International Association of Libraries and Museums of the Performing Arts

Société Internationale des Bibliothèques et des Musées des Arts du Spectacle

Theatre Collections and their Practical Contribution to Stage Production

The Example of Two Dance Company Archives

Jane Pritchard (London)

17. Internationaler SIBMAS-Kongreß / 17ème Congrès International de la SIBMAS / 17th International SIBMAS Congress, 1.-9. September 1988, Mannheim

Bericht / Actes / Documentation. Red.: Liselotte Homering. Mannheim : Städtisches Reiß-Museum, 1990. pp. 127-131

Certainly in Britain in recent years dance companies have taken a responsible attitude to the development of their own record-keeping, and the leading companies have established their own archives. As Archivist for Rambert Dance Company (established 1926) and London Festival Ballet (established 1950) I am very well aware of the contribution archives can make to productions on stage and in particular their role in the revival of ballets.

Indeed one of the reasons that dance companies have been ahead of other branches of the performing arts in developing their archives is that they frequently revive a complete production of a ballet as it was originally staged. Whereas the norm for drama companies is to put on new productions - we expect a director and his or her actors to reinterpret and shed new light on the text of a play - this is not the case with dance companies. They frequently revive earlier productions and restore them to their repertory - and accordingly need to refer to choreography and music, sets and costumes. The keeping of detailed artistic records, as well as business records, is of clear value in a very practical sense. One might add that as far as companies are concerned the value of their archives to outside scholars is of secondary importance.

It is of course one thing to note that dance companies favour precise revivals, but it is altogether another to determine exactly what constitutes a precise revival. Where a ballet has been performed for some time the ideas of the choreographer and designer change and evolve so that parts of the dances are rechoreographed to suit different performers, companies or stages. Designers amend, or on occasion radically alter costumes during a ballet's run. Such factors as these make the task of reconstructing a work more difficult. Where ballets are notated it is rare for all variants to be recorded and similarly with design it is only if a reviewer of the ballet notes that changes have been made, or if this is recorded by the archivist in the company's records or in the Stage Management Report for the show, that these are documented. Reconstructing a ballet can be a very tricky business.

When revivals of works are proposed I am asked for a range of information from the archives. This may include:

1. Details of and numbers of dancers in the cast.
2. Details of the music. This may be to clear copyright, to discover how many musicians will be involved, to discover if scores will have to be hired. If taped music is involved, will the Musicians' Union agree to it on this occasion?
3. Details of the designs. Do we have the original designs and plans, or any form of copies of those designs and plans? Will the designer have to be re-employed at greater cost to the company than if the material were to hand? What do we have of the costumes and actual sets from earlier productions? If we do not have sets and costumes or designs, what photographic material do we have of the first performances and of earlier revivals?
4. What photographs and reviews do we have that can be copied and used for sponsorship packs to raise funds for the revival or to publicise it?
5. Has the ballet been notated, or recorded on film or video? Is there any other material (notes, written descriptions) that might help in restaging the work?

When new works are being created the archives maybe referred to for background information on choreographers, designers or composers or for details of earlier productions of ballets on the same theme or with the same scenario or using a specific score. This information is most frequently wanted for sponsorship or publicity purposes but occasionally choreographers will also ask for information on earlier uses of synopses or scores as part of the preparation for their own versions of a ballet.

For productions where the company archive does not hold much information I may be asked to refer to other sources and collections, undertaking research on behalf of the technical, fundraising or publicity departments. The resources of the archive may also be used for compiling programme notes and packs produced on certain works by the company's education department.

To turn to practical examples. During the period I have been the Archivist for the Rambert Dance Company, revivals I have been asked for material on include Capriol Suite (choreographed by Frederick Ashton in 1930, revived in 1983 after a gap ofthirty-fouryears without performances); L'Aprés-midi d'un Faune (choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky for the Ballets Russes de Serge Diaghilev in 1912, mounted on Marie Rambert's Ballet Club in 1931, frequently revived by the Company and most recently re-staged in 1983); Dark Elegies and Judgment of Paris (choreographed by Antony Tudor in 1937 and 1938 respectively, frequently revived by the Company since) and several works by Glen Tetley either mounted on, or created for, Ballet Rambert in the 1960s.

