As recently reported, the Woody Guthrie Archives will be moving to a new purpose built facility in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to be financed by the George Kaiser Family Foundation.  The new center, a former warehouse, which is currently being renovated, is expected to open in 2013.  New York’s loss is Oklahoma’s gain.

Carl Van Vechten photograph of Paul Taylor in George Balanchine's 'Episodes'

The Paul Taylor Dance Company announced officially today that its archives are now available to the public. The collection includes Foundation records consisting of 95 cubic feet of archives backlog and over 60 cubic feet of personal papers and artifacts from Mr. Taylor’s former West Village home.

Finding aids to the collection and other information is available online at the PTDC site and also discoverable on ArchiveGrid. The preservation project was funded through a grant from the National Historic Publications and Records Commission.

Congratulations to all!  I look forward to digging around more on the site once my login is authenticated.

Image credit: Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division, LOT 12735, no. 1085 [P&P]

You can watch the entire sequence on YouTube as well:

And I’ll let you have the fun of picking out Martha Graham in this early image from her Denishawn days, courtesy of the NYPL Digital Gallery.

Denishawn dancers at Mariarden (1922).

Suffragette Series No. 9 postcard

We don’t often make “official” announcements, but since we were asked nicely, we would like to take this moment to remind our readers who are SAA members to please vote in the online election.

Online voting in SAA’s 2011 Election closes April 11!  If you are an eligible SAA member, please vote today: https://eballot4.votenet.com/saa.

Google Houdini Doodle

Another cute Google Doodle reminded me to remind you that time is running out to catch the Houdini exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York City.

Houdini's will poster, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, POS - MAG - .H37, no. 2 (C size)

Billed as “the first art exhibition in an American art museum,” Houdini: Art & Magic brings together archival documentation and the responses of contemporary artists to the legendary performer.

Materials have been drawn from both private and public collections, including the Library of Congress, which includes an interesting description of the dispersal of the Houdini collection in its online catalog record for this particular item.  The LC note also relates the story of Harry Houdini’s brother, Theodore Hardeen (whose presence was notably absent from the exhibition if I recall correctly — but, then again, it was pretty crowded when I visited and I’m not sure I managed to read through all the captions).

Although the show closes in New York this Saturday, you will have a chance to catch up with it again throughout the year as it tours to two venues on the West Coast, before winding up in Wisconsin (where it all began).

Kudos to the Jewish Museum for organizing some of the most consistently innovative and engaging exhibitions on performing artists over the past few years!

West Fourth Street looking west

I don’t know about you, but Women’s History Month has gotten off to a rocky start for me.

For example, it was disheartening earlier this week to read the sad news that political activist and book artist, Suze Rotolo, had passed away.  Although the full-length obituary by William Grimes that appeared in the New York Times was a wide-ranging and sensitive account of what sounds like a life well-lived, the title of the condensed version that appeared on the Arts Beat blog simply read, ” Suze Rotolo, Muse and Girlfriend to Bob Dylan, Dies at 67.”

A. Gardel postcard for Fête du Narcisse in Montreux, Switzerland (1928)

In what makes an interesting side note and a nice addendum to the article on the Diaghilev exhibition in the Winter issue of Performance!, history was made recently when the first known film of Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes company was identified by Victoria & Albert Museum Dance Curator, Jane Pritchard, after she was directed to it by Susan Eastwood of the London Ballet Circle.  The 1928 festival footage, which had been posted on the British Pathé historical archive Web site, includes a brief rehearsal (one hopes) clip, which is believed to show Serge Lifar and the company in a sequence from Les Sylphides. Diaghilev, of course, was adamant about not allowing his company to be filmed, which makes this discovery all the more exciting.

Can spring really be far off now?

In the meantime, you can view the clip for yourselves here.

Image credit:  Digital ID” Fel_018135_RE, ETH Bibliothek Zürich, Bildarchiv

So much for my November promise of more frequent postings, but just a quick announcement to let you all know that the Winter issue of the newsletter of the SAA Performing Arts Roundtable is now available online:

http://www.archivists.org/saagroups/performart/newsletter/PArtsNews2010win.pdf

The issue features an article about the Diaghilev exhibition at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum, as well as interviews with New York City Ballet dancer Ellen Bar (about her film adaptation of Jerome Robbins’ 1958 ballet, N.Y. Export: Opus Jazz) and Brooklyn Academy of Music archivist Sharon Lerner.