Jerome Robbins Nypl for the Performing Arts Create Na Account

How Both Martha Graham and Trisha Brown's Archives Landed at the Jerome Robbins Dance Division

The world'southward largest dance archive just keeps growing. Over the summer, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts' Jerome Robbins Dance Division began welcoming two new collections to its illustrious archive. The legacies of Martha Graham and Trisha Chocolate-brown will be safely housed at NYPL's Lincoln Center campus, featuring rarely seen treasure troves of papers, photographs and moving images.

The Martha Graham Dance Company Collection

Martha Graham, Erick Hawkins, Merce Cunningham and May O'Donnell in Appalachian Spring

Cris Alexander, Courtesy Jerome Robbins Trip the light fantastic toe Division

NYPL'south conquering of the Martha Graham archives was announced last May, on the 126th anniversary of the historic choreographer'south birth. The Martha Graham Dance Company has been involved with the NYPL since the launch of its video documentation program in the 1960s, and the visitor'due south leadership spent nearly 15 years working on a plan to ensure the longevity of its drove. "Martha was a New Yorker for 70 years," says creative director Janet Eilber. The Trip the light fantastic Division "is so attainable and curating things and then creatively that people will be able to access the materials in all unlike ways."

The drove features over 400 audio and moving-epitome items, covering Graham'south childhood, performance career, choreographic oeuvre and company. Highlights include tintype family photographs, Isamu Noguchi'due south set up drawings for Seraphic Dialogue and forgotten correspondence between Graham and composer William Schuman, regarding his Night Journeying score and the ballet'south grapheme descriptions.

The Dance Division'southward holdings already included materials from Isadora Duncan, Loïe Fuller, Charles Weidman, Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn. "Graham was the final missing piece in building out our archive of the legacy of early on American modern trip the light fantastic toe," says Linda Murray, curator of the Jerome Robbins Trip the light fantastic Segmentation. Though public programming is delayed due to COVID-xix, the collection is in the procedure of being catalogued. The library hopes the papers will exist fully available to researchers by jump 2022.

The Trisha Brown Athenaeum

Brown's Foray Forêt

Elian Bachini, Courtesy Jerome Robbins Dance Sectionalization

Though postmodern matriarch Trisha Brown passed away in 2017, her company had been working since 2015 to find a abode for her archive. "While Trisha was interested in what could be gleaned from the study of her past, she was equally concerned with how her archives could be activated to create something new," says Trisha Brown Dance Company executive managing director Barbara Dufty. Brownish's archive volition join the collections of Judson Dance Theater peers similar Deborah Hay and David Gordon, helping to mankind out researchers' understanding of New York City'southward downtown dance scene.

Brown's collection includes correspondence, musical scores, dance notation, photographs and more, but its centerpiece is the Building Tapes. Starting in 1990, Brown filmed the entirety of each of her rehearsals, a practice uncommon at the time. She and her choreographic banana, Carolyn Lucas, now the company's associate artistic manager, would then write down everything that had happened. This footage, spanning from 1994 to 2011, and its respective notebooks offering rich textile for dancemakers and scholars alike. "Information technology's going to illuminate her body of piece of work in ways nosotros tin can't imagine," says Murray.

A bottom-known highlight of the archive is a long-forgotten video of Brown, dressed in a tutu, making her manner beyond a tightrope. "The mean solar day I saw it I was admittedly overjoyed," says Murray. "And that's what I love about archives."

Plus: The Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company Archive Goes Online

Acquired in the summer of 2019, The Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Visitor Annal is another of the Dance Segmentation'southward newer collections, and the papers are now available for remote admission upon request. "I feel similar Bill has always been an artist of our time," says Murray. "And then much of his torso of work is about trauma, and race is besides central to what Bill makes. I'm very glad the papers are available, even while our reading room is closed."

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Source: https://www.dancemagazine.com/martha-graham-trisha-brown-nypl/