to me that the best way to make students aware of stage technique was to give them something new to dance, something they had never seen before” (call number *MGYB 75-1415). In that process, he made a masterpiece.
Workshops
Konservatoriet was not one of the Bournonville ballets being prepared for the NYCB 2015 spring season. I came across it quite by chance in my research at the library, while studying the collection’s materials on Stanley Williams. As both a former Royal Danish Ballet dancer and as the preeminent teacher at SAB for over thirty years Williams was a fascinating connector in my investigation of Bournonville and Balanchine. His teaching was by no means a rote transmission of the "Bournonville School” to American students. But his Danish artistic heritage did flavor his pedagogical contribution at SAB. Most notable in this were his stagings of Bournonville’s ballets for the annual SAB Workshop Performances, beginning in 1968 with the pas de deux from The Flower Festival in Genzano (danced by the very young Gelsey Kirkland and Robert Weiss.) In my library explorations, I had the pleasure of watching many of these performances. Highlights included: the 1979 film of my teacher Darci Kistler in the pas de deux from William Tell (call number *MGZHB 4-1826), the 1980 video of my teacher Jock Soto in the “Jockey Dance” from From Siberia to Moscow (call number *MGZIA 4-4935), and the 1982 recording of Peter Boal (with whom I trained for two summers at the Seattle-based Pacific Northwest Ballet) in the “Chinese Dance” from Far From Denmark (call number *MGZIA 4-4977). In all of these, “Williams proved that Bournonville’s ingenious arrangement of steps could survive even a radical translation of time and environment” and “demonstrated, inadvertently perhaps, the kinship between Bournonville’s obsessive fascination with steps and their patterning, and his trust that such material alone might make dancing worth watching—and Balanchine’s” (The Quality of the Moment: Stanley Williams, Dance Magazine, March 1981, call number *MGZA). Balanchine, a self-professed Bournonville fan, was so delighted by these stagings that he had Stanley set several of these pieces on the professional NYCB dancers, under the title Bournonville Divertissements, was be reprised in the NYCB’s 2015 spring season.
Image 11. Stanley Williams teaching at the School of American Ballet. Photographer unknown.
In an interview I watched, Stanley Williams had commented on the choreographic nature of Bournonville’s classes and how Konservatoriet essentially was the Friday class in the “Bournonville School” (call number *MGZIC 9-4800). The library has a wonderful, flickering silent 1955 film of Stanley dancing one of the Konservatoriet male variations at Jacob’s Pillow, when he was there with the first group of Royal Danish Ballet dancers to visit America (call number *MGZHB 4-172). So, of all the SAB Workshop films that I watched at the library, the 1986 performance of Konservatoriet, featuring the teenaged student Margaret Tracey (whose “Marzipan” in The Nutcracker had dazzled me earlier in my research), was the most intriguing to me (call number *MGZIA 4-523). Nilas Martins, a teenaged SAB student at that point, appears in the corps de ballet. Also featured in this recording is Kathleen Tracey, Margaret’s younger sister, who went on to become a NYCB soloist and is now one of NYCB’s finest ballet masters. In studying this Konservatoriet film, I first began to connect the dots between it and Serenade.
The curtain rises on a tableau of tulle-clad dancers in both ballets (excluding the men onstage at the start of Konservatoriet.) Both ballets begin with basic academic ballet movements, especially Serenade. Balanchine has his dancers execute a simple port de bras, turn their feet out from “6th” position to first position, and then tendu à la seconde to fifth position. This fifth position is the alpha and the omega of classical ballet. For Bournonville and Balanchine, both supreme classicists, its perfection is essential. Of fifth position, Balanchine said, “This is where it all is” (Suki Schorer on Balanchine Technique, call number *MGTM 00-26). It is often the final pose in a Bournonville variation. This requires incredible technical strength from the dancer, since fifth position unforgivingly reveals the slightest wobble or adjustment. No extra flourish from the dancer can mask a faulty fifth.
In the second movement of Serenade, Balanchine clears the center of the stage for the so-called “Waltz Girl” to dance by having the ladies of the corps de ballet create three lines, one to border the back and the two sides of the stage. Here the ladies proceed to link arms and plunge into a combination of movements with arabesque penchée and backbends in tendu devant. In this formation, they resemble Bournonville’s Konservatoriet corps de ballet who take their places at the barres that line the sides and back of the stage. (Mr. Balanchine also uses this construct in the fourth movement of his ballet Symphony in C, when the ladies of the corps de ballet line the perimeter of the stage to show off their fine schooling with a string of sparkling battements tendus.)
In one of the most recognizable poses from Konservatoriet’s central pas de trois, the man is seen supporting two ladies at once, one in attitude croisé devant, the other in attitude effacé derrière. Throughout the fourth and final “Elegy” movement of Serenade, the male dancer has several similar passages in which he partners two, and at several points three, ladies at once. One of the most striking examples of this is when he whirls one woman in to embrace him with one arm while he simultaneously whirls another woman away from him with his other arm, then repeats the motion back and forth. This moving in two directions at once is also seen earlier in Serenade when the “Waltz-Girl” whips off a sequence of en dedans (inward) piqué turns that trace an en dehors (outward) pattern on the floor. (Bournonville also uses this effect, but reversed, in the Act III “Tarantella” in Napoli, when the couple who play castanets perform en dehors saut de basque jumps in an en dedans floor pattern.)
As I studied Serenade at the library and observed its performances at NYCB in the 2014 fall and 2015 winter seasons, I began to see its importance in the life of SAB and NYCB more and more. I knew it was Balanchine’s first new ballet in America. I discovered that it was one of the ballets presented on the night of NYCB’s inaugural performance in the New York State Theater (now David H. Koch Theater) on April 20, 1964, which was the 30th anniversary year of the ballet’s creation. A film of this performance is in the library’s collection (call number *MGZIC 9-5021). Former NYCB principal dancer and esteemed SAB faculty member Suki Schorer began staging Balanchine ballets for the SAB Workshops in 1973. She has staged Serenade more frequently than any other single work, at intervals of about five years since 1974. She can be seen dancing in a 1969 stage rehearsal film of the ballet in the library’s collection (call number *MGZHB 12-639). Films of the 1984, 1989, and 1994 SAB Workshop presentations are available for viewing in the library’s collection (call numbers *MGZIA 4-270, *MGZIA 4-867, *MGZIA 4-2344, respectively). Thus Serenade has served, more than any other ballet, as an initiation in dancing the Balanchine repertory for scores of SAB students and proven to be a valuable bridge for those students into their professional ballet work with NYCB (and companies the world over). I was able to observe both rehearsals and the performances of Suki’s 2009 and 2014 SAB Workshop stagings of Serenade, and she worked with me directly on Balanchine’s Cortège Hongrois for my graduation Workshop. In all these experiences, her reverence for Mr. B.’s aesthetic and her passion for sharing the details of his choreography were so marvelously evident. Suki’s Workshop rehearsals were as much lessons in technique and artistry as her daily SAB classes. In this clear studio to stage bond, she follows in the steps of her teacher.
Image 12. Suki Schorer teaching at the School of American Ballet. Photograper unknown.
Dancing Together
Conversation Pieces
“There’s a wonderful reciprocity, a beautiful understanding, that proceeds through all of this. You don’t grab. You converse” (call number *MGZIDVD 5-5976). So Edward Villella described the nature of the relationship between the man and the woman in a Balanchine pas de deux. For Balanchine, ballet was most importantly about the woman. The man supports and serves his ballerina with deference. In so doing, he finds his own place of honor. Like a rose’s stem, he is the setting for her jewel-like beauty. She responds by following his lead and trusting that he will be attentive to her needs (the particulars of her center of gravity, weight distribution, musical phrasing, etc.). In studying the passages for the principal man and woman in Balanchine’s Chaconne, in which I danced the corps de ballet in the 2014 fall and 2015 winter seasons at NYCB, I saw how Balanchine used this idea of conversing through gestures both in the principals' two pas de deux sections and in their serial variations. In these variations in particular, I saw a definite relationship with Bournonville’s male-female duet choreography.
In Bournonville’s ballets, there is not a great deal of what modern viewers would consider “partnering.” There are hardly any of the lifts, supported adagio movements, and supported pirouettes, which Balanchine ingeniously employed in his choreography. Rather, one observes two individuals who are dancing together in a Bournonville pas de deux. Virtuosity is required from both sexes in his ballets. In an age when the ballerina was glorified to such a degree that the male dancer was almost entirely overlooked elsewhere in Europe, Bournonville made it part of his mission in Copenhagen to make roles of real choreographic substance for men. He created many such roles for himself to dance. Thus he ensured that the male and female ballet dancer would be challenged and flourish in a comparable manner. Perhaps the most famous example of this is Bournonville’s pas de deux from The Flower Festival in Genzano (copies of Bournonville’s handwritten notes for this ballet are in the library’s collection, call number (S) *MGZMD 30). Here, as in the Chaconne variations, one senses that the man and the woman are dancing with and for each other. In both Flower Festival and Chaconne, the dancers’ technically complex variations unfold in rapid succession. The woman finishes her moment, then gestures to her man, who then picks up where she left off to begin his moment. In this relaying of dances, both the Chaconne and Flower Festival partnerships are like married couples who know each other so well that they finish each other’s sentences. When the man delivers his choreographic lines, the woman remains onstage (standing off to the side) to listen to him. When her lines come, he returns the favor. In Villella’s words, these exchanges are “a physical conversation” (call number *MGZIDVD 5-5976). This is rendered with tenderness and flair in the 2005 Danish television broadcast of Flower Festival with Gudrun Bojesen and Mads Blangstrup from the Royal Danish Ballet’s Third Bournonville Festival (call number *MGZIDVD 5-2783).
Image 13. Peter Martins and Suzanne Farrell in the New York City Ballet production of "Flower Festival in Genzano," choreography by August Bournonville. Photograph by Martha Swope.
This Flower Festival and Chaconne connection is made all the more interesting by the fact that Balanchine created the latter on Suzanne Farrell and his very own Dane par excellence, Peter Martins. Balanchine skillfully exploited Martins’s Bournonville training in his variations, displaying the batterie, veiled preparations, and fleetness of movement that are so characteristic of the Danish schooling. Balanchine’s Martins moments provide a brilliant complement to the coloratura steps that he devised for Farrell. The Library possesses an excellent film record of this: Farrell and Martins in Chaconne (call numbers *MGZIDVD 5-4604 and DVD B Balanchine C) and Martins in Flower Festival with Merrill Ashley (call number *MGZIC 9-448).
The conversation dances in Flower Festival and Chaconne shed light on Balanchine and Bournonville’s similar perspectives on the relationship between a man and a woman, characterized by harmonious collaboration. In Balanchine’s Square Dance and in the “Ballabile” from Act I of Bournonville’s Napoli, that sense of togetherness then ripples out into a whole community of dancers. The two pieces are cast for the same forces, six corps de ballet couples and one principal couple. In Napoli, they are the youth of the city, and the principal couple are the young lovers Teresina and Gennaro. In Square Dance, they are anonymous dancers at a gathering. The mood is generally joyful in both, hence the constant allegro movements. “The essence of ballet is order,” wrote Kirstein (Tributes: Celebrating Fifty Years of New York City Ballet, call number *MGTB [U.S.] 98-6650). Kirstein continues, “What one sees in Balanchine’s ballets are structures of naked order, executed by celebrants who have no other aim than to show an aspect of order in their own persons, testifying to an impersonal purity and personal interest.” (call number *MGTB [U.S.] 98-6650). This is certainly true of Square Dance. Even though the “Ballabile” participants have the added element of conveying a particular character, they still exhibit that same purity and openness.
Image 15. Stanley Williams (far right in the front line) in the Royal Danish Ballet production of the Act I Ballabile from "Napoli," choreography by August Bournonville. Photograph by Arnold Eagle.
The discussion through movement is a large part of both Square Dance and the “Ballabile.” But it is now on a much larger scale than in Flower Festival and the Chaconne principal variations. In the “Ballabile,” the men begin the dance. The ladies then join them. After a bit, with all the ensemble together, all but two men clear to the periphery of the stage. The others stand by and enjoy watching the two men as they show off their elevation. The two men finish by extending a hand to acknowledge the group of ladies, who then link at the waist (in a formation much like the Lilac Fairy attendants in Petipa’s The Sleeping Beauty) and dance a fancy footwork phrase with crisp pas de courru and lightning fast changements. The ladies finish by clearing a path so that the whole pack of men can come flying forward along the diagonal from upstage left in that quintessentially Bournonville jump, grand jeté en attittude. The whole corps then dance a few more steps together and then draw back to the sides so that the principals can make their first entrance. These constant group shiftings continue for the duration of the “Ballabile.” With each reconfiguration, those who have just finished dancing gesture to those who follow them, as if to say, “Now it’s your turn.” This “Ballabile” is vividly captured in the film of the February 16, 1983 NYCB performance of Bournonville Divertissements, lead by Nicol Hlinka and Jean-Pierre Frohlich, now a NYCB ballet master (call number *MGZIDVD 5-4533).
One observes this same gracious passing of the choreographic baton throughout Square Dance, especially during the separate men’s and women’s dances. The men’s dance begins with the principal man taking fifth position center stage, flanked by the other gentlemen. A game of balletic follow-the-leader ensues, with the corps men echoing the principal’s steps. My favorite portion of this dance is when the lead man executes a sequence with soaring jetés battus and jazzy hip thrusts in five counts over the music’s four-count structure, creating one layer of counterpoint. The six corps men execute the same phrase with the principal man at first. Then the principal man stops moving for two counts while the corps men continue on. He then restarts the phrase, now overlapping with the others. Hence a second layer of counterpoint is created. In this moment, which typifies the musical and choreographic wit of the entire ballet, the dancers’ delight in dancing together and in the steps themselves is palpable.
The “Ballabile” from Napoli is the first excerpt in Bournonville Divertissements, as it is performed at NYCB. When Bournonville Divertissements was filmed under the title Bournonville Dances for PBS in 1982, this was also the case (call number *MGZIC 9-448). As the opening credits finish just before the “Ballabile” begins, Peter Martins is heard recounting the reason Balanchine gave him for why Bournonville was so great. Balanchine had said to Peter, “Because he entertains with steps” (call number *MGZHB 12-639). I can only imagine that Bournonville would have made a similar comment on Balanchine’s choreography, since Balanchine also had a remarkable facility for entertaining his public through his dexterous manipulation of ballet vocabulary.
In Square Dance, Balanchine has some of his most amusing choreographic master strokes. The very premise of the work, a formally classical ballet to baroque music in the guise of an all-American square dance, is already a kind of very sophisticated joke. In the original 1957 production, the string orchestra sat onstage as a band of Corelli- and Vivaldi-playing fiddlers. A real-life square dance caller, Elisha Keeler, provided rhyming commentary that he had especially written to accompany Balanchine’s choreography. Caller Keeler even wove the names of the ballet’s leads, Patricia Wilde and Nicholas Magallanes, into his text. In the female follow-the-leader dance, he instructed the ladies of the corps de ballet: “Now keep your eyes on Pat. Now see where she is at. Her feet go wickety-wack.” By this he meant Wilde’s impeccably executed gargouillade. Balanchine later cut the caller role and relegated the string section into the pit in his 1976 revision of the ballet. For this version, the leads were Kay Mazzo (now SAB’s detail-oriented and incredibly nurturing co-chair of faculty) and Bart Cook, for whom Balanchine added a pensive adagio variation. This is the reading of the ballet currently performed, which I had the pleasure of watching several times over the course of NYCB’s 2014 fall and 2015 winter seasons. Even without the caller’s colorful commentary, the ballet is still brimming with choreographic amusements.
