Eva Ives, Interviews Editor, Metropolitan Archivist (MA): The Mark Morris Dance Group Archive, as we currently know it, was primarily advanced by Mellon grants in 2014 and 2016. Prior to these grants and this professionalization effort, do you know if there was a specific event or events that inspired the existing infrastructure before you came to the project? Can you tell us about the inception of Mark Morris Dance Group’s Archives?

Stephanie Neel, Mark Morris Dance Group Archivist (SN): The company was formed in 1980, and from the get-go, they were fortunate that quite a few of their performances were recorded because of where they were performing. The bigger venues had resident videographers, like Character Generators at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and Dennis Diamond/Video D Studios at Dance Theater Workshop (which is now New York Live Arts). Mark Morris himself prefers that the company performs to live music, so we have a large collection of live performance audio recordings over the years, too. Originally, everything was on U-Matic and Betacam and cassette, but the company migrated formats over time as needed to be able to view and listen to the material.

Prior to the Mellon-driven initiatives under which I started my job there in 2017, and some other, smaller grants that the company had to primarily inventory their audiovisual collection, the archive was used a lot by the Dance Group to restage works. The moving image component of the archive was organized quite well by Tina Fehlandt, a former dancer with the company who became the ad hoc archivist for the company after she retired from dancing and moved into more administrative and rehearsal assistant roles with the company.

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The digitization station at the Mark Morris Dance Center Archives in 2018. Photograph by Stephanie Neel.

In 2006, there was money from Save America’s Treasures to do a big digitization project. They made an effort to clean, bake, and transfer original camera tapes from the 1980s to Betacam as master tapes, and then create a VHS copy and then a DVD copy. The company made a lot of mixtapes that would compile an individual dance from various performances, so a dancer could watch a few different iterations of the dance and use it as a learning tool. If you wanted to relearn, for example, New Love Song Waltzes, which was choreographed in the early ’80s and is still performed today, someone at the organization would create a mix-tape with three different performances of New Love Song Waltzes.

When I came into the archive, I had all of these different past migration efforts, and then also all of these clips, just compiled together on a VHS tape. And we have hundreds of those! It was actually organized quite well because of all of these inventory efforts that had been made, but we had to go in and identify what the original recordings were, and that took months — a lot of grant time!

MA: That must have taken a lot of research to identify all of the various stagings, if that information wasn’t necessarily identified in the footage itself.

SN: A lot of research! The company had an old VHS deck connected to a television so we could watch the VHS versions to get familiar with what the dances looked like. By then the digital versions of dances that the company had, unless they were born-digital, were so derivative — a file made from a copy of a DVD, made from a VHS copy of a Betacam tape, which was created from the original U-Matic. The quality was not good. And these were always meant to be for mostly internal use. Once we were digitizing from the original tapes, the big task became replacing recordings around the organization with non-derivative files — such as with Marketing and the Artistic Department, who had their own stashes of usable files.

MA: Like a teaching collection?

SN: Absolutely. They do license some of their works to colleges to be performed, so it was just one tool in the restaging process. The company would also learn from current dancers in the company who knew the choreography, or they would bring in former dancers to teach choreography. So the video recording wasn’t the end-all be-all, but it was a really powerful visual aid in learning to dance. That’s why that part of the archive was actually maintained so well, and was all on-site and organized, because it’s been used since it was generated. It was a very active collection and still is.

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Teri Weksler, David Landis, and Ruth Davidson in the premiere performance run of “Championship Wrestling after Roland Barthes,” 1984. Photograph by Beatriz Schiller.

MA: Could you briefly describe your archival background and how you came to work on the Mark Morris project?

SN: I started out my undergrad education at NYU in 2006, as a Dramatic Writing major at Tisch. That lasted one year. After that I transferred to Barnard College, where I majored in Art History. I got an internship in the Exhibitions department at the International Center of Photography in 2007, my sophomore year. At the time, they didn’t have full-time archivists on staff, and the curators were given hours every week to keep up an ongoing inventory of their collections. Instead of doing anything related to exhibits, all of the curators gave me their archive inventory hours, and that’s how I even became aware that archiving was a job. I got to be in close contact with the art and learn how to handle all of these vintage prints, and I would just lose track of time looking at everything.

I ended up being a Dance minor at Barnard just because I had enough credits to do so. My focus was more on tap, not Modern or anything, and it was very fun. But I always loved going to dance performances in New York. Especially growing up in Los Angeles where you have to drive everywhere and everything is such an effort — it never ceased to amaze me that I can just walk or hop on a train and go and see this amazing performance somewhere.

