PRESERVE: TEACHING ARCHIVES TO DANCE COMPANIES

PRESERVE: TEACHING ARCHIVES TO DANCE COMPANIESAuthor(s): John ShepardSource: Fontes Artis Musicae, Vol. 58, No. 2 (April-June 2011), pp. 148-156Published by: International Association of Music Libraries, Archives, and Documentation Centres(IAML)Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23512903 .

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PRESERVE: TEACHING ARCHIVES TO DANCE COMPANIES

John Shepard1

English Abstract In 1987, a New York City symposium on preserving performing arts videotapes brought media attention to the fragility of the documents of dance history. Soon afterward, the symposium's

convener, Michael Scherker, and one of its speakers, Leslie Hansen Kopp, formed Preserve, The

Coalition for Performing Arts Archives. A survey of 52 U.S. dance companies prompted Preserve to

propose a series of one-day workshops on archival management. With funding from the Mellon

Foundation, Scherker and Kopp gave twenty workshops in nineteen cities from April 1989 to March

1990, introducing dance company representatives to principles of archival organization and practi

cal preservation measures. Following Scherker's premature death, Kopp incorporated Preserve in

1991, and in 1995 she published the practical manual Dance Archives, which codified information

presented in the workshops. Two decades later, the example of 1989-90 workshops might serve as

a model for fostering the preservation of archives of musical performing organizations.

French Abstract

En 1987, un symposium à New York sur la préservation de bandes vidéo des arts du spectacle a

attiré l'attention des médias sur la fragilité des documents d'histoire de la danse. Peu de temps

après, animateur du colloque, Michael Scherker, et l'un des conférenciers, Leslie Hansen Kopp, ont

établi Préserve, la Coalition for Performing Arts Archives. Une enquête auprès de 52 compagnies

de danse des États-Unis a invité Preserve de proposer une série de workshops sur la gestion des

archives. Grâce au financement de la Mellon Fondation, Scherker et Kopp ont donné une vingtaine

d'ateliers dans dix-neuf villes d'avril 1989 à Mars 1990, pendant lesquels ils ont proposé aux

représentants des compagnies de danse des principes d'organisation des archives et des mesures

de conservation pratiques. Après la mort prématurée de Scherker, Kopp a incorporé Préserve en

1991, et en 1995 elle a publié le guide pratique Dance Archives, qui codifie l'information présentée dans les ateliers. Deux décennies plus tard, l'exemple des workshops de 1989-90 pourrait encore

servir de modèle pour favoriser la conservation des archives des organisations des arts du

spectacle.

German Abstract

In New York fand im Jahr 1987 ein Symposium zum Thema „Die Erhaltung von Videoauf

zeichnungen der darstellenden Künste" statt, das die Aufmerksamkeit der Medien auf die

Vergänglichkeit von Dokumenten der Tanzgeschichte lenkte. Kurz darauf gründeten der Initiator des Symposiums, Michael Scherker, und eine der Referentinnen, Leslie Hansen Kopp, die Gruppe „Preserve, The Coalition for Performing Arts Archives". Eine Umfrage unter 52 Ballettkompanien der Vereinigten Staaten veranlasste „Preserve" zum Angebot einer Serie von eintägigen Workshops

zum Thema .Archivmanagement". Scherker und Kopp konnten zwischen April 1989 und März

1990 mit finanzieller Unterstützung durch die Mellon Foundation 20 Workshops in 19 Städten

1. John Shepard is Head of the Jean Gray Hargrove Music Library at the University of California, Berkeley.

148



PRESERVE: TEACHING ARCHIVES TO DANCE COMPANIES 149

veranstalten und dabei Mitarbeiter der Kompanien mit Grundlagen der Archivorganisation und

praktischen Maßnahmen zur Bestandserhaltung vertraut machen. Nach Scherkers frühem Tod

ließ Kopp im Jahr 1991 „Preserve" als Gesellschaft registrieren. 1995 veröffentlichte sie die in den

Workshops präsentierten Inhalte im Handbuch „Dance Archives". Zwei Jahrzehnte danach können die beispielhaften Workshops aus den Jahren 1989/90 als Vorbild für die Pflege der Bestandser

haltung in Archiven von Organisationen der darstellenden Künste dienen.