One such moment is during the second and livelier half of the principal’s pas de deux. The man swipes his leg in a quick rond de jambe à terre, as if to trip his partner, as she bounds over his leg into a series of temps de flèche jumps. It is all in a spirit of fun. Another moment is when, amid the classical precision of the female follow-the-leader dance, the principal woman abruptly jumps onto pointe into an entirely knockkneed position. In Balanchine’s body of work, such a distorted position is not at all unusual. In fact, he even used this same pose in Stravinsky Violin Concerto in the “Aria II” pas de deux, which he choreographed for Mazzo and Peter Martins. But in its Square Dance ladies’ dance context, which is a miniature treatise on classroom petite allegro, this pose is delightfully shocking. Here we see Balanchine entertaining with steps.
Through studying Square Dance and the “Ballabile” side by side, I also found several places where Bournonville and Balanchine chose the same or similar steps with which to entertain their respective audiences. For example, the six “Ballabile” corps couples execute a big repetitive combination of two quick runs into a grand jeté moving in a circular pattern just before the principal couple’s second entrance. The six Square Dance corps couples perform exactly the same combination (but moving along a slightly different floor plan) just before the principal woman’s virtuosic circular reentrance combination of coupé jeté en tournant and saut de basque near the end of the female follow-the-leader dance. Keeler’s original call for this buoyant sequence of leaps could very well have been written for the “Ballabile” moment as well: “Chase that rabbit. Chase that squirrel. Chase that pretty girl 'round the world.” Near the end of the “Ballabile” and the end of Square Dance, the men of the ballet have to perform consecutive entrechat six jumps. This simple step is a challenge at this point in both ballets because of how tired the men are from all the difficult jumping that has preceded this sequence. Tendu bookends these two ballets. The first step seen in Square Dance is tendu écarté devant, and one of the last steps seen in the “Ballabile” is tendu effacé devant. To top it all off, the pose that the Square Dance corps dancers take at the end of that ballet’s first movement (the man kneeling with the woman sitting on his knee, both sexes with the outside arm in fifth position) is a close relative to the “Ballabile” final pose (man kneeling with his arm around his woman, who is standing in tendu effacé devant).
Three particularly excellent Square Dance performance films at the Library are those of Patricia Wilde with Nicholas Magallanes, with Keeler’s calling (call number:*MGZHB 6-17), Merrill Ashley with Sean Lavery (call number MGZIDVD 5-4053), and Margaret Tracey with Peter Boal (call number *MGZIC 9-4309B). Patricia Wilde, can also be seen coaching the ballet with members of the Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre, where Wilde served as artistic director from 1982-1997 (call number *MGZIA 4-3018). Mazzo and Cook can also be seen in the film of a 1977 onstage rehearsal of the ballet (call number *MGZHB 12-1572). The “Ballabile” is very well danced in the 1986 film of the Royal Danish Ballet ballet in Napoli (call number *MGZIA 4-1063).
Two Muses
Prodigies
In my library explorations on Bournonville and Balanchine, I discovered and became fascinated by the connection between two of these men’s muses, Lucile Grahn and Tanaquil Le Clercq. Both Grahn and Le Clercq were technical and artistic prodigies. Each inspired some of these two masters’ most important choreography. Both ballerinas became legends in their own right, whose artistic contributions are now emblems of the entire era in which they danced.
Lucile Grahn was a pupil of Bournonville’s beginning when she was ten years old. Commenting on the seven years that he spent as her teacher, Bournonville wrote that she “possessed all the qualities which are characteristic of a female dancer of the very first class” and that she “fulfilled all the expectations to which her natural gifts entitled her” (My Theater Life, call number *MGYB [Bournonville] 79-4109). Bournonville made a pas de deux for himself and Grahn called La Vestale when she was only fourteen years old. This is a piece of harrowing technical difficulty. The choreography requires the female dancer to echo her partner’s virtuoso movements. It must have been extraordinarily impressive to see the teenage Grahn execute the same batterie and grand pirouettes as her teacher. There are three exceptional video records of this work in the library’s collection: a 1967 film of former Royal Danish Ballet stars Toni Lander and Flemming Flindt (call number *MGZIC 9-550) and two films of Stanley Williams’ 1977 staging of the ballet for that year’s SAB Workshop Performances (Melinda Roy and Douglas Hay, call number *MGZIC 9-1828; Victoria Hall and Patrick Bissell, call number *MGZIC 9-1833). In 1835, Bournonville created his first major role for Grahn in his full-length ballet Valdemar. Grahn was sixteen years old, and she carried the weight of the ballet. Bournonville wrote that Grahn’s character, Astrid, was the “focal point about which grace, festivity, and chivalrous gallantry could revolve” (call number *MGYB [Bournonville] 79-4109). Valdemar was based on old Danish sagas of kings and conquests. In using themes of such national historical importance for the first time, Bournonville was attempting to create a work that would place the art of ballet on an equal footing with the already established and revered Danish theater and opera. He was able to achieve just that. He would later write of Valdemar, “No drama has enjoyed greater favor or drawn larger audiences than this ballet” (call number *MGYB [Bournonville] 79-4109). It also secured a place of popular, as well as critical, esteem for the ballet as a dramatic art form. Grahn’s contribution was invaluable in this. Of her Astrid, Bournonville wrote, “It was she who gave our audiences the first concept of female virtuosity” (call number *MGYB [Bournonville] 79-4109). She was both technician and artist. Grahn would become part of the very small group of ballerinas (which included Marie Taglioni, Carlotta Grisi, Fanny Cerrito, and Fanny Elssler) whose dancing would define the whole Romantic era in the history of ballet.
Tanaquil Le Clercq (known to many as “Tanny”) entered Balanchine’s artistic world at the age of eleven, when she was one of the five winners of SAB’s first-ever scholarship competition. She caught Balanchine’s eye from the very beginning. He commented that this little girl looked “like a real ballerina already, only very small, as if you were looking at her through the wrong end of a telescope” (But First a School: The First Fifty Years of the School of American Ballet, call number *MGZ 86-143). In 1946, Balanchine choreographed a principal role for Le Clercq in his ballet The Four Temperaments, which was presented on the opening program of Balanchine’s company, Ballet Society (the direct precursor to NYCB). Le Clercq was only seventeen years old and was still an advanced SAB student when Balanchine made the ballet’s fourth variation, “Choleric,” for her. There is a brief rehearsal clip of Le Clercq in this variation in the 1989 documentary film Dancing for Mr. B: Six Balanchine Ballerinas (call number *MGZIC 9-2127). Balanchine was greatly inspired by her technical clarity, artistic maturity, and by her unique physique. Her body was elongated, with interminably long limbs, a short torso, and long beautifully arched feet. She was the prototype for what is often referred to as the ideal “Balanchine dancer.” Lincoln Kirstein wrote that she was “a brilliant, capable, and strangely personal ballerina of wit” and that she “was the epitome of Balanchine’s lyrically athletic American criterion” (call number *MGTB [U. S.] 80-3585).
Death and the Maiden
As I investigated more about Grahn and Le Clercq at the library, I was struck by the many relationships between the two masterpieces that were made for them: Bournonville’s 1836 restaging of La Sylphide for Grahn (after the 1832 Paris original that Filippo Taglioni had made for his daughter Marie) and Balanchine’s 1951 La Valse for Le Clercq. Both are indeed romantic ballets, with their evocative music, flowing costumes, and general air of mystery and otherworldliness. Grahn’s Sylph role is a symbol of purity and transcendent beauty. The color of her white diaphanous costume and her elevated classical ballet technique place her in high contrast to the ladies of the Scottish Highlands in the story. As the protagonist in La Valse, Le Clercq’s role is the Sylph’s mortal counterpart. Her white dress cuts through the darkness of the stage setting and distinguishes her amid the deep red, orange, and burgundy hues of Karinska’s Dior-like costumes for the other ladies in the ballet. Le Clercq can be seen dancing this role in a Library film of the ballet made in the same year as the ballet's premiere (call number *MGZIDF 1691).
Image 18. Lucile Grahn as the Sylph in "La Sylphide," choreography by August Bournonville.
La Valse begins with a pas de trois for three women, who have often been referred to as “Fates.” They set the decadent and slightly sinister tone of the entire ballet with their languorously paced and highly ornamental gestures. (Three sylphs similarly set the stage for the dancing in Act II of La Sylphide.) Richard Buckle described the three La Valse ladies by writing, “They are society’s witches, who console themselves for the loss of youth by the exercise of power” (George Balanchine: Ballet Master, call number *MGYB [Balanchine] 88-2443). Buckle’s comment could very well describe Madge, the old village sorceress in La Sylphide who wields her occult powers to deceive James. She gives him a magical scarf and tells him that if he but embrace the Sylph with it, her wings will fall off and James will be able to have her as his earthly love. She will not be able to fly away from him anymore. The reality is that when James finally does grasp the Sylph with the scarf, the outcome is not the mere loss of her wings, but the loss of her life.
Death comes to the maiden in La Sylphide through the garment. I saw this as a staggering connection with La Valse, where the costuming also plays a decisive role in the final demise of the woman in white. In the final section of the ballet, the Le Clercq character encounters the figure of Death (originally danced by Francisco Moncion). He seduces her with gifts of black gloves, black jewels, a transparent black dress which she puts on over her white dress, and a bouquet of black flowers. She is enveloped. Death himself then whirls her into an ecstatic waltz and ultimately drops her lifeless body to the floor. As a dancer in the corps of La Valse, I stand off to the side of the stage with my back to the audience during the protagonist’s final dance with Death. I angle myself slightly into the stage so I can watch this moment unfold out of the corner of my eye. It is chilling and thrilling.
The corps de ballet, who have been “asleep” off to the sides of the stage during the Le Clercq character’s final pas de deux, then “wake up” and find the dead woman lying center stage. The corps then back away in horror and dance one last frenzied passage. As the curtain falls on the ballet, the Le Clercq character’s dead body is being held aloft, legs and feet in fifth position, and swung from side to side by three men as the rest of the cast runs in panicked circles around her. Just before she dies at the end of Act II of La Sylphide, the Sylph makes a position with her trembling arms. She places her right hand on her left shoulder as her left arm shakily extends away from her body. If she kept her arms in the same relationship to each other, and simply lifted her left arm straight up to the sky, she would almost exactly mimic the iconic pose that the “Fates” in La Valse strike near the beginning of the ballet’s final section. Arlene Croce wrote of this image, “They look like crosses in a graveyard” (Repertory in Review: 40 Years of the New York City Ballet, call number *MGTB [U. S.] 77-5550). Like the Le Clercq character, the dead Sylph is ultimately lifted aloft, with her legs and feet in fifth position, by several of her fellow sylphs. As she is carried off, the kneeling James weeps with his head buried in his hands. Lis Jeppesen’s death and Nikolaj Hübbe’s subsequent mourning are devastating in the library’s 1988 film of the Royal Danish Ballet in La Sylphide (call number *MGZIDVD 5-4282).
Bournonville choreographed his La Sylphide for himself as James and Grahn as the Sylph. Balanchine did not choreograph La Valse for himself and Le Clercq (Nicholas Magallanes was her partner). But he had choreographed a piece in 1944 for a March of Dimes benefit performance for himself and Le Clercq, then a fifteen-year-old SAB student. In it she played a little girl who was stricken with polio, confined to a wheelchair, miraculously healed, and ultimately able to perform a dance of celebration. Balanchine danced the role of Polio. In an eerie sequence of events, in which life imitated art, Le Clercq was stricken with polio at the age of twenty-seven while NYCB was on tour in, of all places on earth, August Bournonville’s birthplace of Copenhagen, Denmark.
The Chain of Beauty
Mozartiana
The first ballet that I studied when I embarked on my library research for thr 2014-2015 NYCB season was Balanchine’s last masterpiece, Mozartiana, which he choreographed for NYCB’s 1981 Tchaikovsky Festival. This was even before I had decided to focus on the relationship between Bournonville and Balanchine. I was simply curious about Mozartiana, since it was being presented as the centerpiece of an all-Tchaikovsky program of Balanchine ballets, in which I was dancing in the corps of the “Theme and Variations” section of Tschaikovsky Suite No. 3. My investigation of the ballet consisted of watching the library rehearsal and performance films of the ballet, reading Robert Maiorano’s book Balanchine’s Mozartiana: The Making of a Masterpiece (which documents the entire creation of the work, call number *MGYB [Balanchine] 85-940), and watching every performance of Mozartiana from the wings as I warmed up for “Theme and Variations.” As I reflected more on what I had learned about Mozartiana later in the 2015 winter season, by which time Bournonville had become the other thread in my library inquiry, I began to see how in this one ballet there were powerful examples of all the major themes that I had found that related Bournonville and Balanchine.
The little children, four girls from SAB, played a major role Mozartiana. This was Balanchine’s last choreography for children, and it was unlike anything he had done before. Of these four young ladies’ contribution on the ballet’s opening night, Maiorano wrote, “No longer children, they prance step for step alongside the ballerina [Suzanne Farrell] who possessed the greatest understanding of Balanchine’s genius.” Maiorano continues by writing that the four SAB girls “have made history. For the first time in a ballet of the New York City Ballet, young students are not in children’s roles but are integral to a ballet’s design” (call number *MGYB [Balanchine] 85-940). Robert Maiorano has a unique perspective to comment on this as he does. He was a former SAB child student and NYCB dancer. In fact, Maiorano played the Prince in the 1958 CBS broadcast of Balanchine’s The Nutcracker, in which Balanchine played Drosselmeier (call number*MGZIDVD 5-4143, Discs 1 & 2).
The 1981 spring season, in which Balanchine choreographed Mozartiana, marked the last time in his life when Balanchine regularly taught the NYCB company class. So this was the last time where his technical and highly musicality-oriented teaching directly fed his creative work. Maiorano commented on Balanchine’s choreographic classicism in the midst of all this: “By adding, developing, syncopating, and subtracting, Balanchine innovates within the classical tradition. Through striving for new movement, his respect for the mathematics and historical essence of the music is the foundation of his choreographic technique” (call number: *MGYB [Balanchine] 85-940). This was the final chapter of Balanchine’s lifelong binding together of the studio and the stage.
Balanchine eloquently displayed the joys of dancing together in Mozartiana as well. There is an amazing choreographic relay between the ballet’s principal man and woman in the long theme and variations section. These variations are slightly different in structure from the Chaconne conversation dances in that in Mozartiana Balanchine has the dancers fully exit the stage after passing the baton to their partner. The woman was Suzanne Farrell. The man was Ib Andersen, a former Royal Danish Ballet star whom Balanchine had invited to join NYCB as a principal dancer in 1980. Bournonville was present in his variations by virtue of his Danish balletic formation, and Bournonville was present in one of Farrell’s variations through a particular step. Maiorano wrote, “Farrell immediately jumps, ‘reaching’ her legs with straight knees ahead of her before landing and jumping into another leap holding a second with both legs curved behind her in the quintessential flight of La Sylphide” (call number *MGYB [Balanchine] 85-940).
Mozartiana was also Balanchine’s last masterwork for Suzanne Farrell, his ultimate muse. In all, he made twenty-three ballets for her. She was his enduring inspiration. Maiorano wrote, “Their collaboration, their communion, has been a glory of the New York City Ballet for twenty years” (call number *MGYB [Balanchine] 85-940). It was a pleasure for me to observe how Farrell would reinvent her approach to her Mozartiana role in each of the films that I watched (including call numbers *MGZIDVD 5-4582 and *MGZIA 4-8188). The choreography remained the same. But the way she would stress or mute certain movements and musical accents made the ballet feel remarkably fresh each time. In Mozartiana, Balanchine was “like a master tailor” for Farrell (call number *MGZIDVD 5-5976). Every gesture fit her to perfection. Arlene Croce wrote of Farrell’s centrality in the work: “Thus does the master choreographer aggrandize the gifts and presence of a ballerina. Thus does he reveal her, sovereign in her kingdom of ballet- the one among the many who are one” (Dancing: Bounty,The New Yorker, August 10, 1981, in “Tchaikovsky Festival” clippings, call number *MGZR).
