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"Not the Last Dance"
by Bonnie Brooks
"The mission of the National Initiative to Preserve America's Dance
is to foster America's
dance legacy by supporting dance documentation and preservation
as an integral and
ongoing part of the creation, transmission and performance of dance."
On a very cold and rainy Saturday in February 2001, a handful of
sturdy Chicagoans gathered
at the Dance Center of Columbia College for the traveling road show
of the National Initiative
to Preserve America's Dance. Five such presentations in California
and Texas already complete,
the program will have added presentations in Washington, Philadelphia,
New York, Columbus
and Boston by the end of March.
With these public events and a followup guide, The National Initiative
to Preserve America's
Dance (or NIPAD as it is affectionately known in the field) will
come to the close of its
current re-granting activities. Over the last eight years, with
generous funding from The Pew
Charitable Trusts, NIPAD has granted 43 organizations and individuals
a total of $2.5 million
to support projects dedicated to the documentation and preservation
of dance in America.
Trying to measure the short- and long-term impact of the program
is hard to do. It takes years
to understand and interpret the value of what funders refer to as
interventions (strategies for
building capacity or improving best practices) in a given field.
NIPAD was such an intervention.
What will its legacy be to dance in America?
The eight Next Steps monographs published over the course of 18
months reported to
dancemakers, curators and administrators on more than a dozen of
the many projects in which
NIPAD invested. Leafing back through the articles, as well as looking
at the many projects that
didn't receive ink, one begins to gain an awareness of the range
and scope of what NIPAD has
accomplished. From Merce Cunningham and Murray Louis to the Tonawanda
Iroquois nation to
club dancers in the underground scene of Manhattan to the Dance
Notation Bureau, NIPAD has
showered its resources, provided by The Pew Charitable Trusts, on
the illumination and
advancement of America's dances and dancing. It is said that what
you give to the world comes
back to youtenfold. Can we expect more from the legacy of this program?
NIPAD's traveling road show provided dance practitioners in almost
a dozen communities with
the opportunity to see and hear examples of the program's accomplishments.
It included
presentations from grantees and an overview of lessons learned from
Andrea Snyder, executive
director of Dance/USA and the lead administrator for NIPAD across
the life of its existence. In
her PowerPoint-supported talk on the advice gathered from the grantees,
Snyder did not simply
present successful highlights from the program. "Not every project
succeeds," she observed.
"The process of investigation and experimentation is valuable for
others who may follow, if only
to know what not to do."
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Lessons Learned
Snyder covered seven points in her discussion gleaned from the
experiences of project
managers. In designing a project, develop a blueprint that
establishes the goals of the project
and how to accomplish them. Referencing the Dance Research Foundation's
Classic
Black project,Snyder reported that the clearly established goal
was to further identify and
document African-Americans who trained in classical ballet, performed
in ballet companies, and
subsequently continued in other dance genres or left dance entirely.
The project, which
specifically sought outartists who pre-dated Dance Theatre of Harlem,
yielded multiple results
by finding artists,conducting numerous interviews, collecting obscure
photographs and
organizingthem,holding two symposia featuring artists identified,
and touring a photographic
exhibition to several cities around the country.
Snyder added that a critical element of blueprint development involved
carefully choosing
the media and related tools to be used in delivering a project.
Choices among grantees
ranged from documentary films to computer-based models to videotape
products to hands-on
workshops with accompanying handbooks.
The second point was develop a budget. While applicants
to the program were required
to provide budgets in their proposals, many grantees discovered
that costs arose that they
had not anticipated or had not sufficiently researched before initiating
their project. In other
cases, grantees remained within their financial budget but discovered,
along the way, what they
should have done that would have enhanced the final outcome measurably,
but that would have
inflated the costs significantly. An example of this was Sharon
Kinney's video documentary,
From the Horse's Mouth. In retrospect, Kinney wished she had used
two cameras for the
performanceshoots of her documentary, but it would have doubled
all of her tape, rental and
personnel costs. Another important realization Kinney made was the
importance of hiring true
professionals.She focused a significant amount of her financial
resources to secure the
involvement of PamWise, whose editing skills Kinney credits as an
extremely significant
component of the successof the final video.
Almost to a person, grantees reported that they did not adequately
budget time. Once they
got into their projects, they discovered that nearly everything
took longer than they had anticipated.
It thus follows, Snyder concluded, that budgeting time realistically
is essential to project
planning and completion.
The third point in the list of observations focused on legal
issues. Grantees with
excellent projects encountered unexpected challenges with rights,
ownership and
distribution of their final products. Particularly challenging are
issues around music
rights. "Copyright permissions are likely to bemore costly when
requested for commercial
uses than for educational purposes only," Snyder said. "If you are
thinking of commercially
distributing your product, you need to settle royalty issues up
front."
The legal issues do not stop with music, but also involve artists'
permissions, credits to
photographers, and working out relationships and agreements for
usage with owners and
donors of materials placed in collections. Some grantees discovered
that developing sound
agreements on legal and copyright matters took exceptional time,
energy and negotiation.
It is critical for anyone embarking on a documentation and preservation
project to anticipate
what the legal maze might be during their "developing the blueprint"
stage of the project.
Fourth, it is important to anticipate the nature of conservation
work in documentation
and preservation projects. Snyder said, "A thorough assessment of
your source materials
- photographs, videotape, film, and other artifacts - will reveal
how much time, effort and
money must be allocated to conservation in order for the project
to go forward." An excellent
project is not achievable if the film to be used is falling apart
and requires extensive servicing
in order to make it viewable. American Tap Orchestra, which undertook
a project to conserve visual documentation of the Copasetics, had
enormous difficulty in preserving the fragile, 25 year-old
videotapes. The equipment needed to transfer the tapes from ½" reel-to-reel
format to BetacamSP
was not easily accessible, and finding technicians willing to work
with them was equally difficult.