In the United States in 1990, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation jointly sponsored a study which resulted the next year in a report entitled Images of American Dance: Documenting and Preserving a Cultural Heritage. The

report states that the study's purpose was

...to learn what comprises the existing system of dance documentation and preservation, how

transactions are conducted within the system, and to what extent the needs of the dance com

munity are being met. By focusing on the needs of users, it was hoped, the study would better

equip both the artistic and archival communities in their efforts to build, strengthen and/or ex tend dance documentation and preservation efforts at the local, regional and national levels,

thereby ensuring that the legacy of dance endures.2

For the work of the study, the Project Personnel developed sixteen survey questionnaires, tailored to categories of constituents: presenters (that is, impresarios), choreographers, dancers, company managers, institutional archivists, dance scholars, "teachers of the aca demic aspects of dance," "teachers of the creative aspects of dance," critics, collectors, filmmakers, photographers, creative collaborators (that is, composers, or designers of

sets, costumes, or lighting), service organizations or artists' managers, film and video

distributors, and programmers of dance related shows on television and radio.3 Field researchers in six metropolitan areas used these questionnaires to conduct

160 interviews with individuals and several more meetings with staff of dance festivals,

major dance archives, and projects of documenting commercial musical theater. The

metropolitan areas were Los Angeles (with an additional field researcher assigned to the Latino dance community), Minneapolis/St. Paul, New York City, Salt Lake City, San

Francisco, and Washington, D.C. "Two follow-up meetings in New York City and

Washington, D.C. during the second phase of the research further tested and elaborated

upon the findings "4

As an introduction to the background and rationale for the project, the report makes some statements that remind us both of the state of dance documentation in the U.S. be

fore 1991 and of the nature of dance that makes documentation essential. The report

quotes two words from a passage at the opening of the dance critic Marcia Siegel's first

book, which deserves to be quoted at greater length. Siegel wrote

Dance exists at a perpetual vanishing point. At the moment of its creation it is gone. All of a dancer's years of training in the studio, all the choreographer's planning, the rehearsals, the co ordination of designers, composers, and technicians, the raising of money and the gathering

2. Images of American Dance: Documenting and Preserving a Cultural Heritage. Prepared by William Keens,

Leslie Hansen Kopp, Mindy N. Levine (Washington, D.C.: Dance Program, National Endowment for the Arts,

1991), 3 [hereafter Images], 3. Images, 14.

4. Images, 3.



150 FONTES ARTIS MUSICAE 58/2

together of an audience, all these are only a preparation for an event that disappears in the very

act of materializing. No other art is so hard to catch, so impossible to hold.5

The 1991 NEA/Mellon report further asserted that

... dance ... stands as a neglected stepchild vis-à-vis the other art forms. Left out of history

books, absent from discussions of aesthetics and philosophy, overlooked by sociologists, ignored

by institutions of higher learning, dance as a discipline has been relegated to the margins of serious intellectual interchange in this country.

To a large extent, this is because, for much of its history, the dance field has had no easy way of recording itself and has left few legible documents in its wake. Poetry and fiction can be af

fixed on the printed page; visual art can be set on canvas or in stone; drama can be passed on

through scripts; music has a widely understood notational system. But until recently, dance has

lacked the means to create tangible, widely accessible records of its history.6

The report concluded that this paucity of records consigned dance to a "limbo of illiter

acy," borrowing a phrase from John Martin's 1950 New York Times article about dance notation.