Revivals are only a small part of Rambert's programme; its main focus now, as always, has been on the creation of new ballets. Its choreographers do however use scores previously used for other works. In terms of revivals London Festival Ballet is far more ecclectic and its repertoire is drawn from a general pool of internationally recognized ballets rather than from works created for it. It therefore makes greater use of other collections, museums and archives for revivals.

For the Rambert revival of Capriol Suite little beyond the musical score, a few photographs and reviews survived in the Rambert Archive. This work was reconstructed from dancers' recollections of the ballet and had its final rehearsals supervised by its creator, Frederick Ashton. The photographs provided clues for the original designer of the ballet, William Chappell, to reconstruct the costumes, although he chose to follow a version later than 1930. Chappell gave his new designs for the revival to the Rambert Archive. This Rambert revival led to the ballet also being re-mounted for the Royal Ballet School and Sadler's Wells Royal Ballet.

A similar reconstruction process was used a year ago to revive Ashton's 1936 ballet, Apparitions for London Festival Ballet. Apparitions had been created for the Vic-Wells Ballet with designs by Cecil Beaton. It had however been extensively revised several times, most notably when the Company moved after the Second World War to the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, the sets and costumes became more lavish. The choreography was again reconstructed from dancers' memories; the Wardrobe Department studied costumes and designs at the Royal Opera House Archive and London's new Theatre Museum; the Technical Department reconstructed sets and properties under the supervision of William Chappell, having asked me to supply them with visual references. Using primary and secondary sources we traced designs showing all the scenes as well as numerous posed and production photographs. In addition there were written descriptions of the lighting effects. On this occasion the production was not successful, partly because of miscasting, partly because the producers muddled details from different periods of productions, and partly because the company failed to reproduce the imaginative lighting effects of the original production.

On other occasions London Festival Ballet has triumphed because they have successfully reproduced original sets and costumes. A particularly notable example of this came in 1969 when Geoffrey Guy undertook research into the sets and costumes for Michel Fokine's 1910 ballet Schéhérazade. At this time interest in the original designs had been revived by the sales of sets, costumes and designs from Diaghilev's Ballets Russes which provided source material for many of the subsequent Ballets Russes revivals. Schéhérazade had been revived periodically by London Festival Ballet since 1952 but it took serious research into its vitally important Leon Bakst designs to make it live again. Works from the Ballets Russes repertoire have been very important for London Festival Ballet which has concentrated on reviving works from that Company's first decade by Michel Fokine and Leonide Massine. In 1974, for example, they mounted Massine's Parade - but on that occasion benefited from the reconstruction work originally undertaken for the Joffrey Ballet's revival rather than researching into the production themselves.

London Festival Ballet has a long tradition of reviving works from the Ballets Russes repertoire but it has little sense in its revivals of its own Company tradition. For example London Festival Ballet was the first British ballet company to stage Michel Fokine's Petrouchka. Its first performances and many others between 1950 and 1983 were supervised by Nicholas Beriozoff who had learnt Petrouchka from Fokine when he was a member of René Blum's Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo in the 1930s. At other times revivals were supervised by former Diaghilev Company members - Serge Grigoriev and Lubov Tchernicheva in 1955 and Leon Woizikovsky in 1958. London Festival Ballet now has a Danish Artistic Director, Peter Schaufuss, and for many revivals he has turned to his Danish colleagues. For the current revival of Petrouchka the staging is by Niels Bjrn Larsen who is reproducing the Danish version staged by Michel Fokine for the Royal Danish Ballet in 1925. It therefore provides just as authentic a precedent as Fokine's 1936 version for Blum's Ballet Russe but is different in many details~