The more I studied, I began to see Mozartiana as the summation of Balanchine’s whole life’s work. He and Lincoln Kirstein’s dream of an American company and school of complementary excellence that could stand its own with the great ballet companies and schools of the past was realized in this ballet with the work of the four SAB girls and the adult dancers (like Farrell) whom he had groomed. Here also was the meeting of the artists with whom Balanchine shared a mystical bond. Balanchine had always felt that Tchaikovsky had guided him whenever he had choreographed to his music. He once said, “When I was doing Serenade, Tchaikovsky encouraged me. Almost the whole Serenade is done with his help” (Balanchine’s Tchaikovsky, call number *MGYB [Balanchine] 93-930). In Mozartiana, as its title makes clear, Tchaikovsky is paying homage to Mozart. Tchaikovsky even referred to Mozart as “the musical Christ” (Dancing: Bounty. . . , call number *MGZR). Thus there were deep ties between these men across centuries and artistic genres.
This is what I saw to be the most important connection of all between Balanchine and Bournonville. They were both intensely spiritual men who saw their teaching and choreography as being related to a much larger story of elevating mankind through the transcendent and transforming power of art. In Bournonville’s words, “Every dancer ought to regard his laborious art as a link in the chain of beauty. . . and as an important element in the spiritual development of the nations” (My Theater Life, call number *MGYB [Bournonville] 79-4109). Both Bournonville and Balanchine had immense knowledge of the history of their art form and their far-reaching vision for where that form could go. Consequently, Peter Martins’s description of Balanchine could be true of Bournonville as well: “His belief and trust in music and classical ballet were absolute and his deep motive was to assure that the classical ballet idiom would continue for generations. He had a love for both, and as ballet master he knew he was creating the link that bound its past to its future” (Portrait of Mr. B, call number *MGYB [Balanchine] 84-3837).
Good Shepherds
I complete my thoughts on Bournonville and Balanchine with a quote from Bournonville’s Letters on Dance and Choreography, which were originally published in the Parisian weekly paper L’Europe Artiste in 1860. In these eight letters, Bournonville shares his memories of influential figures from his past, his thoughts on the current state of ballet, and what he would do to take the art form forward. At the conclusion of the first letter, Bournonville pays tribute to August Vestris, the master teacher who had mentored him and served as the model for his life as a dancer, teacher, choreographer, and ballet master. He wrote of Vestris:
“Lively, light-hearted, sensitive, and generous, he loved not only the dance and the theatre, but everything that was beautiful, spiritual, and courteous. His fire warmed without burning anyone who approached him, for he was impetuous without rage, critical without malice, superior without arrogance. Gifted with a lively imagination and exquisite taste, he knew better than anyone how to reveal his pupils’ qualities and to conceal their faults; and those who, by chance, understood how to grasp his advice, were often able to profit from it for the rest of their careers” (call number *MGRZ-Res. 01-8303).
When I read this excerpt to Susan Pilarre (former NYCB soloist, longtime distinguished SAB faculty member, and mentor to me), she simply responded by saying, “That could have been written about Balanchine.”
It is my hope that the rest of my life will be spent as a student and as a servant of the art of ballet, particularly as it is taught and performed at SAB and the New York City Ballet. I trust that the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts Jerome Robbins Dance Division’s collection will continue to play a critical role in that ongoing work of scholarship and service.
In Jerome Robbins Dance Division, call number *MGZEB 95-5482, Ser. B, vol. 70, p. 21\*WDY 98-1, no. 262.
George Balanchine, Photographs: teaching class, no. 505, call number *MGZEA.
George Balanchine, Photographs: teaching class, no. 505, call number *MGZEA.
In Jerome Robbins Dance Division, call number *MGZEB 95-5482, Ser. B, vol. 79, p. 4\*WDY 98-1, no. 254.
School of American Ballet, New York, Oversize Photographs, Folder 3, Photo 26, Image 4-4a, call number *MGZEAO.
School of American Ballet, inc, New York, Oversize Photographs, Folder 2, Photo 15, Library call number: *MGZEAO.
Suzanne Farrell, Photographs: with Peter Martins, no. 134, call number *MGZEA.
Suzanne Farrell, Photographs: with Peter Martins, no. 131, call number *MGZEA.
Napoli (Lander H after Bournonville), Photographs, no. 24, call number *MGZEA.
Square dance (Balanchine), Oversize Photographs, no. 4, call number *MGZEAO.
Square Dance (Balanchine) NYCB Production, no. 20, call number *MGZEA.
Lucile Grahn i Sylphiden, call number *MGZFB Gra L Syl 1.
La Valse (Balanchine), Photographs, no. 2, call number *MGZEA.
In Jerome Robbins Dance Division Title: La Valse (Balanchine), Photographs, no. 1, call number *MGZEA.
Mozartiana (Balanchine), Oversize Photographs, no. 2, call number *MGZEAO.
Mozartiana (Balanchine), 1981 Production, Photographs, no. 1, call number *MGZEA.
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.
Years ago I read a book called Gods Who Dance, written by American dancer Ted Shawn (1891-1972). It tells the tale of his exploratory dance travels. Shawn was one half of Denishawn, a seminal and hugely popular dance company that was the first stadium dance act in the United States. Before them Isadora Duncan had opened people’s ideas to new thinking about dance. Isadora looked to the ancient world, Greece, for first principles. These progenitors of modern dance were an expression of the cultural imagination of America before anthropology and widespread tourism provided facts, experiences, and exposure to other cultures. Just as Art Deco was fascinated by the exotic, so was America and so was Denishawn.
Dance legend has it that Shawn’s partner, Ruth St. Denis, a famous vaudeville "aesthetic dancer" well before she met Shawn, saw a pack of Cleopatra cigarettes, mimicked the pose of the image... and never looked back. St. Denis’s most famous dance was called Incense, in which she becomes the incense itself. She performed it throughout her long life and all over the world. Denishawn could conjure more than incense. Starring in their own large spectacles, they could bring to life an endless pageant of exotica: an Aztec empire, the first Tillers of the Soil, Japanese Samurai, Egyptian deities, the Navajo, Siamese royalty, Moses. The Dance Division has a 1964 film of Ruth St. Denis dancing Incense.
Image 2. Ruth St Denis and Ted Shawn in "Tillers of the Soil". Photograph by White, N.Y.Image 1. Ruth St Denis in "Incense." Photograph by Frederich August Von Kaulbach.There was not so much international cultural interchange between dancers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Museums, World Fairs, word of mouth, and visiting holy men were ways artists, or anyone for that matter, could encounter information about dancing in a foreign culture aside from actual travel. Denishawn spectacles, as respectful, researched, and intended as tributes as they were, also reflected the lack of access to cultural knowledge in the United States at that time. With Ruth’s inspiration for all things ancient and profound, and Shawn’s choreographic flair, Denishawn was able to create spectacular awareness for ancient and particularly Asian culture. Their intuitive sincerity approaching Asia and the ancient was rewarded: it guided them to the source.
The level of their cultural knowledge changed completely in 1925 and 1926 when Denishawn themselves made a nearly two-year performance and research tour of Asia. It was as grand a dance encounter between East and West as can ever be envisioned, as many if not most Asian nations, were then ruled by royal families and so had courts and the accompanying court dancers. Dances in Asia retained, to a large degree, their historical accuracy at that time, as well as established ways of transmitting extraordinary techniques of body and mind. Most of this was completely foreign to the West.
Conversely, the industriously creative Denishawn company, always making up new dances, was something foreign to most Asian dance traditions. Ted’s artistic research into the dances of the world was scientific, and his manner of recording the ancient dances he encountered was revolutionary and systematic at the same time. This was a critical time for ancient dance, with kingdoms soon to end and a new century taking hold. Where the Asian traditions variously depicted their dances for the sake of recording or remembering them, Ted Shawn brought a new way of recording them with film and photographs. . . and Denishawn dancers learning the steps!
Ted Shawn and Ruth St. Denis were received at the highest levels everywhere they went. Glamorous as it sounds, there was no electricity, no running water, and they traveled by elephant, camel, rickshaw, gondola, rail and ship, performing at every stop. Ted Shawn knew more about the dances of the world than anyone in the world at that time, and perhaps still to this day. He was particularly interested to see Bugaku, an ancient Chinese Confucian dance, brought to Japan in the late seventh century and kept alive there ever since in the Imperial Palace of the Japanese emperors. The Dance Division has a 1978 recording, Court Dances of Japan: Bugaku, which was presented by Brooklyn College in cooperation with the Performing Arts Program of the Asia Society and produced, written, and narrated by Beate Gordon for the Asia Society (call number *MGZIDVD 5-5520).
The Emperor Taisho, who reigned when Ted and Ruth visited the Palace, was curious of the fashions, skills, and tastes of the West. The Taisho Era is known for the early inclusion of Western elements into Japanese design. Remarkably, but largely on account of the new ethos of the Emperor Taisho, they were invited to the palace. It is hard today to appreciate the level and type of fame lavished on American dancers Isadora Duncan, Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn. They were iconic worldwide. Ted and Ruth were dignitaries in their own right as leading ambassadors for dance. They were the very image of respectability everywhere they went, which is all the more astonishing considering how exotic and outlandish much of their work was.
Ted and Ruth did not see Bugaku performed at the Palace, as viewing was not allowed to the general public, but they did hear the accompanying music, the otherworldly Gagaku. I noted this from looking at the forward to Gagaku by Lincoln Kirstein, reprinted from Gagaku by Robert Garfias, in Ballet, Bias and Belief (call number *MGT 84-2222).
They were awed by this specter of imperial dance, and spoke how there was much to learn about dance from Japan. Mirroring the respect and admiration Ted and Ruth showed their ancient culture, members of the Imperial household allowed them to see a hand-painted, two-volume portfolio of Bugaku costumes, which revealed choreography along with the costume design. The American dancers were touched and marveled at the beauty of the images.
About eighteen months later, Denishawn returned to the United States using the same route through Tokyo by which they’d arrived. They were surprised to be invited to the Imperial Palace of the Japanese Emperor for a second time. This time, to their humble and complete delight, Ted Shawn and Ruth St. Denis were given a hand-painted copy of the two-volume portfolio of Bugaku costumes. It is the only known copy in the world of this Japanese Imperial treasure and this account from Shawn’s book Gods Who Dance is the only known reference to it.
I put the book down. One question lingered. Where is that Bugaku portfolio now, ninety years later? I contacted Jacob’s Pillow, the dance festival founded by Shawn, but they did not have it. I was directed to look for it at the Jerome Robbins Dance Division at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts by my editor. There my journey with Shawn evolved in a way I could never had imagined. Yes, the Bugaku portfolio was there, but I did not find it on the first day. Instead I learned that every chapter of Gods Who Dance had a corresponding film. Java, China, Indonesia, Sikkim, Kashmir, Ceylon, India and the list goes on. You can see the films from this collection at the Dance Division, including Denishawn Oriental Tour, 1926 (call number *MGZIDF-3061), Ceylon, Singapore and Darjeeling dances (call number *MGZIDVD 5-175), and Denishawn Dancers in India (call number *MGZIDVD 5-116).
These are silent, black and white, short films. Some are newsreels for the folks back home. In fact the book Gods Who Dance is a compilation of articles Shawn sent back each month to be published in Dance magazine. The other films are the real treasure: skillful documentation of the dances Shawn encountered in each place, a record of ancient dances unmatched anywhere. Some of the dances Denishawn encountered have become extinct since that time.
Shawn’s book and expedition came to life. In 1925 and 1926 everyone in film was a pioneer. In this case, filming a dance expedition across pre-modern Asia was an enormous achievement. Ted Shawn directed the films, and they were usually shot by Ruth St. Denis’s brother, Buzz, who had long worked with the company and knew well how to film dancing. Here was a treasure of recorded ancient dances as amazing in its own way as the Bugaku portfolios. Amazing too that the New York Public Library had both. One does not replace the other, rather, together they present a picture of dancers’ desire to preserve and remember their dances, to encode and so explore the nature of dance itself.
The treasure was in good hands at the Jerome Robbins Dance Division. The films were easy to find in the dance research catalogue, delivered quickly, faster than I could watch them, and importantly, altogether, understood as a body of work. The Dance Division supplies convenient quiet places to watch these films as carefully and as many times as I choose. Just as Denishawn encountered treasures and experiences along their journey, so did I as I retraced their steps at Dance Division at the Library for Performing Arts.
By visiting some of the other entries, and following associated keywords that appeared when I searched for the Denishawn artifact and films in the catalogue, I found an entry listed as Japanese Dance Drawings (call number *MGS-Res. ++ [Japanese]), and further described as coming from Shawn and St. Denis, and as a signed gift from the Imperial household. It had to be the Bugaku portfolios. I filled out the order slip and gave it to the desk to retrieve. Within half an hour, I was sitting with the hand-painted copy of the two-volume portfolio of Bugaku costumes belonging to the Japanese Emperor Taisho. I felt the New York Public Library had given me a cultural encounter as surprising and rare as the one experienced by Ted Shawn when he first received this gift.
It was decades before American culture was able to absorb and appreciate the Imperial Gagaku troupe during their first visit to the West in 1959. Bugaku is the dance portion of Gagaku music performances. Lincoln Kirstein, co-founder of the New York City Ballet, championed the effort to bring the Imperial Gagaku to the United Nations. He edited and wrote an introduction for an elegant book for the occasion, written by Robert Garfias, Gagaku, The Music and Dances of the Japanese Imperial Household (call number *MGS [Japanese]).
It tells with authority the history, choreography, and repertory of these venerable dances. The publication includes haunting reproductions of a late eighteenth century Bugaku scroll owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was only one year earlier, in 1958, that choreographer George Balanchine with New York City Ballet presented his ballet Bugaku and with it initiated a conversation about both dance forms. Today, films of the Balanchine ballet are available at the Jerome Robbins Dance Division (call number *MGZIC-9-4313A), and beautiful Bugaku screens are available on the website of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Taken together: scroll, screens, films, portfolios, a lavish visual understanding dawns.
My experience of the Bugaku portfolios is simple for me, pure in a way. They are not mine to protect, as was the duty of Ted Shawn. The Jerome Robbins Dance Division protects this timeless dance asset with rigor and professionalism. It is very well taken care of. I can sit at a choice of tables. This book being from a special collection, I viewed it in the reading area of the third floor of the Library for Performing Arts dedicated to such materials. Large tables allowed me to open the volumes with stability and plenty of clear flat surfaces. I was left alone to study and admire these records of ancient dance to my heart’s content. I could return to pages as often as I chose, open both volumes to experience the full glory of the books, behold an ancient dance tradition remembered in painting.
It is indeed a fine example of Japanese aesthetics: precise and clean, decorative and making the profound seem simple. To see a comparable screen in a museum collection: http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/45264 ). These dancers were the sole figures on otherwise pure pages, suspended in an eternity of appreciation, something to behold. These two portfolios depict many dances. Bugaku costumes are multilayered and complicated. For this reason, dance steps were chosen in the paintings to reveal as much of the costume as possible. Accuracy was the purpose of the portfolio. Taken together, these two volumes are one of the most complete representations of the art of Bugaku in any visual form and also serve as reliable scientific records of bugaku performance in the pre-modern time.
