Merce Cunningham Dance Company




	David Vaughan, Archivist Photo by Leslie Hansen Kopp

Merce Cunningham has written eloquently of the dancer's experience of "that single fleeing moment when you feel alive." Like most choreographers, his concern is with the piece he is making now, or the one he has in mind to make next. A dance completed represents a problem solved, or a process worked through to its conclusion. The historian's, or archivist's, concern is rather different. Anyone who has attempted to work in the field of dance scholarship knows how exasperatingly difficult it is to research the history even of contemporary dance companies, let alone those of the past. How often, for example, do we find programs, posters, or flyers for dance performances that give only the day of the month when they took place, but not the year? Dancers themselves, notoriously, have short memories for such things. They may remember choreography in some detail after many years-it's in their "muscle memory"-but when asked when a particular performance happened, have only the vaguest recollection. The reason is clear: the very nature of dancing makes its practitioners concerned with the present and future rather than the past, the opposite of the historian's preoccupation.

When Merce Cunningham opened a studio of his own in December 1959, in the Living Theater building, at the corner of Sixth Avenue and 14th Street, he asked me to come and work for him as studio administrator. (I had been taking his class for some time, in the studio he rented at Dance Players.) I began to organize the records of the company's history, first by putting all the programs of performances in chronological order. Cunningham usually brought programs back with him from tours, and in time-honored fashion tossed them into a cardboard box. Some gaps were filled by Carolyn Brown, who was rather more systematic. From this I was able to compile a checklist of Cunningham's works. From then on I tried to keep these records up to date. When I went on tour with the company, as I did from time to time, I collected programs and clippings myself.

In 1976 Jean Rigg, then administrator of the Cunningham Dance Foundation and Merce Cunningham Dance Company, applied to the National Endowment for the Arts for a grant to employ me as archivist, thus formalizing what I had been doing for my own interest. The NEA awarded a matching grant as a pilot program. The original intention was to fund the position for a year, but I asked if I could work part-time for two years. This was agreed upon, and Merce, the Board of Directors, and the administration decided to keep me on after the grant expired, since for an active company the maintenance of archives is an open-ended project.

Being an archivist was something I learned on the job. If there were places where I could have gone for help, I didn't know about them. Then one day I had a telephone call from Michael Scherker, then librarian of Dance Theatre of Harlem, who had guessed that if any company had an archivist on the staff, it would be the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. He came to see me, and we compared notes. He also told me about a weekend workshop conducted by Leslie Hansen Kopp at the City University of New York. There I learned about things like acid-free paper and boxes and Mylar sleeves for photographs. From then on the Cunningham archives began to be organized in a more professional way. Programs and clippings were stored in gray acid-free boxes, in chronological order, photographs in Mylar sleeves, in alphabetical order of dance titles. In 1987 Leslie Kopp established an organization called Preserve, Inc., "a national center for archival documentation and preservation of the performing arts," which published a manual, Dance Archives, to which I contributed a chapter on the Cunningham Archives.

One thing I had started on my own was a set of card files documenting the performances of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company: a chronological file of performances, noting on each card the place and date and program; an alphabetical file of dances, noting on each card where and when the piece was performed; and a geographical file of places where the company performed. Most of this material has been stored in a database organized by Will Knapp, General Manager of the Cunningham Dance Foundation, but I still maintain the card files for my own use.

Needless to say, films and videotapes (and now DVDs) are an important component of the archives. Merce Cunningham himself has worked extensively in film and video, in collaboration first with Charles Atlas and later with Elliot Caplan, choreographing dances specifically for the camera. In 1999 the collaboration with Atlas was resumed with the production of the documentary Merce Cunningham: a lifetime in dance. Because Cunningham prefers video documentation to notation systems, which he finds insufficiently immediate and visual, the company tries to have live performances recorded whenever possible. Also dances are videotaped in rehearsal in the company's studio, with two cameras, one recording stage left and the other stage right, shooting into the mirrors, so that both front and back views are seen. Copies of all these videos are kept in the archives, together with various interviews and documentaries that have been filmed.

In my capacity as archivist I am responsible not only for keeping the various collections of material up to date but also for making them and the information they contain available to scholars, critics, editors, and publicists, as well as to members of the dance company and of the Foundation staff, who need to have access to the archives when writing grant proposals or booking engagements and tours. Students and scholars may visit the archives by appointment, and are allowed access to the materials, and to view videotapes (except for the rehearsal tapes, which are for the use of the company), under proper supervision.

In 1995 the Cunningham Dance Foundation was awarded a grant of $24,700 by NIPAD (the National Initiative to Preserve American Dance) to inventory and preserve Merce Cunningham's personal choreographic notes. The original notes are copied on acid-free paper and scanned. As with the pilot grant from the NEA in 1976 to establish the position of archivist, this project has continued beyond the expiry of the original grant because of the open-ended nature of its subject-matter, namely the creativity of Merce Cunningham.

When I go on tour with the dance company, I often give brief talks at the Study Days which the company offers, pre-performance lectures, or post-performance question and answer sessions with the audience. I am also available to supply information to journalists and even, on occasion, to be interviewed if Merce Cunningham is unavailable.

I frequently serve as a liaison with curators of museums and exhibitions who need information or wish to borrow materials; I in fact co-curated with Germano Celant a major exhibition on Merce Cunningham and his collaborators that toured European museums a few years ago. In other words, the Cunningham Archive is an active part of the daily life of the Cunningham Dance Foundation and the Merce Cunningham Dance Company.

In June 2000 agreement was reached with the New York Public Library for the acquisition of the Cunningham Dance Foundation Collection by the Jerome Robbins Dance Division at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. So far, many of the films and videos, the complete collection of original programs through 2003, and scores of archival photographs have all been transferred to the library, where they will be processed. Duplicates remain in the offices of the Cunningham Archives in Westbeth. (Current photographs are kept in the administrative offices on the first floor.)

A LIVING ARCHIVE
by David Vaughan, Archivist

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