I took a couple years off in between undergrad and grad school and just worked, not doing anything archives-related. I worked at Barnard as the department assistant in Alumnae Relations, which was all event planning. I tried searching the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) job board for archives jobs, and they all required a Master’s in Library Science. At the time, Barnard College had a tuition remission program, where they would pay for an employee’s degree as long as it was higher than one you currently had. So I decided to go and get my Master’s at Pratt. I ended up working full time at Barnard’s Library as the Department Assistant while I went to Pratt part-time. I was still really focused on photo archives — I had, like, no interest in anything else.

I also always like to mention: so much of my role as a project manager now on various archival projects is rooted in the five years I spent as a department assistant and office manager. Those operations skills are so important and come up again and again everywhere I go.

My first gig after grad school was a full-time internship at the Richard Avedon Foundation. Then I worked at theatre director Robert Wilson’s archive, which was my first performing arts archive job. And then I found a full-time job in the image archive at a fashion agency — I made the decision to go there purely for financial stability, but I also had a fashion photo interest. Then the job at Mark Morris came up, again on the NYFA board. All the work I found for the first couple of years after grad school was through NYFA.

MA: The background at Robert Wilson seems like it would dovetail nicely into that.

SN: It definitely did, but it was an Archive Project Manager job, and it seemed very out of my league at the time to manage a large staff and a multi-year grant-funded project. The person who eventually became my boss, the executive director of Mark Morris Dance Group, Nancy Umanoff, I remember in our interview, said, “You have none of the qualifications we’re looking for — why are you applying for this job?” And I just replied, “I have to start somewhere.”

The company had hired a consultant, Imogen Smith, before I even started working there, and she was the Acting Director of an organization called the Dance Heritage Coalition, which became the Archiving and Preservation branch of a national dance stewardship organization called Dance/USA. Essentially, we contracted them to hire contractors to digitize our AV collection and design our database. Imogen really helped me understand what I was doing. The job was basically to create the archive: define, arrange, process, digitize, and catalog it in a custom-built CollectiveAccess database. CollectiveAccess was specifically written into our grant because so many other performing arts groups used it.

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Ephemera from the Mark Morris Dance Center Archives in 2018. Photograph by Stephanie Neel.

I relied heavily on the advice of previous Pratt instructors and other dance archivists when I first started. We were a team of ten at our largest, with two full-time staff including myself and eight part-time contractors. We had two video digitization specialists because we digitized most of our moving image collection in-house, on decks that we inherited from the Dance Heritage Coalition. Another person managed flatbed scanning for works on paper, such as programs and photographs, and we hired additional staff to manage the born-digital content and migrating content from optical discs. We converted a merchandise overstock room into our one-stop archiving facility for the duration of the project. We could do this because we had a massive grant — $900,000 from the Mellon Foundation. In dance world, to get something like $10,000 is a big deal.

We also worked with four former dancers with the company to help us decide what the best versions of performances were, though that sort of informed itself based on the quality of the recordings. We started to do ad hoc oral histories with the dancers because they would watch something and it would bring up a lot of memories for them: the experience of learning a new work, being on tour, being onstage. Also just listening to them describe the choreography — Mark Morris has not been on record as having a movement language in the way other choreographers have been, but the dancers have their own internal way of describing the choreography and how the movement feels in the body. Because they are such incredible dancers, everything looks so effortless. Really, it was so important to understand what it felt like to perform a work or a certain phrase or movement, how complicated it was, how hard it was to move from one thing to another. The physicality!

MA: Did you ever encounter different interpretations that you had to marry in some way or negotiate between the dancers?

SN: For interpretations of movement, we had repeatable content specialist fields in our database. So if Tina Fehlandt said this, and June Omura said that, both descriptions were added to the record, and we didn’t establish a hierarchy for prioritizing anybody’s account. That was established based on who was hired to be a content specialist. In a perfect world, it would have been really great to work with different content specialists throughout the project period, but how we ultimately worked with content specialists was quite different from the grant proposal. If we had initially started with bringing in generations of dancers, it would have been interesting to have cross-generational discussions. We had so many ideas. The good thing is, since the archive is now digitized and functional, if at any point the company has more of an investment or wants to do more legacy projects, they have a good framework to introduce varying interpretations.

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Tina Fehlandt in “Gloria,” 1988. Photograph by Klaus Lefèbvre.

MA: As it’s at a point of completion, and more in a maintenance phase right now, what kind of users does the archive have? Is it still primarily an internal archive for the company, or do you get a lot more research requests now that it’s public-facing?