The actual experience of using the Dance Division, handling the materials oneself, absorbing a dawning sense of history and those who made it, is the core of its value as a dance resource. It is a destination of the mind and spirit, a quiet and thoughtful place from which to take any manner of personal journey in dance. Away from the random infinitude of the Internet, here was a focused and professional manner of delving into a dance subject open to anyone; any dancer, any scholar. Going through the catalog itself is something that can be done online, and the New York Public Library website offers convenient ways to save lists of titles for future reference. This makes the experience at the library faster and focused on the objects.
By following related subject searches in the catalog entry for the portfolios, my personal search for treasure expanded to specific types of art, such as woodblock prints, paintings, drawings, or engravings. My searching had me, like Shawn, investigate an array of countries. I was faced with the fact that nations and kingdoms have fallen and disappeared in the last one hundred years. Taiwan was Formosa, Thailand was Siam, the Philippines were part of the United States. These works of art were given by people who were travelers, explorers, adventurers, lovers of dance and of Asian culture. Something about the works of art struck them; they brought the works safely to our shores with varying degrees of specific knowledge but insightful first-hand experience.
I also became fascinated with the documentation aspect of Shawn’s films next to that of the painted compendium of Bugaku dances. How is a tradition best remembered visually? Is there one answer? When dance traditions have spiritual techniques or rely on mysterious effects, is allusion better than representation? The researching was simple in its way: I searched through various media combined with a country. My search in "woodblock prints and Japan” brought me to the works of Japanese woodblock print master Tsukioka Kogyo. It was both serendipity and a research method.
Tsukioka Kogyo is a genuine heir in a lineage of Ukiyo-e printmakers and draftsmen. His mother remarried to a famous Ukiyo-e master Tsukioka Yoshitoshi and the boy became his apprentice. Later he studied with the painter and print maker Ogata Gekko, and so his training was complete and he was given the name Kogyo. What makes him unique among ukiyo-e artists is that he almost exclusively depicted the Japanese Noh theater, an otherworldly style of dance theater dating to the fourteenth century.
During the same period as Shawn was making his expeditions and films, and the Imperial household was painting a copy of the Bugaku record of dances, Kogyo was working on his third representation of Noh, a five volume portfolio entitled Noga Taikan (call number [S] *MGS-res Japanese + 79-302 ) to follow his two earlier sets, Nogakuzue (Illustrations of Noh, 1897-1902 ) and Noh Hyakuban (One Hundred Noh Plays, 1998-1903). In fact, Kogyo’s disciple completed the final twenty-four woodblock prints in this series. Noh plays, notoriously slow, profound, and beautiful, have climactic moments of spiritual dilation where a moment is frozen in time.
Kogyo’s woodblock prints seize on these moments of still transcendence, creating color woodblock prints of detail, complexity and enveloping environment. This is a watery use of color, a billowing use of imagery, human emotion immortalized in dance. Quite unlike the Bugaku portfolios, so crisp and precise in their antique stylized manner. Yet both of these multivolume portfolios were intended, as was Shawn’s book and films, as ways to record whole traditions of movement. 1926 was an important year for making records of Asian dances.
Shawn firmly believed in the universality of dance, and further the kindred nature of all dancers as insiders to one another regardless of origin or style of dance. The eventual encounter of actual dancers from the West with dancers from the East established a fraternity that could at last be based on knowledge of dance. There were other expeditions, photographers and early filmmakers, but none with the skill in dance theory and performance such as Denishawn brought with it. That doesn’t mean there was no awareness of dance by the early anthropologists, geographers, missionaries, diplomats, and others who traveled to cultures where dance was very old.
By searching “engravings and Indonesia,” I came across the Claire Holt Collection of Indonesian art (graphic), 1952-1966 (call number *MGZDG Ind 1-41). The items collected by her during the course of a several trips to Indonesia from the 1930s through the 1950s include many photographs of dance from among the first photos ever taken of Indonesian dance. A scholar of art and anthropology, her collection came to the Jerome Robbins Dance Division by means of the Modern Indonesia Project of Cornell University in 1978.
The treasures here are perhaps most significantly unpublished manuscripts about the dances of Bali and Java. While not a dancer like Shawn, Holt was a professional observer of culture and realized the significance of dance to the lives and religions of Indonesia. These are unrepeatable firsthand accounts, every bit as important as the first accounts of the South Pole or Mount Everest. The simple power of dance depicted in sequence, image by image, has a documentational value that transcends epoch, and unites all artists who employ the progression whether in painting, print or photograph. It is a kind of two-dimensional schematic applied to evanescent three-dimensional movement, appearing in almost every era of human history.
It should come as no surprise then that among the items in the Claire Holt collection are several different engravings of Dance of Otheite, as Tahiti was then known (call number *MGZDG Ind 1-12 ). This particular dance was deemed of interest because the costumes might suggest they were in some way influenced by European styles. It seems far-fetched, as the engravings are taken from a painting done when Captain Cook first traveled to these isles in 1773. The nature of an engraving is such that a metal plate is engraved based on a painting or drawing, and so takes on the artistic license and impulse of the engraver.
Claire Holt collected several different engravings based on the famous painting by Webber, the artist who traveled with Captain Cook. One engraving reverses the image, another exaggerates the Western line of the costumes. Taken together, the variations of engravings indicate the varied ways we looked at other dances “for the first time," and even two hundred and fifty years after the painting was done, we are still looking at documentational works of art to teach us, about ourselves as much as the subjects we chose.
An example of a Western attempt at objective depiction was found in the Holt collection. It was an extraordinary colored engraving of animal headed dancers of the Nouak Tribe (call number *MGZDG Ind 1-12 ). The sobriety of the engraving nevertheless reveals astonishment at things previously unknown and unseen. This original painting also had several engraved versions.
Perhaps my favorite item in the Claire Holt collection, however, is a simple and quickly executed pastel drawing of a dancer (call number *MGZDG Ind 1-12 ). It reminded me of the pastels of nineteenth-century French painter Toulouse-Lautrec, who drew furiously to capture the flamboyant dancing going on in front of him. It had an energy, a dance of its own, an immediacy that carries the observer of the painting into the observation of the painter. This little pastel drawing from Indonesia was so full of life, I felt the very joy of exploration and discovery expressed and preserved. It was that spark of life one cannot get searching the Internet. It was that feeling of discovery within the Dance Division that is its intellectual vitality.
My researches at the Jerome Robbins Dance Division worked well with complementary online research. Invariably I would search online for some of the subject matter I encountered at the Library for Performing Arts. The added context and information only highlighted the quality and distinction of the materials at the library. Recently a famous and successful blogger Andrew Sullivan, decided to quit blogging. Not that there was anything bad about it, in fact it had been the best thing he ever did. But he wanted to “think slower, read longer, write more deeply.” The Jerome Robbins Dance Division allows an opportunity to do just that. Dance deserves better thinking, these days more than ever.
The list of prints and etchings, art books ,and specialist publications featuring Asian dances are enough to entertain a cultural traveler richly, to educate dancers visually, and expand public scholarship beyond words. Works of art, from Bugaku and beyond, produced heavenly moments for me in the Dance Division of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Beautiful moments of thinking, of looking and being silent with objects of art as much symbols of the journeys they have taken as artworks in themselves. These art works represent a series of great personal encounters, and they provide the modern viewer with great personal encounters as well.
Joseph Houseal
Winter 2015
New York, Chicago
Items in the Jerome Robbins Dance Division
Denishawn 150, call number *MGZEB (Denishawn, no. 150).
Denishawn 390, call number *MGZEB (Denishawn, no. 390).
Japanese dance drawings, call number *MGS-Res. ++ (Japanese).
Japanese dance drawings, call number *MGS-Res. ++ (Japanese).
Japanese dance drawings, call number *MGS-Res. ++ (Japanese).
Japanese dance drawings, call number *MGS-Res. ++ (Japanese).
Noga Taikan, call number *MGS-res. Japanese + 79-302, vol. 5.
Noga Taikan, call number *MGS-res. Japanese + 79-302, vol. 5.
Claire Holt collection of Indonesian art, call number *MGZDG Ind 1-41.
Claire Holt collection of Indonesian art, call number *MGZDG Ind 1-41.
Claire Holt collection of Indonesian art, call number *MGZDG Ind 1-41.
Claire Holt collection of Indonesian art, call number *MGZDG Ind 1-41.
Joseph Houseal is the director of Core of Culture, a nonprofit 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.
I was flattered and intrigued when asked by the Jerome Robbins Dance Division of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts to participate in their scholar's program to explore their collections and write an essay about architecture and dance, since those are, respectively, my primary areas of training and practice. I have never been a good reader or a diligent researcher. I consider myself pragmatic and empirical but not scholarly. Almost all my knowledge is experiential and extrapolated from information I learn solving crossword puzzles and through miscellaneous listening. I'm infatuated with the precision of meaning that words and the rules of grammar-which I learned in fifth grade-make possible. So, I enjoy writing, and probably due to my problems with comprehension, I tend to write clearly. But my writing thus far has confined itself mainly to previewing and reviewing dance performance, the occasional dancer profile, and a lecture or two.
For me, the act of writing is like choreographing: figuring out how to arrange the parts (steps or words) to express exactly the sentiment I intend or to ask the questions I'm posing. It's consistent with my propensity for making all kinds of things, which I've been doing since age seven. Even if there are instructions, I learn by trial and error.
To quote Martha Graham in her 1957 film A Dancer's World: "the terror and the challenge" of engaging in scholarly research was—if not altogether irresistible—long overdue.
Subject
Image 1: Martha Graham in studio portrait.
Photographer unknown
With a Bachelor of Architecture from MIT in 1961 and a career-long interest in staging dance in alternative spaces, I thought it might be interesting and informative for me to write about site-specific work, since that was always a particular choreographic interest of mine. An Internet search for "Dancing in Buildings" led me only to "Dancing Buildings," which included the Dancing House in Prague, a 1996 funhouse of a design by Vlado Milunić and Frank Gehry, in which a stone tower cuddles up to a glass one, symbolizing Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.
The Signature Towers, so-called Dancing Towers, in Dubai, designed by Zaha Hadid, is an unlikely skyscraper with three masses that undulate and interweave as they rise skyward, each from its own base. Also planned for Dubai is Italian architect David Chase's rotating, eighty-story building, in which the floors will rotate individually, giving the building a dynamic, constantly changing silhouette-dancing indeed.
Since the Jerome Robbins Dance Division is the place to look for dancers and dances, I decided to search for site-specific dance works. I began first searching for myself finding 176 items, including 139 moving image works as well as my own papers, donated to the library in 1994.
Image 2: Gus Solomons jr in "Motion is the Medium".
Photographer Unknown
A keyword search in the Library's catalog using "site-specific" found 555 items, among which are site-specific art, installation, and performance. The more specific keyword "site-specific dance" found 124 items, including books, videocassettes, and DVDs. I later learned that the Dance Division actually uses a local subject "site-specific performance" in its cataloging. Using that subject, I found 85 items. Subsequently, I decided it might be interesting to find out what I could about my own site-specific dances in the library-their casts and collaborators, etc. My history of doing site work dates from 1968, shortly after I had to leave the Merce Cunningham Dance Company due to an injured back. But at thirty, injuries heal quickly, so by late that summer my spinal compression had abated; I could dance again. And I was invited to Boston, my hometown, to create a video-dance. I made City/Motion/Space/Game, which was both a dual-screen video and site-specific to boot. The Dance Division has a recording of this produced by Boston's WGBH-TV.
Site-Specific Performance
When my company and I began doing dances outside of theaters, I called them "environmental" dances. That is, they were performed in alternative kinds of locations that were not conventional concert dance venues. Not all those works were site-specific. Some of them could be described as site non-specific: that is, they could be adapted to various locations rather than requiring a single, specific place. Among the more recent site choreographers, these are among my favorites. Stephan Koplowitz, formerly based in New York City and now in California, is noted for extensive site works, but uses the term "site-adaptive" to describe his work, that is, pieces that can respond to various different kinds of spaces, using similar or identical movement materials, like his Grand Step Project (2004-ongoing), which was designed for any wide public staircase. Among the 59 items on Koplowitz to be found in the Library's catalog, I discovered a DVD recording of Koplowitz participating in a site-specific event at New York City's Grand Central Station. Other participants were the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, the Lucinda Childs Dance Company, juggler Michael Moschen, highwire artist Philippe Petit, and Paul Thompson/Troop Three. A documentary on the creation and performance of Grand Central Dances is available for viewing at the Dance Division.
Image 3: "Grand Central Dances", "Fenestrations" by Stephan Koplowitz, Grand Central Station, 1987.
Photograph by Frank English
Such site-adaptive pieces in my own catalog are PocketCard Process and AudiencePlay Process (1974), and Hits and Runs (1977), of which there are no photographic or video records extant. But unlike Koplowitz's large-scale pieces for casts of dozens or more, mine were mostly made for just the six to eight dancers in my own company.
Site-dance and filmmaker Noemie Lafrance's work turns her sites into settings for cinematic narratives. Noir (2004) took place in a parking garage on New York's Lower East Side. The audience sat in parked cars, listening to the sound track on the car radio, as what could be a gangster film from the 1940s unfolded before them in the building. High society clashed with mobsters, desperate chases, bodies stashed in trunks, secrets and mystery galore. A documentary of this work, with commentary by Lafrance is in the Dance Division's moving image archive.
San Franciscan Joanna Haigood, with her Zaccho Dance Theater, has since 1980 been investigating site-adaptive and aerial dance that blend culture with movement. Her 1993 Butterfly Dreams in collaboration with sculptor Cho Mu was a walk-through installation that explored evolution, using the stages of a butterfly as metaphor. It was performed at Jacob's Pillow in Massachusetts, Walker Art Center Sculpture Garden in Minnesota, and New York's Roosevelt Island in the East River, where I saw it. An author search shows that the Library has seven items on Haigood, including a public program at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts in which Ms. Haigood discusses this work. Other participants in this program included Meredith Monk and Elizabeth Streb.
Another significant creator of site-specific works is Marilyn Wood. The Dance Division did an extensive Oral History interview with her in which she discusses creating works in urban plazas, including the Seagram Building in New York City.
Image 4: Celebrations in City Places: The Seagram Building and It's Plaza, New York City, September 1972. Photograph by Robert Wood.
Other notable creators, among many, who have investigated site-adaptive and -specific work include the Japanese Butoh company, Sankai Juku, whose Shiloba has its dancers hanging upside down from building facades. (In 1985, the piece resulted in the death of founding member Yoshiyuki Takada, when his rope broke.) A keyword search using "Sankai Juku shows the Dance Division has 95 items concerning this company.
Image 5: Sankai Juku in performance.
Photographer unknown
Elizabeth Streb: her company invaded various sites in London with her Action Mechanics prior to the 2012 Summer Olympics. The Dance Division has 151 items in its catalog relating to this artist; this includes 64 videorecordings.
Image 6: Elizabeth Streb in performance.
Photograph by Johan Elbers
And the forerunner to all of these, Trisha Brown's 1970, self-explanatory Man Walking Down the Side of a Building. The Dance Division has over 500 items for Brown including a videorecording of this work.
The Jerome Robbins Dance Division
Using the extensive resources of the Jerome Robbins Dance Division, I was able to locate a quantity of factual details about my own site-specific dances-casts and program information, contracts and letters of agreement, budgets, reviews, etc.-in my own collection. In 1994, to spare some of my papers from destruction or loss due to apartment purging, I had donated several file boxes full of memorabilia to the Dance Division. Processed by the Library, my materials had been organized into sixteen boxes of file folders.
