Dance Collection Returns To Lincoln Center - Brief Article

Dance Magazine, Oct, 2001 by Lynn Garafola

After three years in temporary quarters on the far west side of midtown, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts celebrates its return to Lincoln Center with a free open house on Saturday, October 13. Public service begins two days later.

The library reopens after a $37 million renovation that partly gutted its building, home to its research collections in dance, music, and theater as well as an extensive circulating collection. Today the library is among the world's great performing arts repositories, with vast holdings of books, programs, manuscripts, videotapes, stage designs, photographs, and historic recordings.

Madeleine Nichols, curator of the Jerome Robbins Dance Division, looks forward to returning with "gusto and energy" and expects the move back to Lincoln Center to be smooth and on schedule. "There will be some disruption in service, but we will make every effort to take care of every request."

Since the library opened in 1965, the Dance Division, and especially its acclaimed Jerome Robbins Archive of the Recorded Moving Image, has grown by leaps and bounds. With nearly 40,000 items, augmented in recent years by major gifts from the Rudolf Nureyev Foundation and the Brooklyn Academy of Music as well as recordings produced by the library itself, the archive is a mecca for artists, scholars, and dance fans worldwide.

The changes in the building, designed by Polshek Partnership Architects, are far-reaching. According to Senior Vice President and Andrew W. Mellon Director of the Research Libraries William D. Walker, they include a "grand, light-filled reading room; spectacular loft-like exhibition galleries; new audiovisual stations; a vastly more efficient centralized retrieval system; expanded storage; an enhanced preservation lab; a four-fold increase in public-access computers; and a massive number of networked databases."

Not all the changes are physical. Underscoring the library's long tradition of public service, an initiative is being launched to make a large portion of its collections available online so scholars anywhere can have access. Already, says Nichols, nearly 1,000 photographs from Dance Division collections can be accessed through the Internet. "It's the beginning of an ongoing process."

More good news is that material exhibited in the library's new Donald and Mary Oenslager Gallery will also be available digitally. Both this gallery and the renovated Vincent Astor Gallery have state-of-the-art cases, flexible lighting systems, and digital connections to support audio, video, and interactive components. (A few images are online now and more will soon follow.) "Transformations," the first exhibition to open in the new galleries, focuses on the creative process. The exhibit takes a broad look at the theme and includes images of makeup and set design that make onstage changes look magically real. It also features photos and videos of productions that tell stories of transformations--like Pygmalion and Giselle. A rare lithograph of Marie Taglioni in La Sylphide illustrates the change from human to sylph.

Nichols is especially happy about the new Technology Training Center, which will offer classes on research in the performing arts for students, artists, and others. "For five 'years we have done programs like this. One was for New York City public school teachers. The Juilliard School, La Guardia High School of Music and Art, School of American Ballet, and Alvin Ailey American Dance Center are all our neighbors. They have students and incorporate research into their regular activities." She laughs. "Now what we can do is limited only by the number of hours in the day."

Visit www.nypl.org and click on "Digital Library Collections" to view online images.