From the longer view, the dance as an art cannot fail to profit by building up a literature of its

own for study, for stylistic comparison and deduction, for cultural stability and continuity. As

things are now, the dance has no past. It is impossible to know what the epoch-making ballets

of Noverre were like, or Taglioni's "La Sylphide," or Nijinsky's "Sacre de Printemps"

although a miracle of dance documentation in the 1980s has now given us a plausible and

compelling hypothetical version of that last ballet.7 Martin continued

Notation has come of age just in time to save our own richly creative period from passing into

this same limbo of illiteracy. As Doris Humphrey remarked when she saw some of her own com

positions on paper: 'Now these works are no longer legend; they are history.'8

Returning to the United States context, the 1991 report adds that the "marginalization of dance is disconcerting, particularly given the extraordinary role that dance has played in American cultural expression."9 In this regard, the report briefly quotes Susan Sontag, whose remarks also deserve to be quoted at greater length. At a 1981 West Coast Con ference on Dance Criticism, Sontag said

When I travel... and fall into conversation about American arts ... I generally find that people

abroad vastly overestimate us I explain to people in Warsaw or Tokyo or Mexico City or Paris

or Munich that American movies are lousy; I insist that there is good painting that is not

American ... ; I point out that we do not have one great, international world-class writer—of the

stature of Calvino, Beckett, Borges Yet it is my perverse, rather than patriotic, pleasure to end up pointing out that there is one art at which we are really better than anyone else. There

is one and only one and it is dance. Dance is the only art where Americans are, have been for

some time, doing the best work in the world. The greatest dance in the world is here. It has more

5. Marcia B. Siegel, At the Vanishing Point: A Critic Looks at Dance (New York: Saturday Review Press, 1972), 1.

6. Images, 10.

7. See Millicent Hodson, Nijinsky's Crime Against Grace: Reconstruction Score of the Original Choreography for Le Sacre du printemps (Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon Press, 1996).

8. John Martin, "They Score Dance as Others Do Music," The New York Times (July 2,1950): 25.

9. Images, 10.




diversity, more imagination, more experiment - and better classicism It was largely in this

country that modern dance was created, for the most part the work of women dancers; and it's

here that we have the culminating version of the Italo-Gallic-Russian tradition that we call the classical dance, namely Balanchine's New York City Ballet.10

Many might dispute those assertions, but the 1991 report referred to them as compelling support for the question: why was dance in the United States so woefully underdocu mented? To Sontag's statements the report adds that "it is also on American soil that the

expressive dance languages of jazz and tap evolved."11 In its conclusion to its introduction to the background and rationale of the study, the 1991 report states

As the dance field moves rapidly toward the twenty-first century, it has become increasingly clear that documenting and preserving its past are intimately connected to its future. The need for increased discourse—both within the field and with the larger cultural and intellectual

community—is pressing. But the field cannot take up this challenge if its most priceless docu ments are stuffed in boxes in choreographers' closets, daily prey to decay; if its major archival institutions have cataloging backlogs of two and three years; if irreplaceable material is daily dis carded because the general public remains unaware of its historical and artistic significance; and if there are no organized channels by which to retrieve information.

Just as documentation and preservation create a bridge between dance's past and its future,

they are also the currency of its dynamically unfolding present. It is through video documenta

tion that choreographers not only preserve their work but also market it to presenters here and

abroad; it is through archival resources that company management helps contextualize dance

activity for the general public, building new dance audiences; it is through master teachers that vital information gets passed on person to person, body to body.12

The report lists Five Conclusions with "A Menu of Possible Actions" in response to

each conclusion. The third conclusion states that "In none of the six research sites did the

researchers find a fully functioning, institutionalized dance documentation and preserva tion network."13 Among the possible actions to respond to this state of affairs, the report recommended the following action; "Encourage a formal association among the major repositories to facilitate undertaking joint projects, coordinating policies and objectives, and creating standards for cataloging."14 This recommendation led to the formation of the

Dance Heritage Coalition the very next year. The fifth conclusion states that "A variety of

educational initiatives are needed both within and outside the dance field."15 Its particular menu of possible actions reads, in part:

Train artists and administrators in the basic techniques of documentation and preservation.

