Dance Heritage Coalition (DHC) today announced a $35,000 award from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation as part of the
Knight Prototype Fund to develop “Culture Conversations,”
a prototype for linking born-digital media and related arts writing.
“The average life of a webpage is a hundred days.”
This startling statistic appeared in an article about the Internet Archive by Jill Lepore, published in
The New Yorker on January 26, 2015. Since writing about dance, along with other forms of arts criticism, now takes place mostly online, and frequently outside of well-established newspapers or magazines, the instability of webpages clearly presents a
stark challenge to the survival of today’s dance writing.
Where will scholars of the future learn about the dance of our time?
How will potential audiences be engaged by and educated about the art form?
While some online resources like the Internet Archive are saving vast amounts of web content, this content isn’t easy to find.
DHC will create a fully searchable subject-specific online site that will present dance writing and link it to streaming videos of related dance works. By linking direct documentation of performances with context and critical viewpoints, DHC will help
save the lively conversations that surround and support the creation of dance and other arts.
“We need to make sure that the 21st century has lasting voices about dance,” said Libby Smigel, DHC Executive Director. “American writers across the country told the story of modern and postmodern dance as they witnessed it. Their writing spurred audiences
to tell their own stories in letters to the editor. These print media have lasted. We hope this prototype project will make blogs and their comments and other digital dance writing last for future readers.”
“Through Culture Conversations, we hope to learn more about the potential of curated archives for preserving digital media,” said Chris Barr, Knight Foundation director for media innovation, who leads the Prototype Fund. “The tool may uncover lessons on how
other communities might save material that could be lost to the ever-changing web.”
The Knight Foundation Prototype Fund provides funding for early-stage media and information projects and is specifically designed to promote experimentation and learning. The proposal for “Culture Conversations” was chosen from over 500 applications to the
Fund. To develop and test the resource that DHC envisions, this prototype will focus on selecting recent material from the San Francisco Bay Area, a diverse and vibrant community of dance practitioners, critics, and cultural heritage organizations.
“No one has done more to protect the work and vital history of Bay Area dance than Dance Heritage Coalition,” said Dave Archuletta, executive director of Joe Goode Performance Group. “We are very excited to learn of this new endeavor to link dance writing to
video, in an effort to preserve the work of both artists and critics for future generations. For anyone who has worked in the dance field, the challenge of archiving and documenting work is all too familiar. Too often, we have allowed our work to disappear
into the ether without a trace, or to let our rare videos and critical documentation corrode in inaccessible basements. DHC has been a vital resource to Joe Goode Performance Group and many other Bay Area organizations, enabling us to protect our archives
and to make them accessible. We welcome this new initiative with excitement, and look forward to working with DHC to raise the visibility of Dance as an art form, while creating a resource for the public at large.”
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Our Plans for Culture Conversations
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Culture Conversations builds on many of Dance Heritage Coalition’s existing programs and strengths, including outreach and services to artists to help safeguard their legacies, as well as close
ties to the community of dance writers and scholars. The project builds on DHC’s long-term initiative to create an online resource for digital dance videos so that full recordings of seminal works can be viewed for study and teaching. For the project, DHC
will partner with technology consultants Dave Rice and Tessa Fallon, recognized leaders in the field of audiovisual preservation, web archiving, and web design, who have a strong commitment to digital preservation of cultural heritage. Lessons from the prototype
phase will be applied to an expansion of the resource to other regions, with the ultimate goal of creating a nationwide database of dance writing. The project will also provide a model for other arts to save their own cultural conversations.
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