Société Internationale des Bibliothèques et des Musées des Arts du Spectacle

Users of Dance Company Archives

Jane Pritchard
Archivist English National Ballet and Rambert Dance Company, London, Great Britain

Documents et Temoignages 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. 29-30

As Archivist for two major British Dance Companies operating all year round I am faced with the same range of questions and enquiries that many of you receive in your own institutions. Requests for information from the general public, students of all levels; picture, television and film researchers; curators of exhibitions (like many of you we will only lend original material when it will be displayed under museum conditions but being less committee-bound can lend at relatively short notice), authors of scholarly and popular books; and biographers. Just to give a few random and immediately recognisable examples. The death of Audrey Hepburn resulted in authors ans film-makers from Japan to Britain asking for information and photograps relating to her brief period of training with Marie Rambert at the Mercury Theatre in 1948.

The death of Derek Jarman resulted in enquiries from writers and curators of exhibitions about dance-works he had designed for both Ballet Rambert and London Festival Ballet. Unfortunately both were disastrous productions for reasons quite unrelated to Jarman's designs and one feels reluctant at having to reveal the skeletons in the companies' closets! ¹; On a totally different level the dance syllabus for the current GCSE examinations in Britain sat by pupils at the age of 15 or 16 requires them to produce a project on two self-selected individual ballets and we are inundated with requests for information on the companies' most popular works. To alleviate this problem we prepare study notes and bibliographies so as not to have to answer each request independently.

But the individual companies chose to set up their archives primarily as a resource for themselves and first and foremost my function is to provide information for other staff within the organisation and to liaise with other performing companies.

Internally the archives will certainly be very extensively used when works are being revived - whether returning to the repertory after an absence of a few years or for revivals that really start from scratch. Notation and video references will certainly be studied by the ballet staff responsible for the revival even if the choreographer adapts some aspects of the work for a new cast. Old lighting plots may not be precisely duplicated for a new run but will provide a reference point for the lighting designer, certainly the sponsorship (fund-raising) department, and press and marketing will want access to visual and written records, including the critics' comments, of the work at previous stagings. At this point I would note that we are just beginning to produce EPKs (electronic press kits), transmittion-ready material to send to television stations, yet another area in which the archives play their role - and of course will have the problem of preserving the original tapes! Adminstratively, too the archives will be constantly referred to as they monitor changing relationships with the venues in which we perform and hold complete contractual records with individuals and organisations since the 1960s.

At both Companies the archives works very closely with the Education Departments both in producing written resources on the Company's work and in leading presentations and some workshops. For example this year, on behalf of the department at English National Ballet, I have presented a range of sessions on costumes worn in productions. These may be as introductions to aspects of a specific ballet for example Coppelia or The Sleeping Beauty or simply the workings of our wardrobe department. At these I will have with me costumes, head dresses and accessories that the public may look at closely and touch. We also do children's sessions with older costumes from past repertory that they may actually try on.Although I consider this linked with my work as an archivist we do not take out the specially selected items stored under archival conditions in this way. That is a small representative collection documenting the work of designers, makers and the materials they used and may be referred to by serious researches. At both companies I have organised 'show and tell' sessions or archival material for student groups - our potential users - as a valuable means of explaining how to use a performing artsarchive. I must, however, mention that a lot of the work of the highly successful education departments of both companies is primarily to introduce new audiences to dance and dance styles and not directly related to the archives - although, of course it is yet another area which has to be documented.

In respect of other companies we will be asked to make aveilable a range of material. Current examples from English National Ballet are sending photographs, reviews and programme notes tot the Royal Danish Ballet for their forthcoming revival of Frederich Ashton's Romeo and Juliet.

The work was created for them in 1955 but reconstructed under Peter Schaufuss' direction at Festival Ballet in 1985. Now Schaufuss has returned to Copenhagen the ballet too is returning home. We have also hired out the score for L鯮ide Massine's Le Beau Danube to the ballet company in Nice in the south of France. For an important reconstrction of this witty ballet by the former dancer Tatiana Leskova a search went out to all extant companies who had ever performed the work and it seems that English National Ballet is the only source for the complete score of Johann Strauss' music arranged by Roger Desormiere. The original score itself is a delightful document with a host of comments noted on it by musicians as it has previously been lent to one company after another. I must admit, now I have discovered it is unique, only a copy is loaned!

At Rambert we are currently making available material on Ashton's 1933 Les Masques for an American University Group to attempt to reconstruct the ballet (last seen on stage in 1953). This includes filmed extracts now in video form, designs, photographic records and notes on the choreography of two roles. But probably the work I most constantly provide material for as it is now restaged around the world is Cruel Garden by Christopher Bruce and Lindsay Kemp. Here, as Rambert performed the work in Germany in 1980, we were even able to supply the Berlin Ballet with the script for the 'Dream of Buster Keaton' section in German and, largely on the strength of an enormously successful study day I'd arranged on the work when it was revived for London Festival Ballet in 1988, I was able to provide Houston Ballet for their typically elaborate American press pack with the poetic, visual, dramatic and musical references from the works of Frederica Garcia Lorca that contribute to the collage of the playwright's life and 1930s Spain, that are the basis for the ballet.