Many of the records of dance are of poor quality, or are so poorly kept that they are in danger of

disappearing. a. Conduct training workshops in basic preservation techniques around the country....

b. Host ongoing skill-building workshops and training workshops in local arts centers and other local facilities.

10. Susan Sontag, "On Dance and Dance Writing," New Performance 2, no. 3 (1981): 72.

11. Images, 11.

12. Images, 11.

13. Images, 30.

14. Images, 30.

15. Images, 31.




c. Circulate information about documentation through user-friendly handbooks and /or video tapes.

d. Better publicize consulting services available at major repositories.16

These last recommendations bear the unmistakable conceptual signature of Leslie Hansen Kopp, the so-named Specialist Researcher among the NEA/Mellon Project Personnel and one of three co-authors of the 1991 report.

Almost four years before the release of the NEA/Mellon report, on the afternoon of 20 November 1987, a symposium was held in New York City under the title "Preserving Our Work: Video Archives of Performing Arts Groups" and was attended by 75 represen tatives of performing arts organizations, archives, and arts funding agencies. According to Leslie Hansen Kopp, Michael Scherker, the archivist for the Dance Theater of Harlem, organized the conference by telephoning

more than three hundred dance companies, dancers, choreographers, mimes, musicians, and

performance artists and ask[ing] them, 'Do you have an archives?' When the reply was an un

surprising 'no,' the question followed, Well, do you have some videotapes?' A positive answer to

this question led to an invitation to [the] symposium.17

As the dance critic Jennifer Dunning wrote in her New York Times report on the sympo sium, "the half-inch reel-to-reel videotape that seemed, in the 1970s, to provide a relatively affordable and sophisticated way to record and preserve dance history has proved to be an imperfect tool."18 Although the focus of the symposium was the preservation problems of videotape, larger issues of dance documentation were addressed, and Dunnings' Times article gave national exposure to the issues and to the symposium's speakers—who in cluded Scherker, Alan F. Lewis (an audio-visual preservationist), Sali Ann Kriegsman from the National Endowment for the Arts, and Leslie Hansen Kopp, at that time Chair of the Performing Arts Roundtable of the Society of American Archivists. One of the facts

Dunning noted in her report for the Times was that while nearly every dance company in Europe had an archives program, the Dance Theater of Harlem and the Merce

Cunningham Company were at that time the only two dance companies in the U.S. with archivists on staff.

After the 1987 symposium, Michael Scherker and Leslie Kopp formed Preserve: The Coalition for Performing Arts Archives. In a 1990 article on the early history of Preserve, Leslie Kopp wrote

It was agreed that, first-off, some measure of the dance community was needed, and Michael, David Vaughan [the archivist of the Cunningham Dance Foundation], and I set about devising a survey instrument. In the mean time, David arranged for us to speak to the Artistic Director's

Roundtable at the Dance/USA International Conference, in January 1988, in New York. Here, we

briefly introduced the issues of dance preservation and distributed drafts of our survey (along with some horribly deteriorating cellulose-diacetate negatives from Ballet Theatre's collection, for dramatic effect) to those attending. Indeed, with our half-hour presentation, we gathered tremendous support throughout the dance community.19

16. Images, 31-32.

17. Leslie Hansen Kopp, "Preserve: Assuring Dance a Life Beyond Performance," Performing Arts Resources, vol. 15 (1990): 8 [hereafter "Preserve").

18. Jennifer Dunning, "Dance Archivists Meet to Discuss Field's Crisis," The New York Times (Nov. 23, 1987): C21.

19. "Preserve," 9.




