| International Association of Libraries and Museums of the Performing Arts Société Internationale des Bibliothèques et des Musées des Arts du Spectacle |  |
The use of video in a dance libraryThe Laban Centre for Movement and DancePeter Bassett Documents et Témoignages des Arts du Spectacle: Pourquoi et Comment? / Collecting and Recording the Performing Arts: Why and How? Société Internationale des Bibliothèques et des Musées des Arts du Spectacle / International Association of Libraries and Museums of the Performing Arts 20ème Congrès International / 20th International Congress Antwerp 4-7 September 1994. Acta. Antwerp : 1995, pp. 74-75 Dance is the most ephemeral of all the visual arts - once a dancer has completed a movement it has vanished. It can be repeated but as the effect of aging affects the dancers body the quality of movement will also change. A dancers life is short, rarely does a dancer have more than 25 years of performing life. If they do the movement quality of the last years of their career will be very different from that of the first five. What they dance changes also. The choreographic text is handed down from one generation to the next by example and copying and this leaves plenty of scope for faulty memory and individual interpretation. This applies to all kinds of dance ethnic, social and in the theatre. In the theatre productions are re-staged, new dances come in with the new scenery and costumes. The steps Petipa set in the Sleeping Beauty in 1890 and not very likely to be exactly the same as those we watch in the theatre today, Its not surprising that ways of recording dance have concerned dancers since the earliest times. A PhD student at the Laban Centre has reconstructed dances from China dating from c600 BC. These were of course notated. Since the 1900's there have been a number of methods of writing down movement and dances, some successfully analyzing the mechanics of movements to considerable detail, and some only recording the floor patterns made by the feet in time to the music, none managing to give any real information about the quality of movement and the interpretive powers of the individual dancing a particular dance or role. The development of video has vastly altered all this, the sheer accessability, the ease of operation, flexibility of use, immediacy of playback and relatively cheap cost of equipment all had immediate appeal to the dance world and video began to be used in classrooms at a very early stage, so that students could see themselves in action and companies began to build collections of their performances. Dancers and other researchers and workers in dance really use video. And they use it for very specific purposes. The dancer will check progress and details of technique; the teacher to correct dancers faults and to study teaching methods and different techniques and to gain ideas for fresh combinations of steps, both to liven up everyday class and to develop the students. The choreographer will use video to review work in progress; as a research tool for steps and the techniques of dance styles and he will use it to avoid plagiarising their own and other choreographers works. Everyone uses video as an aide-memoir to rehearsing dances and to help revive and reconstruct their work. Dancers in companies are expected to come to the first rehearsal with a sound knowledge of the steps of the role, so that expensive rehearsal time can be spent on the details of placing the choreography on the body and on the stage and on developing interpretation. The dance boom may be in recession in the UK, but appears to be expanding in the world generally and even third world countries have a dance company. A shortage of choreographers of quality, who can feed the demand for successful works has resulted in an intensive interest in he dances of former generations. Any evidence, especially visual and preferably moving, is eagerly sought. Video has now been around long enough to have such historical applications. Reconstruction of old works from film, video and documentary sources is beginning to provide a way of life if not a lucrative living for some (and is beginning to pressurise dance libraries and archives in Britain). The reconstructor needs visual information on the movement style of the original and it is not unknown for the video of the "results so far" to be whisked off to an elderly dancer in another country to see what additional information can be brought to the surface of their memory. All these application of video are in force in the practical teaching of the Laban Centre, but the Centre is also an academic institution, unique in its blend of practical and academic study of dance. The acceptance of the study of dance as an academic subject is gradually adding yet more new ways of using video to the very practical needs of the dancers/ choreographer as listed so far. The basic needs of the dance historian, chorologist, sociologist,or anthropologist are for a wide variety of moving dance images that can be analyzed in considerable detail. The chorologist, for example, analyses movement whether it be a choreographed dance, in a classroom context or simply everyday movement, in terms of its relations to space and the effort required to produce it. (Laban's effort/space theories originally propounded in the 20's and 30's but considerably expanded in recent years by dance scholars). Video is an integral part of the process of such analysis, used in the studio, the study and the library. Students at the Laban Centre use video constantly, for all these purposes and they use all the extras on the video machine - 1/2 speed, frame by frame advance, forwards, backwards, fast forward (quite a lot about the construction and floor pattern of a dance can be analyzed by playing it at twice the speed). It is not really a situation where the library staff can insist that, in the interests of preservation, a video is played from beginning to end - that would quite defeat the purposes of assembling the collection in the first place. As may by now be obvious video used by dance students receives extremely hard use. Most of it stands up to repeated viewing remarkably well even the repeated viewing of short sections for the purpose of analysis. There have been remarkably few instances of damaged tapes. But few of our videos are of archival quality. Duplicates are bought of outstanding or extremely important tapes so that we have at least a back up copy. But it would be useful to be allowed to copy commercially published tapes for archival purposes if they are no longer available for sale. Ideally duplicate copies of all tapes should be purchased, but so many have to be bought unseen that it is foolish to risk limited funds on less than useful archive copies. Although the intensive use of video by no means solves all problems in the provision of visual information on dance video has become the most significent resource in the dance library and it has made an even greater impact on those working in dance than it has on the lives of everyone else. 20th Congress URL: http://www.sibmas.org/congresses/sibmas94/antw_21.html |
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