Of course, using my own work as the subject of my research made my task simpler, because I'm familiar with the dances I've made, but trickier, in separating the actual materials in the collection from my recollections. I discovered that much of what was in the folders triggered memories that led me deeper into the processes and rationales of the construction of the dances. I was surprised at how flawed my memory was about much of my own creative output
For example, the program notes for Brilll-o (1973) reminded me that as much as I swore allegiance to "movement as the medium"-type abstraction, I had given the sections of this piece titles that implied narrative: "Act I, Scene 1-Party Encounter, Sunday Evening," "Scene 3-Ages Later in the Day, Next Door," "Act II, Scene 3-Brother, Blacksheep," "Scene 5-Late Friday Night Freaks," Act III, Scene 1-Flash. Back, etc." These subtitles sprang from my enjoyment of wordplay, as well as my propensity for commenting on other conventional structures, in this case, a three-act theatrical drama.
Image 7: Program from "Brill-O",
choreography by Gus Solomons jr
The Research
I used the online guide to my company's records and papers, call number (S)*MGZMD 214, a list of the files in the sixteen boxes of material, which is filed in alphabetical, not chronological, order. My site-specific dances span the years 1968 to 2007. This from my own memory, they are, chronologically:
City/Motion/Space/Game for WGBH-TV, Boston, MA, 1968
Quad—during a multi-day workshop at UCLA 1970
Lobby Event #1 (4-day) at M.I.T. Bldg. VII, Cambridge, MA 5/1972
Lobby Event #2 (5-day) (Paul Earls)*, MIT Bldg. VII, 11/1972
Lobby Event #3 (3-day) at Loeb Student Center lobby, NYU, 12/1972
Masse in Trinity Church sanctuary, NYC 1972
Decimal Banana in New School for Social Research Garden, 1973
Ad Hoc Transit in the atrium of CalArts, Valencia, CA 10/1976
Gallery Event #1 in CalArts atrium, Valencia, CA 11/1976
Hits and Runs on various streets and plazas in downtown NYC 1977
Steps #1 at the New Jersey State Museum Plaza, Trenton, 7/1980
Chryptych at St. Mark's Church in the Bowery, NYC, 1986
Red Squalls on the North Plaza, Lincoln Center Out of Doors, 8/1993
Red Squalls II on the North Plaza, Lincoln Center Out of Doors, 8/1997
CROWD—Rotch Architecture Library at MIT, 2002
Random Funny Walks-South Plaza, L. C. Out of Doors, 8/2000
The boxes in the archive contain information on paper, but much of the work was made in the days before video recording was routine, and some of the recordings that were made were in obsolete formats that have not survived time, so the details of the movement are lost, except for some cursory notes and notations on steno pads and scraps of paper, which will be part of my next donation to the Jerome Robbins Dance Division. Perhaps my-or someone's-future research at the Library.
I searched through several of the sixteen boxes in the collection for information that might be relevant to the site pieces above. In Box 8, for instance, folder 1 is labeled "1974-76" with no further information about what's in it. Folder 5 in that box is "Performances 69-86," folder 6 is "Associated concerts, '73," and folder 12 is "Press, '76-77." Box 9 contains several files of information sheets from performances The Solomons Company/Dance did while working with the group management firm Theatre Arts Concepts, sheets listing logistical information about the engagements.
Image 8: Information sheet for Marymount Manhattan Summer Residency,1977
In Box 10, File 13 is labeled "Sidewalk Dance Company"-a commission-"Solomons Company, 1975-85," and programs, "'91-94." The boxes are stored off site, which meant requesting them from the library's storage facilities in New Jersey, from where they would usually arrive the next day.
My donation also included videos in various, now-obsolete formats. My videos at that time were copied onto then current formats which, in the passage of time, were no longer stable. Many of the videotapes I thought I might want to watch were labeled in the catalog as "Preservation," meaning they were in the process of being transferred from U-matic formats to digital. But the staff assured me that it would be possible to view at least some of them in their present state.
Box 8, folder 1 contained only copies of dance audits I had written for the New York State Council on the Arts from 1974-1976-no help in my search for site-specific dances. And Box 8, folder 6 held the contract and financial details pertaining to the Solomons Company/Dance's 1973 performances at American Theater Lab (later to become Dance Theater Workshop and now New York Live Arts.) ATL had paid a commissioning fee of $200 total: $100 for choreography; $75 for dancers' fees, and $25 for production expenses. The rental fee for the space was $25 per evening.
The program for that season consisted of Brilll-o, a dance in three acts, two intermissions, performed by Santa Aloi, Ruedi Brack, Laura Brittain, Randall Faxon, Peter Woodin, and me, with original music by Paul Earls, lighting by Barry Suttin, and décor by Eva Tsug (the pseudonym I used as costume and set designer for my early dances). The section titles mostly represented wordplay, inspired by fleeting images suggested by motion or juxtapositions, since the piece comprised pure movement. In the folder are copies of the program notes.
The On-Site Dances
1. City/Motion/Space/Game
In August of 1968, producer Rick Hauserasked me if I'd like to make a dance piece for video. I leaped at the opportunity, because I was curious to see how three-dimensional dance, hot in McLuhan's terms, could be effectively translated to cool, two-dimensional television. Working with composer John Morris, writer Mary Feldhaus-Weber, and director Peter Downey, I was allowed complete creative freedom by Hauser, who enabled my vision, however impractical some elements of it may have been at the state of the art of TV back then.
The element so vital to dance performance is space, area: side to side, near and far, which live stage performance allows. The watchers' eyes must scan the space; they cannot take in the whole picture in one eyeful, as they can with the relatively minuscule TV screen. So, I decided that the piece should be broadcast simultaneously on two screens, which meant two channels. WGBH-TV had both a VHF and a UHF channel, so that would be possible. It turned out that synchronizing the broadcasts would not prove so simple as pushing two buttons at the same time.
I wanted the dancing to occur in four different types of city spaces-hard-edged urban geometric, planned amorphous urban, randomly amorphous, and refined, dance-friendly. The spaces chosen were, respectively, the Prudential Center, the Boston Public Garden, a junkyard, and the TV studio. My recorded narration, culled from hours of recording and editing by Feldhaus-Weber, provides an audio backdrop to the movement.
I describe my philosophy of how I watch dance and suggest how one might best view the piece. I suggest that you "see what you are interested in looking at at any given moment" and not feel you are missing what you do not see. The movement alternates between more pedestrian activity and dance phrases outdoors, and highly technical dance vocabulary in the studio. The viewers' eyes must scan between the TV sets, whether side by side or stacked, to experience the tapestry of overlapping images.
In 1968, color TV cameras resembled small sports cars in size and weight, so the logistics of on-location shooting were complex. In order to create visual transformations-having my sweatshirt change color in mid-run, for example-both my path through the plaza and the amount of sunshine had to match in each take, so the transformation would look seamless. You couldn't digitally manipulate, as you can nowadays. In the junkyard, where the unwieldy TV cameras dared not go, we took a series of still photos and animated them together like cartoon animation to simulate movement.
I designed editing tricks, like having every other inch of tape removed to resemble a stop-motion version of a sequence that you had just seen whole. But what I did not realize was that unlike audiotape, with which you could literally cut and splice, videotape had to be electronically, not physically, edited. Technicians used to doing, say, three edits in a half-hour show were faced with over seventy-five edits in this twenty-two minute show. I heard no grumbling; producer Hauser made it happen. The overtime costs were, I hope, justified by the show's success and its winning an award from National Educational Television (now PBS) for outstanding achievement.
Watching the copy of the video at the library brought back a flood of memories of waiting for the clouds to roll by between takes at the Prudential Center, so the light would match in different takes; of my falling into the duck pond during one take in the Boston Public Gardens; of having to convince the cameramen that it was okay, if they were seen on camera during the section in the TV studio, because the rules of the game in that section required that both cameras stay on me and the director had to switch cameras whenever I crossed into a different floor area taped on the floor, whatever else was going on. The Dance Divison has a DVD version of this two-part television program.
2. Quad
This was a piece I had made in 1970 for a student workshop at UCLA, where in 1964 I had taught my first four-week, daily technique summer course. The piece was created in two days and performed in an outdoor courtyard at the rear of the dance building, watched by the audience from a balcony above. Obviously, the movement was not complex, but the large number of participants made more complex spatial patterns possible.
3, 4. MIT Lobby Events
Box 14, Folder 1, contains correspondence concerning 1972 performances by Solomons Company/Dance in the atrium lobby of Building VII on the Massachusetts Avenue side of the main building of MIT, my alma mater, in Cambridge, MA. Building VII, coincidentally, was where the Architecture Department's drafting rooms were located, on the fourth floor, where I had toiled for five-plus years earning my degree.
As one of their projects, the architects that year had designed and constructed a series of platforms at various heights within the seventy-foot high rotunda, connected by stairways and bridges and accessible from various of the three tiers of balconies that surrounded the rotunda. They were intended for people to sit and study, eat lunch, people-watch, and just hang out.
We did two iterations of the project, one in May-a three-day event-and another of four days, in late November:, November 28 and 29 and December 1 at noon and November 30 at 5 p.m.
The six Solomons Company/Dance members, clad in white workmen's coveralls, explored the space up, down, and across, subverting its customary usage and forcing people to experience the space differently. The dancers interacted with the lunch-eating, physics-studying users of the space, climbing around, beside, over, and under them, making them passive participants in the action.
Image 9: l-r (foreground): Gus Solomons jr, Laura Brittain, Santa Aloi at M.I.T, 1972Image 10: Gus Solomons jr at
M.I.T. lobby event, 1972Image 11: M.I.T. lobby event, 1972Image 12: M.I.T. lobby event, 1972
During the four-day version, faculty members, including renowned photographer Minor White, and filmmaker D. A. Pennebaker recorded the noontime episodes. Then, on the penultimate day, at five in the evening, when the pedestrian flow was much heavier, a more formal installment occurred on a stage set up on the lobby floor, when the pedestrian flow was much heavier. On a screen behind the live dancing played filmed clips and photos of the week's prior episodes, while the dancers, now in sleek dance attire, performed a concertized version of the movement themes they'd been manipulating all week on the midair structures.
The viewers seemed puzzled and amused by the choreographic antics. The faculty, architects, and our hosts were pleased and excited to see their installation become an unexpected performance venue.
5. Lobby Event, NYU Loeb Student Center
This event, done in November of 1972, scattered the dancers throughout the public circulation spaces on the main floor of the center. The building was located on the corner of Laguardia Place and Washington Square South; NYU's Kimmel Student Center and Skirball Auditorium has now replaced it on the site. On the heels of the MIT events, the movement activities and dance phrases wove through the public areas on the main floor, catching the attention-or not-of the students passing through en route to their classes or from lunch. For them, it was unexpected but not anomalous, its being New York.
6. Masse
In Box 8, Folder 7, I hit more pay dirt with letters of agreement for the performances of Masse, commissioned for something called Jesus Week in 1972. It was performed in the sanctuaries of Trinity Church at Broadway and Wall Street on April 25 at 5:15p.m., April 26 at 12:45p.m., and again on May 3 at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in the evening. Since there was no video or film made of this piece, seeing the letter of agreement in the file reminded me that there had been performances at both Trinity Church and at Cathedral of St. John the Divine, the latter of which I had forgotten.
The company's fee was $1,000. Trinity Church organist, Larry King, played an improvisational score on the big pipe organs in both churches to accompany the dance. The company dancers at that time were Santa Aloi, Laura Brittain, Randall Faxon, Dianne McIntyre, Ruedi Brack, Ernie Pysher, and me.
Trinity Episcopal Church is a beautiful Gothic revival by Richard Upjohn, finished in 1846. I don't recall any of the specific movement we did, but the concept was to utilize the entire sanctuary as our dance floor, starting down the center aisle, spilling into the side aisles, and finishing at the altar. The intention was to permeate the space like a kinetic cloud. I have no recollection of the subsequent performance at St. John the Divine, the world's largest cathedral, but I'm sure the six of us dancers were less pervasive of the spatial volume than we had been downtown.
Box 9 contains programs of concerts I attended, either as audience or auditor for New York State Council on the Arts.
Box 10 has fact sheets from the company's management in 1974, Directional Concepts, an early group management organization for modern dancers. There's a financial balance sheet for each of the company's engagements, which were more numerous than I recalled.
7. Decimal Banana
During a summer residency at California State University at Long Beach in July 1973, I had made a dance for the students, which I named Decimal Plum (Decimal, because the structure of the dance had been based on numerical progressions, and Plum, because the costumes were purple). The following fall, for the annual ChoreoConcerts series, in which I participated for several years, I decided to do my dance in the interior garden of the venue. The concerts were held in auditorium of the New School for Social Research and produced by Laura Forman. Conceptually, the dance had nothing to do with Decimal Plum, except that it was the next dance I made and the costumes were yellow.
The dance comprised phrases and activities that suited the terrain of the enclosed garden. It was in no way narrative but rather sculptural, like a kinetic installation, which lasted for ten or fifteen minutes, before the audience entered the theater for the rest of the show. Like much of my work at that time, Decimal Banana aimed to stretch the conventions of concert dance by moving it out of the theater proper and exhibiting movement as its own message in a different kind of presentation space-a gallery-as had the dances of the 1960's Judson Dance Theater and those of my mentor and primary choreographic influence Merce Cunningham.
[aside] It was at a previous installment of the ChoreoConcert series in 1968 that I had devised "Two Reeler." Since I had to be out of town on the performance date, I created two audiotapes to be played simultaneously from opposite sides of the stage. One audio track contained musical accompaniment, and the other gave the audience instructions that were things they might do while watching a real dance-press you feet into the floor; lean forward; sway from side to side in rhythm; etc.
8, 9. Ad Hoc Transit and Gallery Event #1
I could locate no information about these two pieces in the Dance Division holdings. They were both made while I was on the faculty of California Institute of the Arts (Cal Arts) from 1976-78. But they recalled the MIT lobby events, although they were less interactive with viewers. The CalArts building had a central "square" that was an architectural attempt to knit the sprawling main building, which was mostly a web of long, desolate hallways, to the acting, dance, painting and sculpture studios. Inside the large rooms light, color, and activity buzzed, but oh, those endless corridors! Company members at that time were Ruedi Brack, Donald Byrd, Katherine Gallagher, Jack Gates, Nanna Nilson, Judith Ren-Lay, Carl Thomsen, and our production manager Ruis Woertendyke. A special recording sessions was made ofAd Hoc Transit at American Theatre Laboratory, in February 1977.
10. Hits and Runs
In Box 13, folder 10, is a trove of documentation about the Solomons Company/ Dance's Marymount Manhattan College Summer Residency in 1977, which focused on dancing onsite, in locations not intended for performance: city sidewalks and building plazas. The four-week schedule contains technique classes and workshops, taught by me and company members to students who could earn academic credit for the course.
Hits and Runs, as the roving performance was titled, would invade a plaza and perform a series of movement tasks, then move on to the next space, before the security squad had mobilized to eject us. Back then, no one thought of securing permission or permits; we were a guerrilla band of roving Terpsichoreans, hitting and running.
There's also a small sheet of paper with the movement sequence for our episode in Abingdon Square on July 16 neatly typed out, as follows:
Company Students
Audience Assault Street Walk
Hitch Runs
Warm-up & Opening Run Wall Poses
(as is, then in unison, counting aloud) (singly, then spread out)
Pivot Game 'A' Pivot Game 'B'
11s & 12s
Unison Phrase Unison Phrase
(all are turning; whistle blows; all run to fence, sit, and applaud)
Box 13 also contains copies of student evaluations, which I'm happy to say were quite positive, and correspondence with the administration over a delay in our payment until final grades had been submitted—and vice versa. They wanted grades before paying the company, and we wanted payment before submitting grades. The situation was finally resolved to everyone's satisfaction.
Hits and Runs was a further development of two action structures I had made in October of 1974, ShufflePlay Process and AudiencePlay Process, which both premiered at Alfred University in New York State, during the company's engagement there.
Image 14: Playing cards used in Shuffleplay Process.