In March 1988, the survey questionnaire was distributed to the 73 member companies of Dance/USA, of which 52 responded (a very impressive response rate of 72%). Kopp published a summary of the results of the survey in a January 1989 article in Dance/ USA's newsletter Update. The answers to the survey's questions—grouped in four large categories: Collection Composition, How Long Companies Keep Records, Archives

Administration, and Needs Assessment/Planning—described a serious state of affairs in the community of U.S. dance companies. In summing up her report of the survey results, Kopp wrote

Every dance company retains an enormous amount of primary resource material. This material

needs immediate and proper care if it is to survive. There is an obvious and urgent need to disseminate information about archival management

to performing arts companies. For the companies who answered this survey, hiring a profes

sional archivist might not be a priority, but sending a staff member to an archives workshop would. All respondents recognize the need for preservation, yet almost half of those in the sur

vey indicated that archival materials have been thrown away, lost, or destroyed, and more than a

third of the responding companies do not know what has happened to their records.20

The survey having dramatically illustrated a national crisis, Michael Scherker and Leslie

Kopp proposed a series of workshops to disseminate basic archival information to a broad audience within the national dance community. They patterned the workshops on a work

shop Kopp had given at New York's City College in 1988. Kopp later wrote

The format was to include archival organization in the morning session, and basic preservation

procedures in the afternoon. We prepared a grant proposal for the National Endowment for the

Arts' Dance Program, in the Services to the Field category. While the proposal was met with fa vorable reviews, the Endowment did not vote the funds for such a novel project. Almost imme

diately, however, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation took on the project, with Dance/USA as the

sponsor. Our proposal was to present twenty one-day workshops throughout the country. We at

tempted, whenever possible to link the workshops with other conferences and festivals, such as

the American Dance Festival, the Colorado Dance Festival, The Dance Critics Association con ference in San Francisco, and the Balanchine Conference in Miami.21

On 10 March 1989 Kopp and Scherker "kicked off" their workshop tour with another

symposium at the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. Billed as a slide show

and lecture under the title "Performing Arts Archives: The Basics and Beyond," the

symposium benefitted from advanced advertising and drew 150 participants. Kopp later summarized her approach in the symposium, which was the model for the workshops to come on tour.

The slide show gave an overview of dance company archival materials, illustrated with examples

of crumbling scrapbooks, yellowed newsclippings, deteriorating photographs, and disintegrating videotapes. An outline for describing collections, whether card catalogue, register, or computer

ized data base, was followed by guidelines for maintaining collections. These "archival dos and don'ts" included: storage of materials in acid-free folders and boxes; photocopying of newsclip pings onto acid-free paper; removal of rusted paper clips and dried rubber bands; unfolding and

dusting of documents; removal of photographs from glassine envelopes and interleaving with

20. Leslie Hansen Kopp, "Preserving the Past: A Survey of Dance Company Archives," Update Dance/USA

6, no. 4 (1989): 14.

21. "Preserve," 10.




acid-free tissue; storage of archives in secure environments with stable, if not controlled, tem

perature and humidity; avoidance of Scotch Tape, rubber cement, spray mount and mucilage;

and banishment of food, drink, and smoking near archival documents. The slide presentation

concluded with exhibits of recommended archival publications, and sources of professional

archival assistance; and a plea to understand that the dance community depends on its past to

create its future.22

Jennifer Dunning reported on the workshop in the next day's New York Times, in an arti

cle entitled "Archivists of the Arts Organize." Dunning quoted one of Leslie Kopp's anec

dotes from her lecture;

'I found a fabulous snapshot of Louis Horst sitting at a desk making clippings of Martha Graham's programs,' the archivist said, referring to Miss Graham's accompanist 'On the

desk beside him was a big bottle of mucilage. It was a document recording Louis Horst ruining

the records of Martha Graham.'23

Dunning also reported on the upcoming workshop tour, which received funding of

$75,000 from the Mellon Foundation. From April 1989 to January 1990, Leslie Kopp and

