International Association of Libraries and Museums of the Performing Arts

Société Internationale des Bibliothèques et des Musées des Arts du Spectacle

Some problems with videos in dance archives

Jane Pritchard (Archivist, Rambert Dance Company and English National Ballet, UK)

Documentation des Arts du Spectacle dans une Société en Mutation / Documentation of Performing Arts in a Changing Society

Société Internationale des Bibliothèques et des Musées des Arts du Spectacle /
International Association of Libraries and Museums of the Performing Arts
19ème Congrès International / 19th International Congress
Lisbon 7-11 September 1992. Lisboa : 1994, pp. 46-48

Only ten years ago the range or materials researchers asked to study in company archives was enormously varied. Today two thirds of even serious research enquiries begin with a request - I am tempted to say demand - to watch video recordings. Similarly the standard but awesome letter that used to begin "Tell me all you know" about a given production, now reads "Send me a video of that specific work".

This creates a number of problems for us as archivists. First there is the practical one of space: in my own case at neither archive I work for are there specific viewing facilities for researchers. Then there is the legal one; unions agree to most of our recording for internal use only and therefore they cannot be made available outside the company. And of course we do not lend or distribute any videos except those made for commercial or educational purposes.
Nevertheless where it is permissible for material to be seen I do not believe that anyone who genuinely needs to see a recording has been prevented from doing so, although this generally has to take place before the company's working day begins or better during their vacation.

I will say from the outset that at neither company are there plans to make videos more accessible than they are at present. Without substantial funding for space, equipment and the copying of additional tapes specifically for researchers' viewing (unless they are supervised, researchers treat tapes very roughly) it is simply not feasible. We are therefore very interested in co-operation with organisations who can provide such facilities. The announcement that the Theatre Museum in London is establishing a National Video Archive of Stage Performance is a very exciting development; but already at the Rambert Dance Company we have developed an on-going relationship with the British National Film Archive. Through the British Film Institute (of which the Archive is a part) some Rambert material may already be viewed; and it seems very likely that through them more of our material will become available in due course. The National Film Archive already holds the masters (they have superb film-storage facilities funde
d by the Getty Foundation) and in most instances viewing-copies of all our pre-1970 film recordings. Their own dance holdings have been considerably improved in the last couple of years, thanks to a significant initiative by the Society for Dance Research.
The Society is raising funds to enable the National Film Archive to copy and, for the first time, make available for viewing the whole of BBC Television's dance holdings from 1937-1990. This includes a fair amount of Rambert material which compliments the company's own collection. Also this year the National Film Archive has been helping us to rescue our 1970s videos which have suffered from serious oxidization. All that can be rescued has been by transferring the originals from reel-to-reel half-inch tape to one-inch tape masters for the National Film Archive and onto domestic-style VHS cassettes for our own use. The copying has been carried out by the Polytechnic of Brighton's Audio Visual Department, one of the few places in Britain still able to transfer from the old format onto current stock.

Briefly let me indicate the range of Rambert's film and video holdings. Film material has now been copied onto videotape for easy viewing. First there are films from the 1930s made generally at the Ballet Club (then the company's home-base), either at rehearsals or special run-throughs of the ballets. These silent recordings were made by two amateur film-makers and ballet-fans, Walter and Pearl Duff, who I believe recorded the dancers for fun (dancers moving in a confined space made a good subject for home movies) rather than with an eye on posterity. All the same they left us an incredibly valuable record of the choreography, the dancers and how the works looked in their original theatre-setting. Some of the later films by other filmmakers in the late 1930s and 1940s were shot in order to preserve individual performances - particularly after there had been some public showings of the early films. It was always the original film that was projected and inevitably some damage occurred, but all-in-all these film
s remain a unique source of early British ballet. They are also of great significance to Rambert's Archive as they provide a useful source of income as clips are constantly used in television programmes.

It was in the late 1950s and 1960s that serious systematic attempts were first made to record the company's repertory on film.

Edmée Wood established a recording method (used by the Royal Ballet as well as by Rambert) by which productions were recorded on a deliberately bare stage, first from a distance and then close-up for key solos or pas de deux. Most of these films have sound. I should add that neither these nor the earlier filmed performances were fully indexed at the time of recording, and several have subsequently been mis-catalogued at both the British Film Institute itself and at the Dance Collection of the New York Public Library where copies of much of the material may also be viewed.

Neither organization is to blame for its mistakes but it is fiendishly difficult to get facts straightened out, once printed catalogues have appeared. As more recent material is put on deposit to be made available for viewing I am conscious of the need to get the documentation that accompanies the videos absolutely correct.

That in itself presents a research challenge as in the 1970s our videos were still often made without identifying dates, venues or casts. As I have already noted, many of these have suffered from severe deterioration of the images and the quality of what survives leaves a good deal to be desired in any case, having been recorded just with usual stage lighting. As a company, Rambert was unlucky that all our last reel-to-reel videotapes came from faulty stock in the first place, so, generally speaking, more works have survived in recorded form from the early than the late 1970s. Even so two thirds of our 1970s recordings are absolutely useless - a sad reflection on the video-stock itself rather than misuse or poor storage. Those that survive are a mixture of performance and rehearsal tapes. The problem of recording from one fixed point often makes itself apparent as dancers disappear as soon as they move out of the range of the camera.

It is the same mixture of performance and rehearsal tapes that are recorded today. However, we do now note details of the recordings when they are made, and choreographers are asked to view recordings before they are added to the archive to ensure the performance is satisfactory. At Rambert we record most productions several times: one of the first performances, if not the première itself, has been our usual practise for many years. Now we are trying to add recordings where there are significant changes of cast, in the choreography, or where the performance takes place in a very different venue. We are still working with domestic-format cassettes as we do not have the equipment to make professional one-inch recordings, but there is an awareness that if opportunity presented itself we would like to improve our equipment. Now, too, we no longer depend on single copies as was the case in the past. Once it is agreed to keep a recording, two copies are made: one for use by the ballet staff in their work rehearsing, staging and notating the production; one for the educational department so that the animateurs can prepare for workshops and teaching purposes. The original is locked away securely in the archive.

Videos are now an everyday part of life in the company. We tour with recording and viewing equipment. Videos are used to show, for example, a choreographer's style of work to a new designer, or to introduce a choreographer to a dancer's range (when the cast was being selected for Touchbase, the new creation by Merce Cunningham for Rambert, videos of the company performing other of his works were sent over to New York so that he could select his cast). From the videos rescued from the 1970s we plan to revive an important production not since 1974 - an impossible task without the recordings, since it was never even fully notated.

But what of the much maligned researcher? Often they could study the notated score of a work (at Rambert we have had a notator on the staff since 1967 and many of our creations are recorded in Benesh Movement Notation). Many, essentially undergraduates, working on projects, can be advised to concentrate their attention on works for which film or video material is readily viewable. It seems to me that we are still a long way from a situation where it can be automatically assumed that video material of a production is available.

19th Congress

URL: http://www.sibmas.org/congresses/sibmas92/lisb11.htm