Step Afrika!, or So How Do You Feel About Fire Drills?

First off, watch this video and tell me this isn’t the coolest thing you’ve seen. Trick question! You can’t! Step Afrika!, ladies and gentlemen, the premier authority on the art of stepping. Amazing people doing amazing stuff.

Orientation week is swiftly drawing to a close, which is mind-boggling to me. Me and the “fellow fellows” (ba-dumm-ching!) have been going full-tilt from morning until evening, discussing dance history and archival technique long into the night. This evening, for an example, a couple of the lovely ladies and I spent some quality time writing up a collection assessment for Step Afrika! and thinking about the future.

Out of this exercise, I’ve learned two things:

1) I enjoy disaster, contingency, and policy development planning way, way too much. Nobody should get the kind of enjoyment out of discussing fire evacuation routes that I do. It is profoundly disturbing and further proof that my brother got all the cool genes in the family.

2) That even after three days, this fellowship is doing wonders for making me think about short, medium, and long-term career goals.

Career development within the fellowship is framed in terms of four questions, which include:

-What will you accomplish (i.e. what goals have you set for yourself)?

-What can you do for your cohort?

These are some hardcore questions, all of which involve answers I’m only now articulating. After discussing the type of legacy materials at Step Afrika!, I think a brand-new career goal for myself is seeking out and approaching smaller institutions that may have incredibly niche materials to preserve. As an hono(u)rary Canadian (proud survivor graduate of UBC’s rigorous iSchool), I’d love to facilitate more interconnection between the US and Canadian dance communities. I believe that not only the art form itself, but the scholarship surrounding dance history, would take a massive leap forward if US and Canadian dance academics were willing to work together on preserving North American dance tradition.

I tend to prefer social and cultural dance over theatrical, so making sure records like the ones at Step Afrika! are not only preserved, but accessible for future generations is a mission close to my heart. I’d love to be in a position to work at non-profit rates (i.e. my fee would involve maybe supplying me with coffee?) if only to make sure these treasures don’t languish in obscurity. However, a girl’s gotta eat, and what with the Current Political/Economic Situation, finding a full-time, permanent position within an arts-based institution seems like a long-shot.

In terms of my cohort benefitting from me, I’m already trying to set up some Facebook friendships between like-minded librarians, archivists, and museum workers with my fellow dancebrarians, because in the end, I firmly believe we’ll be the ones to create our own opportunities for each other and with each other. Who knows? I’ll be able to say I knew the next leading dance scholar or archival theorist way back in the Step Afrika! days.

[Edited: 11 June, 2012 for grammar and spelling]

Dancebrarians, or an Introduction to Dance Archives

And just what, I hear you ask, o peoples of the Internet, is a dancebrarian?

Think for a moment about dancing. Not just the kind you do alone in your kitchen when Beyonce comes up on shuffle, but the entire range of dance. Ballet, modern, tap, folk dance, social dance, ballroom, latin, theatrical, sacred, poltical, and the list goes on. Now think about the types of archival materials related to dance. Not only papers and photographs like standard fonds, but also video in everything from film to tape to digital formats. Now throw in souvenir programs, ticket stubs, marketing posters, choreographic notes, musical scores, correspondence from dancers/directors, and items that don’t fit neatly into any category at all. Wrangling these collections, many of which have been sorely neglected for various reasons, takes a certain amount of patience, skill, and sheer ridiculous presumption. Yes, we can organize these collections! Yes, we can create intensive, context-rich inventories and finding aids! Yes, we can! I promise!

This is the introduction post for a newly-graduated librarian just nuts enough to take on the challenge.

Thanks to a fantastic opportunity from the Dance Heritage Coalition (DHC), I’ll be spending the next three months bouncing around the US working with performing arts collections at museums and dance companies generous enough to open their doors to an archivist invested in preserving the legacy of dance history and culture.

[Edited: 11 June, 2012 for grammar]