Whilst London Festival Ballet has little sense of tradition in its own productions this is highly regarded at Rambert Dance Company where company tradition is central to a number of revivals. L'Après-midi d'un Faune and Dark Elegies which have both been performed by the Company on many occasions are examples of this. Marie Rambert, a colleague of Nijinsky's in the Ballets Russes invited Leon Woizikovsky (who had inherited the role of the Faun in the Ballets Russes) and Lydia Sokolova (who had learnt the role of one of the chorus of six nymphs from Nijinsky himself) to mount L'Aprés-midi d'un Faune on her Ballet Club. The tiny stage prevented more than the rock being used as scenery and in any case later performances by Diaghilev's Company had been performed without Leon Bakst's backcloth. The costumes for the Ballet Club followed Bakst's originals in a simplified form. As the work was revived over the decades the roles were passed from one dancer to another within the Company and the rock and costumes remade as necessary. In the 1960s the dresses suffered from being made up in synthetic fabrics. For the 1983 revival the Company felt that audiences' expectations were such that the work should be given a more complete setting and the costumes more accurately realized from the 1912 photographs and illustrations of the ballet. It was appreciated that the proportions of Bakst's original setting would not adapt to the smaller stages Rambert performs on, so a completely new set was created. The costumes were newly-made but faithful reconstructions of those used in 1912 - except for one. For reasons that are obscure the Chief Nymph in the Rambert production has worn a short gold tunic under the veils she sheds as opposed to the sheer, knee-length garment in silver-grey of the original. In fact the same tunic at Rambert was passed from Nymph to Nymph from the 1930s through to the 1970s. It had been backed to support the fragile fabric and sprayed with paint to keep it a bright gold. It has be come much shorter and much thicker in texture as well as being a different colour from the 1912 original. However in keeping with Company practice a new short gold tunic was made for the disrobed Nymph to wear. The 1983 production was revived partly from rough notation made at the previous staging and partly in accordance with earlier Rambert dancers' memories of their roles. No outside material was used for the revival of the choreography. This 1983 revival has been superbly documented with notes on the Benesh Movement Notation score as to where the current revival deviates from other Company documentation, such as Antony Tudor's annotations of a piano score when the Company was first learning the ballet or the film made in 1931.

For Dark Elegies the Company has also ignored material on other productions staged subsequently for other companies. Here the work was actually commissioned from the choreographer by Marie Rambert and it has passed down through generations of dancers. Various attempts have been made to record details of the ballet. In 1938 the dancers recorded their roles with lists of steps and diagrams. In 1966 the production was filmed - both as it was then being performed and with changes in accordance with Sally Gilmour's recollections of earlier performances. Later in 1966 the work was revised according to early Company dancers' memories and in 1980 re-staged by dancers Sally Gilmour and John Chesworth. That revival was recorded in Benesh Movement Notation which has been the basis of subsequent performances by the Company. This year when the set was being hung it was compared with photographs of the production in 1937. Clearly it has been re-painted in a more expressionistic manner than when it was created, and research is currently being undertaken to return it to its original form as designed by Nadia Benois.

As is clear from these examples, dancers' memories have provided a key to the choreography for many revivals; and museums, libraries and archives have provided materials for the reconstruction of designs and occasionally musical scores. The use of Benesh Movement Notation by British companies from the mid 1960s has made them less dependent on individuals and, for example the works by Glen Tetley that have been revived for Rambert in the 1980s, have been made possible using notation and video recordings. The sets have been reconstructed from plans, designs and photographs, and the costumes from earlier examples in the Archive but, on occasion, using different fabrics to give a similar effect on stage but greater comfort to the dancers.

Where notation does not exist choreographers may re-work productions as happened with the recent revival for London Festival Ballet of Cruel Garden, a spectacular work on the life and times of the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca, created by Lindsay Kemp and Christopher Bruce for Ballet Rambert in 1977. Only parts of the work existed on video, but with LFB's very different and larger group of dancers it is likely that the choreography would have changed anyway. Where archival records were useful was the access given to the set model in the Rambert Dance Company Archive of Ralph Koltai's blood-stained bullring from which the new set was reconstructed.

Examples I have given in this paper are limited to two companies' reconstructions of ballets. In June 1988 I presented a survey of the holdings of those two companies' archives to the conference at Essen Beyond Performance: Dance Scholarship Today as part of their discussion of resources available to dance researchers. I was afraid that within such a wide framework of collections and resources the contribution of two relatively small company archives would not seem important. By the end of that conference I was convinced that company collections were particularly important as they are so frequently referred to in preparation for productions on stage. It was also gratifying at that conference that the two works focused on in the practical reconstruction session - Vaslav Nijinsky's ballets L'Apr´es midi d'un Faune by Ann Hutchinson Guest and Claudia Jeschke (using primarily Nijinsky's notation in the British Library) and his Sacre du Printemps, reconstructed for the Joffrey Ballet last year by Millicent Hodson and Kenneth Archer, were major projects that had both involved some reference to material in the Rambert Dance Company Archive.

In comparison with collections in theatre museums or libraries, dance company archives are small-scale, but their strength is their specific and local nature, and, when relevant to staging productions or other related research, they are likely to be very valuable sources of information. Their importance should not be underestimated, and performing companies should be encouraged to keep as detailed records of their work as possible.

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