SN: It’s still used internally, but one surprising aspect of research requests that we get that I wasn’t anticipating — which is great — is they’re based on the music that Morris choreographed to. It’s a lot of people who are studying opera or ballet or musicology, so I get a lot of research requests about the music.

The main outside researchers that I get now are people who are interested in using CollectiveAccess.

MA: Interesting, are they from dance or performing arts companies?

SN: I think we’re one of the few artist/presenting companies, as opposed to a presenter, that has a publicly accessible CollectiveAccess database. A lot of word got out about the MMDG archive during the pandemic, because I did a lot of video production — I would edit together a streamable program of dances surrounding a theme, with Mark introducing the works on Zoom, and we made these accessible on YouTube as digital programming.

MA: Have digital programming and collections shifted over the past few years?

SN: CollectiveAccess has been very useful for curating digital exhibits and online programming. After the Mellon grant period ended in 2019, the only thing we had left to do as part of the grant was launch the public-facing database. I was kept on in a pseudo-permanent position in 2020 for this launch, and then in 2022 I was able to hire one other part-time person to assist with backlog processing and cataloging. He was wonderful to work with and he created another exhibit all about dance press in the 1980s. But otherwise, since 2020, it’s been a very tiny operation, and now that I only work there as a part-time contractor, it’s really in more of a maintenance phase.

MA: Thinking about this issue’s subject of “human” —we touched on this a little, when you talked about the content specialists helping to introduce a dance vocabulary into your cataloging methodology— are there any other challenges of documenting movement and choreography in the archive?

SN: Something we talk a lot about in the Dance/USA Archives and Preservation Affinity Group is developing standardizations or schema for documenting dance — if and how that can be beneficial. Different artists have different methods of documenting their choreography work and their creative processes, and have different needs and desires of both using and even defining what their archive is. For instance, Trisha Brown Dance Company has this incredible FilemakerPro database, and the way it was built is so reflective of Trisha Brown’s company and her dances because some of her dancers built it; it reflects her movement language and the way that she danced and constructed dance, which looks different from, say, Mark Morris or Merce Cunningham.

The means of establishing an archive in the dance world is still so grant- and project-based, too. There are not often permanent archivist positions on staff at dance companies. It’s a huge impediment to keeping something going, and getting to any kind of end goal. However, there are great tools that are available on Dance/USA’s website for artists and organizations to use to get started with an inventory or research different content management systems, but there’s a huge difference between looking at these tools and actually using them.

MA: That’s really cool that Dance/USA encourages an a la carte approach.

SN: Designing something that works internally and can be an external research tool that is sustainable and maintainable over time is challenging, especially without consistent staffing. In using CollectiveAccess, we wanted to build a backend that could be adaptable for other dance companies — not to be prescriptive, but to provide a “Where do we start?” framework. It’s creating space to understand the different needs and where it benefits to build off of and standardize, and where it benefits to allow for creative flexibility and autonomy.

Something else I’ve encountered in my consultant work is the concern that you need your archive to conform to a particular library or institution’s existing standards or methods of arrangement. Forging relationships and having conversations with potential repositories is a good thing, but ultimately, systems of access need to be utilizable by the people that it’s primarily serving now. People also want to do stuff with their archive, creatively, before giving it to an institution, or they might want to gain their own understanding of what they have.

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An example of a video record in CollectiveAccess, 2026.

MA: So it’s all iterative?

SN: Iterative, definitely. In a perfect world, things would be able to keep changing and evolving, and even that evolution would be documented to understand how and why we did something. That’s why this group, Dance/USA, is great — to be able to hear how other people are working. It also goes back to advocacy and how important it is to document something that is considered an ephemeral art form. There is a need for this kind of work to not be super siloed, but done as communicably as possible in order to continue advocating for this work to be funded, and for its permanence and sustainability. And to provide the time that is required to actually create systems that work and are preserving the material.

MA: Thinking about “nature” as being the dual subject of this issue — are there any ways that you’ve had to respond to climate change at all with the Mark Morris materials? The dance archive climate change incident that comes to mind for me is the Martha Graham archive with Hurricane Sandy, and being flooded in 2012 when they were in the Westbeth Building. The Mark Morris Archive is very close to the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), right?

SN: Yes, all the collections are on-site there.

MA: Is some of your disaster planning informed by whatever BAM is choosing to do because of the proximity of the collections?

SN: No, the Dance Center has its own disaster plan because it is also a school and a rehearsal space. We pay for off-site storage in Westchester through UOVO. Once we digitized all of our original tapes, we moved them there, as well as duplicate material like photographs, and we keep a set of hard drives there.