At the start of each performance of Shuffleplay Process, the dancers were dealt playing cards, which each contained four actions they were to perform with each other and/or on audience members. Instructions were gender specific (M and W) and included tasks like:
M move 5 people W hug 1 M carry 2 W kick in circle
2 jump phrase 1 count 9 3 count 11 4 dervish turn
archaic set bronco zigzag run lie for 10 seconds
leap in circle locomote leap across 3 falls
The numbers under the M (Man) or W (Woman) indicate how many times they must repeat the actions on their card. Some of the actions were pre-choreographed, so all the dancers did the identical "jump phrase" or "archaic set" or "bronco," whenever it came up, so the audience would see certain dance-like actions rippling through the cast at different times-or unpredictably in unison, and they were to use their creative imaginations to fulfill the non-dance tasks differently each time. This piece could be performed with or without a captive audience, indoors or out.
AudiencePlay Process involved audience participation, and was done in non-theater settings. Here, the cards instructed such things as:
CHAIN KNOT-people join hands in a circle and twist into a tight knot.
3-WAY MIRROR-face 3 people; do continuous poses as they mirror you.
FOLLOW LEADER-(mainly locomotive)
CONTACT ADAGIO—3 people maintain hold of a different one of your body parts throughout your phrase.
ADD-A-PHRASE-teach a simple phrase, 1 movement at a time: do #1, they do #1; do #2, they do #1+2; do #3, they do #1+2+3, etc. up to 5 moves, then all do whole phrase 5 times.
[aside] The GUT STOMP LOTTERY kill, which premiered in 1972 at the Cubiculo-an intimate black box theater in the west 50s-was not site-specific but did involve indeterminacy. The dancers onstage were dealt hands of playing cards with their action and phrases, printed on them, one per card. As in a card game, they could arrange the cards in any order to determine their own sequence to do them. Hence their relationships to the other dancers were unpredictable in each performance, forcing them to be keenly alert to their colleagues, moment to moment.
And in a similar spirit of indeterminacy, live radios on the game table accompanied the dance, tuned either to static between stations or to random music. Also, in another part of the stage, downstage right as I recall, were also piles of cards with instructions for dancers to produce vocal sounds: counting, listing items in various categories etc., to add to the aural stimuli for audience to relate to onstage action.
As I was a devotee of formalism, the content of my dances assiduously avoided overt emotionality or narrative. "The message is the medium," wrote the provocative Canadian philosopher of communication theory Marshall MacLuhan, and like that of my chief esthetic influence Merce Cunningham, my medium was movement. Unlike Cunningham, however, my instincts for invention or editing fell far short of his genius. Most of my dances were perceived as interesting intellectual conceptions, but tended to perplex audiences, rather than move them or touch them.
Our press reviews were often in the vein of this one written by Julinda Lewis in 1979: "All the dances are abstract, having no storyline, no dramatic intent other than that evoked by the movement itself. The dancing has a linear quality geometric and distant, resulting in a flung-apart and often humorous collection of movement that as a whole is, unfortunately, not always as interesting as the separate parts."
11. Steps #1
In the spring of 1980, I had made NŌZ, a punk musical, which seemed like an artistic necessity at the time. It premiered at the Riverside Dance Festival at Riverside Church in New York City. In the 1970s, my dances had alternated between the purely formal: Decimal Banana (1973), one of my site-specific exercises, cat (1973), a solo made during a residency at York University in Toronto, Steady Work (1975), danced by the company in silence, reinforced by periodic interludes of deafening sound, Statements of Nameless Root, I and II (1975, 1976), the first, a solo in six short sections and the second, a company piece for six dancers, set to a score I "composed" from tape recorder feedback.
And the more emotionally evocative: Yesterday (1973), set to poems by Ethan Ayer; Brilll-o (1973) to commissioned music by Paul Earls, the sections of which were meant to have narrative implications; Bone-Jam (1977), in which the dancers shed clothing with each successive section from trench coats to skivvies; Signals (1978), a dialog between me and composer Mio Morales, who played his electric guitar live, onstage; and make me no boxes to out me in… (1979), a company work, featuring and in tribute to Judith Ren-Lay, one of my most talented and loyal dancers.
After NŌZ's immersion into punk style and my having the dancers sing original lyrics, I needed a palate cleanser. So as an antidote, I went back to basics: walking in geometric spatial patterns to rhythmic pulses. That was the beginning of a decade-plus series of "Steps" dances. This, the first of them, I made specifically to be performed in sneakers and sweatshirts on a plaza in front of New Jersey's capitol, as part of a summer series of public entertainments. Steps #1 had live percussion accompaniment.
The last of the Steps series, Steps #14: Are You Going With Me?, was created for dance students at Hunter College in 1989. It took its subtitle from the Pat Metheny music that furnished its musical pulse. But only Steps #1 could be called site-nonspecific or site-adaptive, as it was made on paper, rehearsed in a studio, and could have been staged in any open outdoor space.
12. Chryptych
This is a 1986 dance that could be called site-specific, because it was designed to use the entire sanctuary of St. Mark's Church in the Bowery, from the balcony loft to the seating risers at the sides of the room to the front vestibule. I seated the audience on the altar end, if not the first, then one of the first times the church had been set up that way for a dance concert.
Since the building is a precious landmark, there was a great deal of discussion with the Buildings Department prior to opening because, according to them, the balcony was not sanctioned for dancing, only walking. We had to demonstrate to them that the opening section, to be "danced" up there, contained no jumping or other impact moves that might compromise the structure or exceed the load limit.
My intention in creating the dance was to permeate the entire interior of the sanctuary with movement and to achieve all possible combinations of dancers-solos, duets, trios, quartets, etc.-and partnerships between and among them. A cast of ten-six company members and four guest dancers-allowed for a multitude of possibilities and required some simultaneity of groupings to achieve the objective. The title Chryptych referenced the religious function of the building and also, cryptically, the nondisclosure of my intention to achieve that full complement of combinations-especially since I was loath to subject that objective to too close scrutiny. This is the only site-specific dance I made for a paying audience.
13, 14. Red Squalls and Red Squalls II
In several summers past, Solomons Company/Dance had participated in the Lincoln Center Out of Doors Festival, dancing on a stage set up on the plaza adjacent to the fountain, since renamed the Josie Robertson Plaza. In 1993, Jenneth Webster, the festival's producer, commissioned the company for a site-specific dance for the North Plaza, around the reflecting pool. This seemed an apt location, because its stony, urban character was particularly unforgiving, mitigated only by amorphous Henry Moore sculpture in the reflecting pool and, near the entrance to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts on the west side, the Alexander Calder stabile.
Before the 2012 renovation of Lincoln Center by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, which softened the aspect of the surfaces in the space with a grove of trees and a tilted lawn, the façades of Avery Fisher Hall, the Metropolitan Opera House, and the Lincoln Center Theaters framed the plaza on three sides, and the north side wall had a staircase at its eastern corner, leading up to an elevated plaza bridging Sixty-fifth Street in front of the Juilliard School.
Architect Scott De Vere and I had been collaborating on concert dance installations since 1988, and our mutual understanding that architecture was articulated by the flow of traffic through it made this an ideal project for us to tackle together. Toby Twining had been my musical collaborator since 1988 as well. What fused our connection was the desire to have both sound and movement emanating from human bodies without the intervention of hardware-musical instruments.
Image 15: "GUT BOYS plus...", a Solomons, Twining, De Verre collaboration.
Poster showing Toby Twining and Gus Solomons
Twining had composed a cappellascores for my 1990 Men's Piece, as well as Site Line (1989) and Opus Pocus (1991), both of which featured installations by De Vere. Unfortunately, our second performance that day was rained out, and Twining's score couldn't be heard properly, due to technical difficulties with the sound system. That project was the last of our collaborations. Still, the installation-a 150 foot "wall," made of translucent mesh fabric attached to ten-foot high poles, manipulated by a dozen movers-transformed the space with color and motion that framed the dancing by six company members.
For the second iteration of the piece, commissioned in 1997, the collaborators joining Solomons Company/Dance and architect De Vere, were musician Walter Thompson, and fabric technologist Stephanie Siepmann, who designed and fabricated the costumes with her three-dimensionally engineered fabrics that added additional texture and shape to the dance movement. This time, the sound was acoustic with the musicians scattered through the space after being escorted into the space with the fabric wall.
In this iteration, there was a counterpoint between different configurations of the fabric wall into a series of bowties, a rectangular prism, and the actions of the dancers whose movement texture and density varied, as they traversed U-shape on the north, east, and south sides of the reflecting pool. They alternated between doing simultaneous solos, warping the white, three-dimensional fabric of their costumes into bizarre silhouettes, and clumping together in tight group formations, which turned them into asymmetric masses echoing the Henry Moore sculpture in the pool.
The musicians-brass and percussion-responded to the gestural language, "sound painting," invented and developed by the composer/conductor Walter Thompson, which can determine his choice of pitch, volume, and timing, of their improvisation. Between passages of playing, the musicians relocated to various assigned spots on the plaza, adding an additional layer of pedestrian movement to the dancing. The 1997 version was by far the more successful in transforming the plaza. A review of this performance can be found in Red Squalls (Choreographic work : Solomons) [clippings], call number *MGZR.
15. CROWD
In 2005, Thomas De France, then a professor of dance in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at MIT, invited me to do a month-long residency there with the MIT Dance Theater Ensemble, which he was directing. The residency consisted of four weekend visits, Friday to Sunday, as the students-double and triple majoring, as many of them were-only had time to meet then. Since their attendance couldn't be consistent, prior planning on my part was essential.
Recalling the lobby events I had done with my company at MIT in 1972, I decided to make a site-specific piece for the multileveled Rotch Architecture Library with its many nooks and crannies, where the roving audience, moving from top to bottom, could make surprise discoveries of small movement tasks happening throughout the space and culminating in the reading room/lounge.
Each week in the few hours we had on Friday and Saturday evenings and Sunday mornings, I would explore materials with those present, and imagine how it could be arranged in the multilevel library. I had my days free to imagine how to arrange the materials. One consistent thing about MIT students is their enormous intelligence. So, each time I'd return, the ones I'd seen the previous week had brought their cast mates up to speed on the material. They had learned and mastered it, and we could quickly get on the same page.
The site-specific performance happened at the culmination of the residency, and the audience seemed as mystified and fascinated by the ambulatory dance as they'd been thirty years before by the shenanigans in the rotunda. The more things change. Later, I restaged the dance for proscenium stage to do in their December concert; that, the audience seemed to understand.
Of course, since neither CROWD nor Random Funny Walks were part of my 1994 donation, the only information in the Dance Division about them will be these personal recollections and I include them to complete the research into the list of my site-specific works.
16. Random Funny Walks (2007)
In 2007, in celebration of Jenneth Webster's twenty-fifth and final season of producing Lincoln Center Out of Doors, I was invited to create another site-specific dance to share a program with Yoshiko Chuma, Merian Soto, and Elaine Summers on the South Plaza of the complex, adjacent to Damrosch Park. The piece was conceived to take place among the audience, who would be sitting on the grid of stone benches, arranged for leisurely reading, chatting, lunching, or killing time between appointments.
Working closely with the layout of the plaza's geometry, I designed it to fill the space with movement to be seen from all angles. The music was a selection of jazz-rock songs, and the cast was made up of students of mine at NYU/Tisch School of the Arts: Bryan Campbell, Andrew Griffin, Silas Riener, Saeed Siamak, Sydney Skybetter, and Nick Strafaccia.
We were scheduled to perform at 6:10 and 7:10 p.m. on August 23. But when we arrived for our technical run-through, we were told that the audience was not going to be allowed to sit on the benches for reasons of "crowd control," and the dance would have to be done on the people-free space, which rendered it virtually pointless. In retrospect, I perhaps should have had the fortitude to simply refuse to perform the dance, because the conditions were not as promised. But I was loath to deprive my dancers of the fruits of their labor, so they did the first of two scheduled performances. After which, I prevailed upon the security to allow "selected" audience members to occupy the benches for the second showing.
The final piece, done only at the end of the second show, when the sun had set, was by Elaine Summers; it involved projections on balloons suspended in the space. Fortunately, the reviewer form the New York Times stayed for both runs in order to see that piece and noted in her review that Random Funny Walks made more sense with people on the benches. Altogether, that experience was less than artistically fulfilling
Conclusion
Coming to the end of the half-year process of researching and writing this essay, I am no longer intimidated by the mysteries of accessing and using materials in the Library's comprehensive Dance Division. In addition, my curiosity has been piqued to undertake more research in future, perhaps, into what this current search has only begun exploring. Yes, the meanings of the letter-number identifications of documents and videos still remain mysterious to me. While the numbering (classification) systems are arbitrary, they do bring similar or related materials together. I know that by going to the public library section that includes the 720s, I can find books on architecture. And, knowing that the Dance Division has several generic call numbers (*MGZR for clippings, *MGZA for periodicals) helps me identify the kind of materials I was finding in my catalog searches. At least now their connection to actual materials is actually comprehensible to me.
Revisiting my early work has been edifying, in light of the new insights I've acquired over the years of teaching and seeing vast quantities of choreography. My understanding of the mechanics of the dance making craft have been sharpened by having to articulate to my students what makes work engaging, whatever its aesthetic point of view may be. Watching my own earlier work corroborates the validity of my evolved notions about what makes better work. I wish I'd had a mentor with those insights back then to help me edit and refine and ask better questions about my own dances.
Site-specific, site-nonspecific, and site-adaptive work encompasses a spectrum of dance far too broad to cover in a single stroke. After a choreographer's initial choice to use an alternative location, artistic vision, aesthetic choices, logistical decisions, and more inform the resulting product and its expressive impact. Limiting my investigation primarily to my own work has afforded me first, a comprehensible chunk of information to probe and second, a way of reviewing my own artistic choices and decisions in a productive way.
What inspired me to locate dancing in the midst of the public in the first place was a desire to make it unavoidable, since it was largely incomprehensible to them anyway. All my site-specific dances except Chryptych have been free and open to the public, because in the early '70s, the general public was largely unaware even of the existence of concert dance, let alone what it comprised. For most civilians in those days, social dancing, folk dance, and Broadway shows-West Side Story and the Rockettes-was all they knew of the art form.
Being one of the spawn of the experimental Judson Dance Theater-which in fact compromised its own iconoclasm by labeling itself "Theater"-I was all for deconstructing form and structure, to get at the quintessence of dancing; what could be eliminated from modern dance as we knew it and still be dance—stage, music, costumes, story, emotion. But I was unwilling to relinquish skilled technical movement in the process, as most of the Judsonites had by favoring pedestrian activity. I thought of site-specific and site-nonspecific dances as valuable adjuncts to the dances made for the stage; to me, they were all interesting to try.
Items in the Jerome Robbins Dance Division
Graham, Martha, no. 647, Library call number *MGZEA
Sankai Juku (Company), no. 3, Library call number *MGZEA
Streb, Elizabeth, no. 8, Library call number *MGZEA
Gus Solomons Papers and the Gus Solomons Company/Dance Records, Box 8, folder 6, Libarary call number *MGZMD 214
Gus Solomons Papers and the Gus Solomons Company/Dance Records, Box 13, folder 10, Libarary call number *MGZMD 214
Photographs by Lois Greenfield
Photographs by Lois Greenfield
Photographs by Lois Greenfield
Photographs by Lois Greenfield
Gus Solomons Papers and the Gus Solomons Company/Dance Records, Box 13, folder 10, Library call number *MGZMD 214
Solomons, Gus [clippings], Library call number *MGZR
Gus Solomons jr
Photograph by Jordan Matter
After getting a bachelor of Architecture at MIT, dancing with Martha Graham, Donald McKayle, Pearl Lang, and Merce Cunningham, and founding and directing two companies, Solomons Company/Dance (1969-94) and PARADIGM (1996-2011), Gus Solomons Jr. continues to perform as a guest dancer in various projects, including Black Mountain Songs at BAM Harvey and Isaac Mizrahi's Peter and the Wolf at Guggenheim Works & Process. He also reviews dance, mentors choreographers, and acts.