While they eventually found a partner in Sony Magnetic Products,
Inc., it was not before going
through a period of extreme discouragement. It is essential to anticipate
not only what needs
to be done, but what tools will be required to do it and who the
partners in accomplishing it will be.
Fifth, a number of projects encountered challenges around handling
culturally sensitive issues.
This was particularly true in cases where the project director or
directors were of Anglo background
and the subject of the project was rooted in a community of people
of color. Mark Eby and
Evann Siebens set out to make a feature-length documentary about
hula in California. They spent
a great deal of time in the community winning the trust of the Hawaiian
hula practitioners and
their families. By learning about the traditions of keeping cultural
identity alive in an expatriate
community and operating respectfully with those who were the practitioners
of their subject, they
were able to make a film that actually went beyond hula to cover
issues of cultural archiving and
preserving heritage.
Sixth, NIPAD grantees at times encountered issues around the questions
of who is the artist and
what is the product? Numerous projects focused on partnerships
between dance and film or
video artists, and/or editing collaborations. Putting professionals
from different fields around one
project requires the establishment of clear boundaries and common
language in order to achieve
results that all parties can feel ownership in. Filmmaker Carmella
Vassor, who made a documentary
on Joan Myers Brown and Philadanco, discovered along the way that
she and Brown had different
visions for the final product. Vassor wanted to make a film about
Ms. Brown. Ms. Brown wanted a
film on the history of her company. The refreshing and revealing
result blended their separate desires.
Finally, Snyder noted that contingency planning is essential.
In the worst case, a collaborator
or subject may die during the project. Sally Sommers' original partner
for her video documentary,
Check Your Body at the Door, Michael Schwartz, died after the project
began. His passing halted
production for nearly two years. The patriarch of the Cepeda family
died during the shooting of Bomba,
and Bessie Schoenberg passed away before completion of the documentary
on her life, Bessie:
A Portrait of Bessie Schoenberg. While death is the most shocking
reason to prepare for the
unexpected, other less dramatic factors, such as cost overruns and
projects simply taking longer
than anticipated, are possible. It is, therefore, essential for
individuals pursuing documentation and preservation projects to
spend some time, during their "develop the blueprint" stage, to
think through time, resources, subject, and costs with an eye for
"what if?"
In closing her presentation, Snyder talked about the short-term
outcomes of NIPAD's legacy -
the publication of eight Next Steps articles featuring reports on
grantee projects, the establishment
of the Save As: Dance website, the presentations about the program
in numerous cities,
and the development of a soon-to-be published Resource Guide. With
the resources for the
program diminishing and soon to be no more, the future regarding
preservation and
documentation in dance is, at this time, unwritten.
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The Legacy
Assessing the post-NIPAD future of dance documentation and preservation
is sobering to
contemplate. While the "consciousness-raising" around the critical
condition of dance
preservationhas been largely successful in the field, actual preservation
practices are likely to
dwindlein the absence of hard resources as well as a high-visibility
national program committed
toproject support and ongoing advocacy. Coalitions such as the Dance
Heritage Coalition
(whose members include the American Dance Festival, Anacostia Museum
and Center for
African American History and Culture, Dance Collection at the New
York Public Library, Dance
Notation Bureau, Harvard Dance Collection, Jacob's Pillow Dance
Festival, Library of Congress,
Ohio State University and San Francisco Performing Arts Library
and Museum) and organizations
like the George Balanchine Trust will continue their important work.
Many dance organizations have incorporated better documentation
and preservation practices into their regular activities
thanks to the initial impetus of NIPAD grants. But we cannot underestimate
the clout that NIPAD's
focused effort represented in the larger dance scene, nor can we
take lightly its absence in the
years ahead.
Sali Ann Kriegsman recently served as president of the Dance Heritage
Coalition. She has had a
long association with NIPAD as a grantee, when she was executive
director of Jacob's Pillow
Dance Festival, and as a funder who advocated for preservation and
documentation when
she directed the Dance Program at the National Endowment for the
Arts.
Kriegsman observes that NIPAD was instrumental in helping alter
the conditions and attitudes
in the dance field. "There is a growing sophistication about planning
documentation and preservation projects, more effective alliances
made (with and within universities, libraries, presenting institutions,
companies, service organizations), and improved access to basic,
critical information. There
has been capacity-building." Having served as a NIPAD panelist for
several review cycles, she adds,
"The quality and strength of proposals was definitely improving
- with evidence of more thoughtful
planning and a greater understanding of what it would take to actually
carry out the work.
Unfortunately, this was happening just at the point when the funder's
commitment was coming
to an end. One lesson here is that this work takes time to build
and sustain. It is not going to be
solved by any short-term initiative. It is life-long."
How is this life-long challenge to be addressed in the absence
of a funding initiative to support it?
We must hope that the original vision that ignited the creation
of NIPAD is alive somewhere,
and that one or more funders will step up to the plate in order
to advance the preservation and
documentation of America's dance.
"We can't underestimate the contribution and commitment that The
Pew Charitable Trusts
made to the American dance field through the inception and support
of NIPAD since 1993,"
says Snyder. "For such a 'niche' issue, it's remarkable that this
program has lasted as long as
it has. We have successfully achieved all the program's goals: to
strengthen documentation
and preservation practices; to heighten visibility and awareness;
to help build capacity; and to
share information with dance practitioners. However, it has not
been the only effort to deal with
this important issue; there are countless individuals and institutions
that have seen the light
and carried the torch to document, preserve, and make accessible
the vibrant legacy of dance
in America. Let's hope the fire continues to grow into the future."
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