Unfortunately, the Dance Center building has experienced a lot of leaks and flooding, but the archive is in the basement (which you wouldn’t think would be safe — I say this, knocking on so much wood!) and the building used to be a bank way back in the day, so the company archives happened to be storing all of the costumes and video and artwork in what was once the vault of the bank. It was pretty safe and climate-stabilized, so the basement has always been okay and hasn’t sustained any leaks and floods. We have an HVAC system, but it’s not an archival setting, not like a traditional archive. When there have been really bad storms here, I do go and check on the archive physically. I will text our facilities director, just making sure everything’s okay.

There are some great support networks out there now. Leah Constantine, who’s at Lincoln Center, set up the NYC Archive Supply Exchange where you can list archival materials you have for donation, or supplies you’re looking for. We’ve used this in the past to list and donate, since we had a large grant and ordered a lot of things like photo archiving supplies, document boxes, acid-free folders, and paper.

One thing we did copy from BAM is that we keep a lot of our AV files in Amazon AWS S3 Glacier Deep Archive. The Dance Group, as a non-profit, gets credits every year through TechSoup that covers cloud storage with Amazon. It would be nice to do a full audit of what we’re storing and where, and do we need it, and why….Do we need to keep all of this? Is there a way to recycle and/or donate something? Another reason why a group like Dance/USA is great because we can talk about all of this.

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“Mosaic and United,” 2001. Photograph by Stephanie Berger.

MA: It’s so useful to have networks and sounding boards for ideas! For my final question: is there anything else that you’ve encountered that’s been surprising or unexpected in relating to the human experience or the natural world in processing, planning for, or even activating resources in the Mark Morris Dance Group’s archive?

SN: Yes, the experience of working with dancers on the project: having them be there, looking through photos with us, telling stories, doing the real work of identifying performances. I had no idea what to expect — and the ways in which it was really grounding and, through their emotional connection to the work, created my own emotional connection to the experience of working in a dance archive. They’re not just tapes — these are people’s real lived experiences. You can see that with anything that you’re working with, but especially with dance, it’s intimate work. You’re seeing the same people day in, day out, going on tour. It’s a very close-knit group of people. I learned things beyond Mark Morris Dance Group, too: what was dance like in the ’80s? What was dance like in New York in the ’80s? What was it like to tour in the ’80s? What cultural events go into the archives? What was it like working at Mark Morris during crises? Politics, government funding of the arts, the dance company’s perception of where they were performing around the world. In videos so blurry where you could barely see anybody, the dancers could say, “Oh, I can tell who that dancer is because I know that foot.”

Getting to learn from the dancers also shaped the way that I am prioritizing people in general as a people-forward archival practice. It’s really important to me, and I really learned all of that from this job. When the digital archive went live, I reached out to as many former dancers as I could locate contact information for just to let them know that the archive was going to be available to the public: “It’s a reflection of your career, so I still maintain, first and foremost, this work is for you — the work of the archive is for you. We would love an updated bio and headshot. There’s things that you’re tagged in, and if there’s something that you should be tagged in or if you’re incorrectly tagged, let us know and we’ll fix it.” With dance, there’s been a lot of conversation about agency, and it applies to people that I’m working with on any archive, obviously also including the staff.

MA: I could see that would come through in working with a photography archive too.

SN: Very much so!

MA: Exactly as you said, these are people’s lives, not just structured data.

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“Grand Duo,” 1993. Photograph by Tom Brazil.

SN: That’s actually what this all comes back to. You are making accessible people’s lives and memory and culture. You just want to be attuned to that, and listening. I also have to be open to making mistakes and being wrong and having to course-correct.

MA: Of course, it’s sensitive and it’s emotional and fragile, like us humans.

SN: I have learned from so many people how they practice that kind of care and slowness and attention.

MA: You’re straddling that impulse in archival work to standardize and structure knowledge, but translating that from something that is very intimate and emotional.

SN: Well, I am showing people how there is space for both of those things. Especially in project management roles, because I get really into the “This needs to happen on this schedule” mindset, but to be able to step back and also explain to stakeholders that something is going to take more time, and to be able to sometimes push back and hold that is just as much of an important process as, “Did that video go online?” Remember who this is for — it’s not for one person, it’s for a lot of people presently and in the future. Any archive is inherently a community effort in a lot of ways, especially because it belongs to that community.

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The digitization station at the Mark Morris Dance Center Archives in 2018. Photograph by Stephanie Neel.