I was in The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Jerome Robbins Dance Division research room looking through a box of photographs when I found it, a postcard of my mother, Irina Baronova, and Paul Petroff in Aurora’s Wedding. I looked at the picture then turned the postcard over. My heart thumped: the postcard had been written and mailed in London in the summer of 1936. The handwriting was my stepfather, Gerry Sevastianov’s, and there was a line at the bottom in my mother’s distinctive hand signed Irina Sevastianova, the one and only time I ever saw her name signed like that. They were writing in French to a friend in New York and had only been married for five months (Gerry was my mother’s first and third husband with my father in the twenty years between). The postcard had been filed as a photograph so to see my mother’s writing on the back was unexpected and emotional. It wasn’t among my mother’s papers, which I had sent to the Dance Division the previous year. I was researching in other archives that day for a book I was writing about my mother, its title was Irina Baronova and the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo.
My mother was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1919. During the Russian Revolution her parents escaped into Romania, where she had her first ballet lessons, then took her to Paris to train with Olga Preobrajenska. Balanchine saw her in Preobrajenska’s studio in 1932 and invited her to join the newly formed Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo when she was twelve years old. At the age of thirteen she danced Swan Lake partnered by Anton Dolin. She danced with the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo from 1932-1941 and from 1941-1943 as one of two prima ballerinas with the new Ballet Theatre company, now American Ballet Theatre. My mother mostly worked with Balanchine, Massine, Nijinska, and Fokine. She retired from performing ballet in 1946. After she moved to England she became a vice president of the Royal Academy of Dance and sat on the Arts Council of Great Britain. She worked with the Festival Ballet, the Houston Ballet and the Australian Ballet, taught and lectured all over the world and was given numerous awards and an honorary doctorate.
My mother died in June 2008. She lived near my sister in Byron Bay, Australia, a beautiful but humid area where preserving anything on paper is a challenge. I talked it over with my sister and we decided that since I lived in Los Angeles, where the climate is dry, I would take on the job of sorting through the contents of our mother’s office. In September the boxes arrived, six huge moving boxes almost as tall as me. They stood in my hall just inside the front door, too heavy to move. I looked at them with mounting surprise. I had no idea Mum had so much stuff. I cut open the first box and pulled out plastic shopping bags and trash bags full of letters and photographs. After I had emptied the contents of all the boxes the hall was filled with photographs, letters, albums, scrapbooks, posters, newspaper clippings, videotapes, costume pieces, a pair of pale pink toeshoes, manuscripts and passports in manila envelopes, boxes, shopping bags, trash bags and bundles held together with elastic bands.
I carried it all upstairs to my small office where I had pinned a thin white tablecloth across the window to protect everything from the light. For the next five months I tried to identify everything and catalogue it. I worked my way through over two thousand photographs, most of them loose and undated; then I started on the letters. I kept going back to Staples to buy more and more white three-inch binders and more packets of clear sleeves to place the catalogued items in. I assembled seven binders with 1,800 photographs arranged chronologically in clear sleeves dating from 1915 through 2008, and three binders of letters from 1926 through 2008. The completed binders moved down onto my dining-room table, underneath which were my mother’s scrapbooks, albums, manuscripts, passports, videotapes, posters, newspaper clippings and the rest of it. My then eleven-year old daughter, a computer whiz who types really fast, spent hours sitting next to me typing up the Baronova Papers Catalogue, which I dictated to her page by page.
While I was arranging the photographs chronologically and identifying them, I sat on the floor with growing piles of photographs lined up on the carpet all around me. Gradually as I placed the photographs in sequence I realized that they told the story of a life in pictures-the unusually well chronicled life of a great artist. Since most of the images had never been seen before I thought that if I wrote just enough words to place them in context they could make a book. I called my sister and she agreed with me. This book would be something that our children and the rest of the family would enjoy, initially that was as far as the idea went.
By this time I had mentioned what I was doing to the acting director of the Getty Museum, David Bomford, and his assistant director, Thomas Kren, whom I met at a Getty event, and they put me in touch with a Getty board member who was also on the board of the New York Public Library. He then directed me to the curator of dance at the Jerome Robbins Dance Division, Jan Schmidt.
Jan and I discussed the possibility of my mother’s papers coming to the Dance Division, it seemed the most natural home for the archive and she was thrilled with the prospect. Knowing that I was going to make a book using many of the photographs I realized that I should make my scans before sending the photographs off to the Library.
The next step was to have the Baronova collection appraised. The Dance Division sent me a list of possible appraisers that had been used by other donors, without giving any endorsements. One of them was in Los Angeles. He looked at everything and made his report, which I sent off to Jan together with the catalog. Not long after I received back from Jan a list of the items in the catalog of interest to the Dance Division. The Dance Division doesn’t acquire textiles so those were not on their list: headdresses made out of silk and velvet, embroidered with flowers and pearls, and a Swan Lake tiara. I immediately got in touch with the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and, after a lengthy bureaucratic process, the headdresses went to join the other costumes my mother had already given the Victoria & Albert Museum. The pale pink toe shoes I gave to the Vaganova Academy Museum in St. Petersburg the following summer. In contrast to the lengthy process of donation to the Victoria & Albert, the NYPL Dance Division was extremely responsive, and the transaction was conducted in a timely fashion.
Which meant that I had a deadline, I had to select the photographs I wanted to scan before I shipped the Dance Division the items they wanted by the agreed date. In order to make a selection I had to consider how I was going to tell my mother’s story. I decided that I couldn’t write about things that didn’t have accompanying photographs and I couldn’t include a photograph that didn’t help tell the story. The text and the photographs would be intertwined. I conceived of her life as a journey, a figurative and a literal journey, decided to divide the book into geographical chapters starting in Russia where my mother was born; followed by Romania, where my grandparents and mother escaped to during the Russian Revolution; after which would follow their travels, first as refugees to Paris, then as members of the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo to Monte Carlo.
Next would come the company tours: America, Covent Garden, Australia, South America, and then the chapters on Ballet Theatre (now American Ballet Theatre) in Mexico and America. Last would be the chapter of life as a mother and vice-president of the Royal Academy of Dance in England. I decided to place the story in context by bookending it with a prologue and epilogue about my own journey through the memorabilia as I created the book. For the text I would alternate my voice as narrator and my mother’s voice, which I would take from her letters to me, the oral history transcript of the interview she did for the NYPL, and quotes from her autobiography when there was no other source. I also decided that I wanted to establish my mother’s repertoire and find a photograph of her in every ballet in her repertoire.
I made 350 hi-res scans of photographs that then went to the Dance Division and 50 more from photographs in my albums. I started working with a book designer and established a wonderfully in-tune back and forth with her. I would cut out copies of the photographs and paragraphs of my written text and tape them onto sheets of paper, arranging them in two page layouts. Chapter by chapter I drove them to Pasadena to hand them over and she would send me the pages she made of them in her design program via Dropbox; I would look at them on my computer, send her e mail notes of changes and tweaks and back would come the revised pages. She was inventive and had some good ideas. By trial and error we worked on the format to achieve my goals: to examine an artist’s life knowledgably, to speak to a reader who loved ballet as well as someone who didn’t know anything about it, to tell my mother’s story in a compelling way by placing the photographs correctly in the text and to show the full glory of hundreds of photographs in a fixed number of pages because I was on a budget.
I had completed the prologue and first four chapters when my phone rang. It was the executive editor in charge of Art, Architecture, Archaeology, and Classical Studies at the University of Chicago Press. She introduced herself and said “I hear you’re writing a book about your mother. Whom are you doing it for?” I told her, “My sister and myself.” “No,” she said, “I didn’t mean that, I mean which publisher are you writing the book for?” I told her, “I don’t have a publisher, and I’m not just writing it, I’m actually making the book, and I intend to finish it before showing it to a publisher.” There was a silence on the other end of the phone. “That’s very unusual” she said eventually. “Well,” I told her, “I’ve never done this before but I know how I want to do it, and I don’t want someone to tell me I can’t.” As we continued talking I learned that she had been a dancer herself and that her mother had auditioned for the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo in America and had been offered a place in the company but her father had said no. I felt I was talking to the right person, and I agreed to send her my first few chapters. The comments I got back were good: don’t be afraid to be scholarly, don’t be afraid to use your own voice. My husband had told me to utilize my own voice more, and so had a friend who had written an acclaimed family memoir but I really didn’t want to impose myself on my mother’s story–now, I finally recognized that the narrator had to have an identity too-and another great comment: don’t limit yourself to the photos you have, if you don’t have an image go out and find it, if you talk about Balanchine show a photo of Balanchine. I looked at the list I had made of ballet images I was still missing for my mother’s repertoire (Scuola Di Ballo, La Boutique Fantasque, Orphée et Eurydice, Symphonie Fantastique, Paganini, Scheherazade, Pas de Quatre, Helen of Troy) and added to it the images of people I had talked about in the first four chapters but didn’t have photographs of (Balanchine and Rene Blum). I reached for the phone.
“Jan? It’s Victoria Tennant.” I was back at the New York Public Library Dance Division. I told Jan that I had started my book, and now I needed to do research in the Dance Division archives. I had eight chapters ahead of me and a list of missing photographs.
Doing research in the NYPL Dance Division archives is exciting because you never know what you will discover. Some of the catalogue entries are broad so you have to put on white gloves and go through every box, folder, and scrapbook that has a connection to what you are researching. This takes time because you have to examine every piece of paper and you also have to be able to recognize what you are looking at, as some of the photographs are unidentified. There are treasures on the archive shelves waiting to be discovered and information waiting to be assembled and revealed. In a newly digitalized world there is something wonderful about having to show up and put on the gloves, to be an explorer and not merely a tourist with a guidebook already in hand.
Starting out online I did my best, given the immensity of the holdings. I went onto the NYPL website, I found the Dance Division, I looked up Irina Baronova, Ballets Russes, Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo, Ballet Theatre, and American Ballet Theatre. I was looking for my missing photographs. Here is one excerpt from a finding aid in one of the many archival collections I consulted:
(S)*MGZMD 267 David Lichine/Tatiana Riabouchinska Papers, Series I b.1 f.15 photographs 1933-1959
This folder contains twenty-six years of photographs. But, how many photographs? What are they of? Are there images for every year? No way to know. Due to copyright issues most of the photographs identified in the catalogue are not online; one has to guess at any image individually listed from its description.
On June 22, 2012, I sent an e-mail to NYPL Research Help:
I am writing a book about my mother, Irina Baronova, and her work with the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo and Ballet Theatre. I would like to include photographs of all the roles she danced. There are very few photographs that I am missing. Here are two photographs that I think I would like to include in my book, but I can’t tell from your website if they are already scanned and viewable.
A couple of days later, Jan Schmidt asked a Dance Division staff member, Alice Standin, to see if she could find any of the photographs I was looking for and let me know. I sent an e-mail to Alice: “Many thanks. I have tried to negotiate the NYPL website as thoroughly as I am able, but have come to this point. I am extremely grateful for your help.”
Alice responded: “It would have come to this point anyway. The only photos that are in the gallery are photos that people have already requested that were digitized or photos that were digitized for various NYPL or Dance Division projects–a small fraction of our photos. Some photos may have been digitized but do not appear in our gallery for copyright reasons. We must either have permission or own the rights. I’ll see what I can find.”
And so began a wonderful research period during which I made several trips from Los Angeles to New York, always requesting in advance what I wanted to look at, because some of the archives and materials are stored offsite and have to be brought over to the Dance Division research room. Trolleys of boxes and folders would be waiting for me when I arrived and from opening time to closing time I would sit with the white gloves on and work my way through the materials. I would advise a first time researcher to have a good meal before starting work, the six hours go past quickly and you don’t want to waste time leaving the room to eat. The most exciting discoveries for me were Serge Grigoriev's black exercise books (call number: (S) *MGZMB-Res. 78-4040) which included a complete day-by-day record of the work of the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo company. He wrote down the rehearsal lists and performance records, the tour itineraries and which ballets were performed and who danced in them; each year he ranked the male and female dancers. The six years of USA Tour Lists left me open-mouthed. I had heard about these tours where the company lived on a train for months at a time, but to see the list of cities written out was astonishing. I copied months worth of itineraries into my notebook-one is only allowed to bring a pencil, paper, and cellphone into the research room. Another good discovery contained in those tour lists was the date of my mother's elopement with Gerry Sevastianov in Kentucky, which explained their subsequent Russian Orthodox marriage in Australia. She was three weeks shy of her seventeenth birthday in Kentucky so that first wedding was actually illegal. No wonder Gerry insisted that they have a second wedding. I don’t think that my mother ever realized this.
There was another discovery, the photographs *MGZEA no.21, *MGZEB v.5 no.370 and *MGZEA no.184 are, I believe, the only known images of Lichine's ballet Nocturne. They are rehearsal images, but there are no other images that anyone knows of. I asked the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo dancer, Anna Volkhova, aged ninety-four, who had danced in Nocturne, if she could identify these three images and she confirmed that they are of Nocturne. She has since passed away. Alice and I found all but one of the photographs of my mother that I was searching for. In addition I discovered some other images in various archives that were perfect for my book; altogether there were 3thirty images I wanted to use. The next step was to get them scanned.
I think all the images are reproducible. As the images would be delivered in digital form you could get rid of the glue marks and other blemishes using a program like Photoshop. I will get back to you with photographer contacts if we have them; the photographer may charge a fee in addition to what the library must charge for making the scans. If there is a photographer credited and we do not have a contact for them or their estate, our Permissions Office requires that you make a good faith effort to locate a rights holder. This usually starts with an Internet search. If no rights holder can be found then you must send an account to the Permissions Office of your efforts and they will release the image.
The list of photographers’ contacts was very helpful. Some of the contacts were out of date, and as I worked my way down the list I let Alice know of any changes I found so that the Dance Division could update their contact information. Of the 335 photographs in my finished book I ended up getting 56 photographs from outside sources, 30 of those were from the archives of the NYPL Dance Division.
Once I had satisfied the NYPL Permissions Office that I had either contacted a rights holder and got written permission to use their image or had made a good faith effort to find a rights holder and had documented my search, the photographs were released and the scans made and sent to me.
When my book was finished it was printed out on double page sheets, which I sent to the editor at the University of Chicago Press to look at. After a peer review and the board review, she told me that they wanted to publish it. Over the next year I worked with a copy editor, an index was made, and a cover designed. In October 2014 when I held the real book in my hands for the first time I completely choked up. All I could think of was how thrilled my mother would have been if she could have seen it too.