Michael Scherker presented their workshop to over 450 participants in 19 cities, includ

ing the following: New York, at the City Center (hosted by the Joffrey Ballet and the City Center for Music and Drama), Seattle (hosted by the Pacific Northwest Ballet and the

Northwest Dance Coalition); San Francisco (hosted by Dance Bay Area, the San

Francisco Ballet, and the Archives for the Performing Arts [now known as the Museum of Performance & Design]); Durham, NC (hosted by the American Dance Festival); Boulder, Colorado (hosted by the Colorado Dance Festival) ; Cleveland (hosted by Dance

Cleveland, the Cleveland Arts Consortium, the Cleveland Ballet, and Dance Ohio);

Minneapolis/St. Paul (hosted by the Minnesota Dance Alliance); Ann Arbor (hosted by the Michigan Dance Association); Chicago (hosted by Chicago Dance Coalition and the

Newberry Library Dance Collection); Washington, DC (hosted by the George Washing ton University Department of Theatre and Dance and the DC Cultural Alliance); Dallas

(hosted by the Dallas Dance Council and the Dallas Public Library) ; Miami (hosted by the Florida Dance Association and Miami Dance Futures); Pittsburgh (hosted by the

Pittsburgh Dance Council); Philadelphia (hosted by the University of the Arts School of

Dance, the Philadelphia Dance Alliance, and the Jacob's Pillow dance festival); and again New York (hosted by Performance Space 122, and The Field, a service organization for in

dependent performing artists). Kopp and Scherker worked closely with each sponsoring organization to coordinate mailing lists, reserve workshop sites, bring in an audience, and

generate local press coverage. Leslie Kopp later wrote that

Michael and I taught the workshop in a sort of tag-team manner; the morning session, following

the slide overview, included instruction of appraisal, accessioning, arrangement and description,

writing a mission statement, and reference and access. The afternoon session always began with

a lesson in conducting oral history interviews, followed by hands-on instruction in preservation methods: testing for the acid content in paper, fabricating storage enclosures for documents and

photographs, and Mylar encapsulation.24

22. "Preserve," 11.

23. Jennifer Dunning, "Archivists of the Arts Organize," The New York Times (Mar. 11,1989): 15.

24. "Preserve," 12-13.




She added that

It would be foolhardy to suggest that any one-day workshop could teach all the principals of

archival management, and we were careful to state at the end of each seminar that those who at

tended were not conferred any degree or certificate to become professional archivists. However, all of our participants now knew to photocopy their newsclippings onto acid-free paper and to

store their videotapes upright instead of flat. We provided guidelines for managing archival col lections and the methods for dance companies and choreographers to obtain help from profes sional archivists and conservators. Participants in each workshop were often old friends and we

watched as they forged new networks for archival action. Several of the workshops were held in

libraries or archival institutions, and many deeds of gift were negotiated with those repositories before each workshop was concluded. Our intention was not to establish hundreds of little dance

archives, but rather to preserve those documentary records as they remained an active part of

their dance company.25

In January 1990, less than a week after he "team taught" the last workshop of the tour at Performance Space 122 in New York, Michael Scherker died after falling into a diabetic coma.26 After she organized a memorial gathering for him at The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Leslie Kopp continued to direct Preserve alone, and incorporated it in 1991. In 1992, she accepted an invitation from the Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival in

Becket, Massachusetts, to have Preserve make its home on the festival's premises. At the October 1992 Rutgers University conference called Dance Reconstructed, Kopp partici pated in a panel on strategies for documentation. She said there that

