Scope and Content Note
The materials in the American Ballet Theatre Archive span about eight decades in documenting ballet in the United States. The collection includes paper materials, such as clippings and articles, scrapbooks, correspondence, institutional records of the company, performance programs and promotional material, photographs and posters, and dance notation and music scores. Film, videotapes, and sound recordings have been or will be transferred to the custody of the Motion picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound (MBRS) Division.
Photographs, contact sheets, and negatives comprise about a tenth of the American Ballet Theatre Archive materials. The Photographs series contains mostly black-and-white prints, along with contact sheets, a limited number of color prints, and some slides. Included in the Choreographic Works subseries are examples of many of the important ballets produced by ABT, most dating from 1944 to 2003. These include George Balanchine’s Ballet Imperial and Theme and Variations; Eugene Loring’s Great American Goof and Billy the Kid; Agnes de Mille’s Fall River Legend, The Four Marys, The Frail Quarry, and Rodeo; Jerome Robbins’s Fancy Free and Interplay; Antony Tudor’s Gala Performance, Jardin aux Lilas, The Leaves Are Fading, and Pillar of Fire. Many of the photographs represent performances, while others are rehearsal or studio shots. The subseries Individuals consists mainly of studio headshots and portraits of dancers in unidentified works. The Miscellany subseries features company shots, anniversary gala photographs (with a notable selection of images from the 35th-anniversary gala, which paired original performers with company members from 1975), contact sheets, and negatives.
For productions with extensive performance histories such as The Nutcracker, images are roughly divided into four sections representing the management periods of Lucia Chase and Oliver Smith (1945-1980), Mikhail Baryshnikov (1980-1989), Jane Hermann and Oliver Smith (1990-1992) and Kevin McKenzie (1993-present). For works with 35mm slides, they are filed after the photographs of the dance work. A large collection of photographs created by Paul B. Goode in the 1980s has been maintained in a separate box in its original order. The photographers and photography studios represented in this collection include well-known dance photographers such as Jack Mitchell, Maurice Seymour, Fred Fehl, Walter E. Owen, Martha Swope, Annie Leibovitz, MIRA, Paul B. Goode, Marty Sohl, Paul Kolnik, Richard Avedon, Gilles Larrain, Kenn Duncan, Rosalie O'Connor, Gregory Heisler, and many others.
A substantial amount of choreographic and staging notes and notation is present in the Dance Notes and Notation series. In addition to sketches and scores written with Benesh dance notation, the information includes cast and prop lists, stage plans, production and rehearsal notes, and occasionally a music score for the dance work. Where a version of a ballet repertory classic has a fully notated score, the score is often annotated with changes, other choreographic notes, or new notation is laid-in. In some cases, such as Ulysses Dove's choreography titled Serious Pleasures, specific notes about dance technique needed for a particular dance are included. For works newly commissioned or set for the first time on American Ballet Theatre, the notation sketches and other production notes provide evidence of creative process.
Note: This finding aid will be updated and expanded to include the full collection of the American Ballet Theatre Archive. This information will be added as additional series undergo full processing.