Preserving Transience: Ballet and Modern Dance Archives

Abstract

Dance is an ephemeral art in that it is primarily a visual and auditory medium that occurs in real-time within a performance. However, there is a wealth of extant primary sources in both print and non-print formats that are steadily being collected, stored and preserved in archives dedicated to the discipline of dance around the world in an attempt to provide some permanence to that ephemerality. There has been a growing movement over the past few decades to document materials belonging to this discipline, chiefly in the modern dance and ballet arenas; these movements sprang up not only to preserve the historical and organizational aspects for both posterity and the educational benefit of others inside and outside of the discipline, but also to capture the art form's essence and spirit. An examination of several dance archives and special collections in Great Britain, Australia, and America, as well as dance repository-related articles demonstrates how these small but thriving collections are capturing the essence of dance through typical archival activities such as acquisitions, processing, preservation, and providing access while dealing with the same logistical and budgetary limitations that archives of more general size and scope face. Information gleaned from this paper may be of use to researchers interested in the organizational, acquisition, collection development and preservation activities of such archives, as well as a general modern history of ballet and modern dance archives.