... being at the Pillow means that Preserve now has the context and the venue to be a national

organization, a clearinghouse for information and documentation and preservation, and it also

gives us a chance to work with the artists directly, so that preservation is part of the process, not

just a product.27

Beginning in Winter 1994, Preserve, Inc. issued the newsletter afterimages. Leslie Kopp continued to teach workshops for the dance companies who performed at Jacob's Pillow and in 1995 she produced under the Preserve, Inc. imprint Dance Archives, A Practical Manual for Documenting and Preserving the Ephemeral Art. The manual appears to pre sent the information and advice that Kopp and Michael Scherker provided in their work

shops of 1989-90. In 1996, when the new director of Jacob's Pillow discovered that the fes tival was running a potentially catastrophic deficit,28 Preserve lost its rent-free offices and relocated to Falls Church, Virginia, close to the Washington DC national office of Dance/ USA. In the summer of 1996, the Dance Archives manual received the Arline Custer Award for outstanding archival publication at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference.29

Leslie Kopp continued to teach workshops in the D.C. area and around the U.S., at lo cations such as Ohio State University and Durham, North Carolina, during the American

25. "Preserve," 13.

26. "Michael Scherker, 32, Dance Archivist, Dies," The New York Times (Feb. 22,1990): BIO.

27. Dance Reconstructed: Conference Proceedings: A Conference on Modern Dance Art, Past, Present, Future,

October 16 and 17, 1992, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey [edited by Barbara Pally with Claudia

Gitelman and Patricia Mayer] (New Brunswick, N.J.: Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers, 1993), 172.

28. cf. "History" at Jacob's Pillow Dance (http://www.jacobspillow.Org/archives/history.asp#1942) [last ac

cessed 6 December 2010]. 29. "Dance Archives Manual Wins MARAC Publications Award," afterimages, 3, no. 3 (Autumn 1996): 3.




Dance Festival. In 1997, Kopp launched the Preserve, Inc. website—sadly no longer live— which made much of the information in the Dance Archives manual available on the World Wide Web.30 In May 1998, to celebrate the tenth anniversary of Preserve's founding, Leslie

Kopp organized a two-day symposium entitled A Decade of Dance Preservation.31 The con ference took place at the Joyce SoHo Theater in New York City and featured 26 speakers in four panel sessions. That so many speakers could be brought together for the sympo sium is a sign of the growth of the field of dance documentation and preservation since Leslie Kopp began her work with dance archives. In short, by the late 1990s there was considerable competition for funding for dance archives projects, and Preserve's share of the total funding began to shrink. Preserve relocated to New York City later in 1998, and the last issue of its periodical afterimages appeared in the Summer of 1999. In the year 2000, Leslie Kopp went on to become the General Administrator of the George Balanchine Foundation32 and later the Director of classical music at New York City's public television station Channel 13.

Leslie Hansen Kopp succumbed to cancer in May 2006.33 Years later, the model that she and Michael Scherker created for practical dance archives workshops may have been

forgotten. The rationales for the workshop model that Leslie Kopp and Michael Scherker advanced in 1989 still compel, however still other benefits come to mind. Clearly, the Preserve model helped preserve dance company archives in situ. But the model also of fers us the hope that should a dance company's archives find their way to an institutional

repository, they will arrive in much better order than would otherwise be likely, and their ultimate processing can be completed in a much more timely manner. And such a model could assist music librarians and archivists in their efforts to preserve the legacy of mu sical performing organizations.

30. "Preserve's Web Site Unveiled at National Museum of Dance," afterimages, 4, no. 2 (Summer 1997): 3. The web site may still be viewed at the Internet Archive (http://www.archive.org/) by searching for the Preserve site's URL (http://preserve-inc.org) [last accessed 6 December 2010].

31. Mary Strow, "Preserve Marks Ten Years of Dance Documentation," Dance Magazine 72, no. 8 (1998) : 31. 32. "Dance Wire: Moving On Up," Dance Teacher 22, no. 9 (2000): 30. 33. "Leslie Hansen Kopp, 53, Archivist Who Focused on Preserving Dance, Is Dead," The New York Times

(June 10, 2006): 14.



Documents

PRESERVE: TEACHING ARCHIVES TO DANCE COMPANIES