Items in the Jerome Robbins Dance Division
Ballet Russe de Basil clippings, Box 1, 1933 II Article title: Arc de Ballet The Pursuit of Limberness at the Barre. Library call number: *MGZRC 58 (Ballet Russe de Basil)
New York (City). Museum of Modern Art. Photographs: Ballet, ca. 1900-1950. v. 37, no. 3158, Library call number *MGZEB
David Lichine and Tatiana Riabouchinska Papers, 1920-1981, Series III: Scrapbooks, 1927-1970 Box 10, f. 2, p. 57, Library call number (S) *MGZMD 267
David Lichine and Tatiana Riabouchinska Papers, Series III: Scrapbooks, 1927-1970, Box 13, f. 22, p. 44 , Library call number (S) *MGZMD 267
David Lichine and Tatiana Riabouchinska papers, Series III: Scrapbooks, 1927-1970, Box 22, p. 15, Library call number (S) *MGZMD 267
Blum, René, Library call number *MGZE, no. 1
David Lichine and Tatiana Riabouchinska papers, Series III: Scrapbooks, 1927-1970, Box 22, p. 16, Library call number (S) *MGZMD 267
New York (City). Museum of Modern Art. Photographs: Ballet, ca 1900-1950 v. 29 no.1880, Library call number *MGZEB
Ballet Russe (de Basil), Library call number: *MGZEA, no. 21
New York (City). Museum of Modern Art. Photographs: Ballet, v.5 no. 370, Library call number *MGZEB
Dolin, Anton, #184, Library call number *MGZEA
Black exercise books, Library call number: (S) *MGZMB-Res. 78-4040
Ballet Russe de Basil clippings, Library call number *MGZRC 58
Baronova, Irina, Library call number *MGZEA, no. 63
David Lichine and Tatiana Riabouchinska papers, Library call number (S) *MGZMD 267 Series III: Scrapbooks 1927-1970, Box 18, p. 14, no. 4
David Lichine and Tatiana Riabouchinska papers, Library call number (S) *MGZMD 267 Series III: Scrapbooks 1927-1970, Box 18, p. 14, no. 7
David Lichine and Tatiana Riabouchinska papers, Library call number (S) *MGZMD 267 Series III: Scrapbooks 1927-1970, Box 18, p. 16, no. 9
Ballet Russe (de Basil) 8, Library call number, *MGZE
David Lichine and Tatiana Riabouchinska Papers, Series III: Scrapbooks, Box 22, p.14, Library call number (S) *MGZMD 267
Victoria Tennant
Victoria Tennant, photograph 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 the age of twenty-one. She has since acted extensively in film, television and theatre, receiving Golden Globe and Emmy nominations. Her book Irina Baronova and the Ballets Russes is a memoir of her mother with over 300 vintage photographs that chronicle her life and the birth of ballet in America, set against the backdrop of the Russian Revolution and World War II.
Increasingly on planes when I'm free from the terminal distraction of the internet. Other than at, at home with my feet up - the feet must be up and I must have a pencil to hand.
Do you have any strange writing habits (like standing on your head or writing in the shower)?
No, just a desk and chair.
What are five words that describe your writing process?
Intermittent, occasional, infrequent, often abandoned.
How have libraries impacted your life?
The first books I read as a boy were in the local library in Cheltenham where I grew up. And at school from the age of 12 we had a record library with all the latest and best prog rock albums.
In this series, we focus on research projects undertaken using NYPL research collections. By showing off some of the research Made at NYPL, we hope that other researchers will build on these projects in new ways.
Dawn Coleman, Associate Professor of English at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, specializes in the work of Herman Melville, and in particular books Melville annotated. A significant number of these are housed in the New York Public Library's Gansevoort-Lansing collection. We are particularly pleased that researchers are now using Melville’s books in their research, since Melville himself was a library user who had consulted books in one of NYPL’s founding collections, the Astor Library.
Who are you and what do you do?
I’m an Associate Professor of English at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, specializing in nineteenth-century U.S. literature and culture. Recently I’ve focused on Herman Melville.
You visited NYPL to look at some of the Melville family’s books, where you found a long-erased note written by Herman Melville that nobody else had ever uncovered. First of all, which book was it?
I was interested in a set of volumes, The Works of William E. Channing (1848), which was recently digitized by NYPL and is published by Melville’s Marginalia Online. Since I couldn’t visit NYPL immediately, my first step was to examine a digital image of the page provided by the library. Without manipulation, that image reveals little, but by using various filters and adjustments in Photoshop, you can generate edited images that faintly show four lines of Melville’s scratchy handwriting in the bottom margin. For that, I depended on the Photoshop expertise of Steven Olsen-Smith, general editor of Melville’s Marginalia Online, and Ashley Maynor, the UT Digital Humanities librarian. Working with the enhanced images, I arrived at a provisional reading of the note, with just a few vexing gaps.
The works of William E. Channing, volume 3. Image ID: 5108813
When the digital images didn’t lead to the answer, what next?
The next step was to pack my bags for New York so that I could examine the page in person. I was nervous. What if the actual, un-enhanced erasure looked like little more than a blank margin? What if the trip ended up being a waste of time and money? But soon after settling in at the library, I was delighted to find that the actual book revealed more than the digital image. Not that the recovery process was easy. I used an LED task light, a magnifying glass, and the technique known as “raking,” which involves moving your hand slowly between the light source and the page. The shifting light and shadow reveal residual indentations in the paper: just enough so that, with a good deal of patience, you can discern the erased writing. It helped that back in Tennessee, I had created an analytic chart of Melville’s idiographs, or distinctive letter formations. Reading erased marginalia is a slow, letter-by-letter process, in which you have to shuttle back and forth mentally between possible letter formations and possible readings of the passage as a whole, while considering the content of the commented-upon essay, the knowledge Melville may have brought to his reading, and his annotative style.
In the first half-day at the library, I completed most of the transcription, but I still devoted nearly two full days at the NYPL trying to recover this four-line note. Most of that time was spent squinting at the most elusive words. It felt surreal to sit in the heart of New York City and to stare at one page in one book for so long. But it was also a thrill to decipher writing by Melville that virtually no one else had ever seen.
So what does Melville’s erased note say? What was he responding to in Channing, and what does that reveal to us about Melville?
Melville’s note appears in the middle of the essay “The Evidences of Revealed Religion.” On the page Melville annotates, Channing presents the argument that the unlikelihood of someone with Jesus’s humble background aspiring to found a world religion suggests a supernatural source.
Melville put a check in the margin next to this idea and responded:
"Could not this [point] with still m[ore]
force be applied to Mahomet?‒who after
age forty [&] less probably [mad], first delivered
his Gospel?"
Right after that, he responded to Channing’s point that Jesus came from “an oppressed nation” by writing “[E]ssentially true as to Mahs tribe.”
Here is Melville, the student of world religions, challenging claims for the divine uniqueness of Jesus by pointing to the seemingly parallel circumstances of the founder of Islam. And he calls Muhammad’s teachings a gospel! Since I hadn’t been able to see that word on the digital image, its appearance at the library was electrifying. Melville may have meant to imply a moral equivalence between Christian and Islamic teachings, a sense that they functioned as “good news” to their respective communities. Very few people in mid-nineteenth-century America were thinking about religion in such a thoroughly comparatist way. As often happens, Melville looks strikingly modern.
Enhanced marginalia
If you’d like to learn more about the variety of NYPL’s Melville-related collections, watch this brief video narrated by Jessica Pigza, Assistant Curator of Rare Books. Read on to learn more about Melville and Channing’s thought.
Who was William Ellery Channing?
All but forgotten today, Channing was one of the most important intellectual and spiritual leaders in the Northeastern U.S. from about 1815 until his death in 1842. He led the Federal Street Church in Boston and became the country’s leading champion of Unitarianism, a movement among the Congregationalist churches that sought to liberalize Christianity by maintaining the essential goodness of human nature and the benevolence of God. He was also what we would call today a public intellectual, writing on cultural and political subjects that fell outside the typical minister’s scope, such as literature, war, education, and slavery. His adamant opposition to slavery ended up alienating many of his parishioners.
Why do you think Channing’s writing and ideas would have interested the author of Moby-Dick?
Channing, like Melville, was a thoughtful, open-minded writer with a deep interest in ethical, religious, literary and social questions and a disinclination to toe anyone’s party line. Melville probably also found Channing’s liberal theology a refreshing antidote to the Calvinist teachings he grew up with, when his family attended a Dutch Reformed church in Manhattan. Reading Channing complemented his Unitarian churchgoing as an adult; he seems to have read Channing (for the first time, at least) in the late 1840s, when he and Elizabeth Shaw were newly married and attending All Souls Unitarian church on Broadway. Also, Melville’s father, who died when Melville was only twelve years old, identified as a Unitarian; in reading and considering Channing, Melville may have felt that he was connecting in a way with his lost father. Finally, Channing was a huge influence on Ralph Waldo Emerson, whom Melville read and responded to with strong mixed feelings. It makes sense that Melville, who critiqued the radical optimism of Transcendentalism, would have been curious about Emerson’s more pragmatic mentor.
This evidence has been overlooked by scholars on account of its erased state. Is this common in the study of Melville’s marginalia? Who would have erased Melville’s annotations in the set of Channing’s Works, and for what reason?
In the twentieth century, scholars paid relatively little attention to Melville’s erasures, but in recent years, and especially with the guidance and resources of Melville’s Marginalia Online, that’s changed a good deal. For instance, my essay on Channing’s Works in Leviathan appears alongside essays on Melville’s erased annotations in two other titles published at MMO, his copies of Dante’s Commedia and Milton’s Poetical Works. As for who erased these lines in Channing, the conventional wisdom would be either Melville’s wife or one of his daughters. However, the fact that the annotation reflects inaccurate information about Muhammad’s life raises the possibility that Melville himself erased these lines. He might have done so after he read Thomas Carlyle’s essay on Muhammad in the summer of 1850. Carlyle discusses Muhammad’s illustrious family, and after at some point reading that essay, Melville may have tried to remove the evidence of his misconception.
In your critical introduction to the digitized set at Melville’s Marginalia Online, you say that Melville’s reading of Channing may have had far-reaching influences on his thought and craft. In what ways might Channing’s views of religion and culture have helped to shape Melville’s ideas?
I think one of the most important things Melville learned from Channing was a style of liberal, dialectical, socially conscious thought that kept its distance from party politics yet opposed slavery unreservedly. We tend to think of that approach to the world as distinctively Melvillean, yet Channing was a powerful antecedent. As for religion, Melville seems to have found in Channing’s writings a palatable, if imperfect, defense of liberal Christianity, one that shaped his sense of which aspects of the Christian tradition were worth saving in a modern, pluralist age. Although Melville seems to have differed from Channing in his metaphysics (the minister, not surprisingly, comes across as more theistic), he found in him strong support, possibly even a source, for the idea that among Christianity’s most important contributions to the world were its calls to forgiveness and charity.
As a literary influence, Channing’s “Remarks on National Literature” may have inspired Melville’s authorial ambitions. This essay, which eloquently outlines the ideal qualities of a national literature, may have lit a fire under Melville in the late 1840s, when he began to try to write for the ages. Melville would have found further inspiration to literary greatness in Channing’s essay on Milton, which also expresses a reluctant yet fascinated appreciation of Satan—passages that may have planted or watered a seed that grew into the magnificent defiance of Ahab in Moby-Dick.
As you point out in your introduction, the set also contains markings and notes in the hand of Elizabeth Shaw Melville. What has your study of the set revealed about Melville’s wife and her views?
Elizabeth Shaw Melville is an elusive figure in Melville studies, and one of the pleasures of working on this set was reflecting on her annotations. Although she’s often assumed to be conventionally pious, several of her notes take issue with Channing. For instance, when Channing speculates that the deceased can watch us from heaven, she writes, in neat script along the length of a left margin, “Vain vain speculations!” Or when Channing maintains that memories of this life must persist in the next, she writes “? A question not so readily settled.” She may have agreed with most of what Channing wrote, but she didn’t give him a free pass. I got the sense of a strong woman unafraid to disagree, at least in privacy and on paper, with a leading male intellectual of her day.
As Melville’s Marginalia Online continues to edit and publish digital copies of Melville Family volumes housed at NYPL and other institutions, how do you expect Melville scholarship to develop, and do you anticipate additional discoveries like the one you’ve written about?
MMO has been and will continue to be—with an ever-growing collection, I hope—an essential resource for scholars of American literature. Digitizing and publishing Melville’s library, with all of its fascinating marginalia, is a tremendous gift to scholars around the world who would never be able to investigate these volumes in person at the NYPL. I expect that as we learn more and more about Melville’s extensive reading—how he read, as well as what he read—we will better understand how his creative genius arose from his ability to synthesize and probe the diverse ideas he found in print. And yes, I absolutely expect that collections of Melville books preserved in archives like the NYPL hold secrets that await unveiling. Every plunge into archived materials is a leap of faith, yet every such leap I’ve taken has been rewarded with eye-opening, perspective-transforming fragments of history. I have no doubt that other scholars and librarians willing to summon “time, strength, cash, and patience” to recover Melville’s marginalia will have similar experiences of discovery.
If you enjoyed President Obama’s performance at the White House Correspondents Dinner this week, you may also enjoy these books by some smart and funny American political humorists. Check the following subject headings for humor across the political spectrum:
Biographical sketches of historical figures Offerman admires for their gumption: a blend of hard work, courage, and a willingness to follow one’s own path.
Staff picks are chosen by NYPL staff members and are not intended to be comprehensive lists. We'd love to hear your ideas too, so leave a comment and tell us what you’d recommend. And check out our Staff Picks browse tool for more recommendations!
If you enjoyed President Obama’s performance at the White House Correspondents Dinner this week, you may also enjoy these books by some smart and funny American political humorists.
The top five is full of romance again this week. For readers who are feeling a bit edgier, there is a new David Baldacci adreneline ride in the mix as well.
Lynn just finished and LOVED Before the Fall by Noah Rawley. (Writer of the amazing Fargo TV series)
Staff picks are chosen by NYPL staff members and are not intended to be comprehensive lists. We'd love to hear your ideas too, so leave a comment and tell us what you’d recommend. And check out our Staff Picks browse tool for more recommendations!
Semco is a Brazilian company that breaks all of the rules. Do not expect any egos or authoritarian ways here. Employees' interests and skills are nurtured for the mutual benefit of the staff, company and customers. You might think that a company such as this would not be successful, but you would be mistaken. The proof is in the pudding: Semco has an extremely low turnover rate, and the company's staff and revenue has grown over the years.
Consider these scenarios:
no mandatory meetings, but staff can attend any meeting that they wish
employees have a say in setting their salaries
people are free to work in any department without being accused of trespassing
consensus is necessary in order for change to be enacted
group interviews of job candidates by dozens of employees so they get a feel for company culture
working from home or satellite offices any day of the week, any hour of the day
#4 Recommendations for readers who enjoyed Bounty by Kristen Ashley, more second chance romance:
![Claire Holt Collection of Indonesian art [graphic], 1952-1966, Library call number *MGZDG Ind 1-41) No 2](http://cdn-prod.www.aws.nypl.org/sites/default/files/2%20Legong%201955%20Bali.jpg "Claire Holt Collection of Indonesian art [graphic], 1952-1966, Library call number *MGZDG Ind 1-41) No 2")
![Claire Holt Collection of Indonesian art [graphic], 1952-1966, Library call number *MGZDG Ind 1-41) No 1](http://cdn-prod.www.aws.nypl.org/sites/default/files/1%20crossed%20swords%20USE.jpg "Claire Holt Collection of Indonesian art [graphic], 1952-1966, Library call number *MGZDG Ind 1-41) No 1")
![Claire Holt Collection of Indonesian art [graphic], 1952-1966, Library call number *MGZDG Ind 1-41) No. 5](http://cdn-prod.www.aws.nypl.org/sites/default/files/5%20Bathing%20USE.jpg "Claire Holt Collection of Indonesian art [graphic], 1952-1966, Library call number *MGZDG Ind 1-41) No. 5")
![Claire Holt Collection of Indonesian art [graphic], 1952-1966, Library call number *MGZDG Ind 1-41) No. 8](http://cdn-prod.www.aws.nypl.org/sites/default/files/8%20Bali%20outside%20USE.jpg "Claire Holt Collection of Indonesian art [graphic], 1952-1966, Library call number *MGZDG Ind 1-41) No. 8")
![Sankai Juku, no. 3 (No credit)]](http://cdn-prod.www.aws.nypl.org/sites/default/files/Sankai%20Juku%203%20sm.jpg "Sankai Juku in performance.")
