Creating Metadata by Hand: Musings on the Limits of Automation in Archives

This post was written by Alice Griffin, who has worked in La MaMa’s Archives since November as the Metadata/Digitization Assistant. She’s leaving La MaMa at the end of July to pursue a Master’s degree at the Pratt Institute’s School of Information. We asked her to offer some reflections about her time at La MaMa. (We will miss her terribly and wish her all the best in her next adventure.)

“But… a computer could just do your job.” The first time I heard this remark it made me pause, seriously question the future of my career, and turn to my professional mentors for reassurance. Now, after being in this position for seven months, I feel confident that my position is not so easily automated away.

In the La MaMa Archives/Ellen Stewart Private Collection, I am the metadata/digitization assistant. My job is to add digital media to corresponding catalog records on the fantastically vast La MaMa Archives Digital Collections site, created by several catalogers and Project Manager, Rachel Mattson, over the past three years. As a result of this project, researchers all over the world can now see the photographs and programs that were initially just minimally described. This project of digitization requires a scanner, some metadata know-how, creativity, patience, and lots of time. The La MaMa Archives does have a lovely professional scanner, my metadata knowledge continues to grow, and I do have a considerable amount of patience. However, time is running short as the grant I was hired on comes to an end. I have added hundreds of digital objects to the digital collections since November 2016, but it feels as though my job has just started.

Alice Griffin, a human, at her desk in the La MaMa Archives.

So, why can’t a computer just do my job? A computer is already helping me with many aspects of this task. The scanner I use to digitize photographs, programs, flyers, postcards, and other objects is connected directly to my computer and once I choose settings and file name, there’s not much more to do except click “scan.” Once I have my preservation (TIFF) files and access (JPEG) files created in Photoshop, it’s just a matter of an easy drag and drop to initiate Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP) through Cyberduck to store them on the La MaMa Archives server or upload them to our digital collections site through a CollectiveAccess-powered backend. I also manually add metadata: a paragraph describing the material at hand, links to Library of Congress Naming Authorities and Subject Headings, information about the storage location and preservation needs of the object, and other bits to make it as complete a record as possible. But in the era of self-driving cars, why do we need a human to do this work? Even though I don’t think anyone would accuse a surgeon of obsolescence because of the rise of robotics in the operating room, I think this is a fair question and I would like to attempt a response.

Simply put, a computer does not yet exist that automates all aspects of my workflow; human labor and expertise are always involved. The labs page of the Stanford Libraries website lists the equipment that used for digitization projects and the rate of digitization. The robotic-book scanner can scan 4 times the number of pages in an hour as someone operating the manual book scanner. So, why even continue to pay student workers to do that manual work? The Stanford Libraries’ robotic-book scanners are not safe for fragile bound materials, and therefore careful human hands are necessary. Of course, book scanners are being engineered to have that gentle touch. In her article “The Hidden Faces of Automation,” Lily Irani mentions a “patented machine” engineered to turn the pages of rare books for digitization. But even this kind of machine was not fully automated; it “housed a worker who flipped the pages in time to a rhythm-regulated soundtrack” (34).

In 2006, the System for the Automated Migration of Media Assets (SAMMA), a system of robotics, hardware, and software, began being sold as a way for institutions to transfer media from obsolete formats to digital files in a streamlined and cost-effective manner. Three factors make SAMMA unusable for my project. First, I am not working with or digitizing La MaMa’s audiovisual materials (for some information about La MaMa’s awesome audiovisual materials, see Rachel Mattson’s blog post here). Second, SAMMA does not create metadata about the content of the materials, such as who or what is depicted. And third, SAMMA’s cost-effectiveness is relative; the costs for a community archives, such as La MaMa, to use tools like SAMMA or the book scanners mentioned above would be prohibitive.

While robotics, hardware, and software are useful, there is still always human skill and precision involved. Before even beginning to scan I must make decisions about whether each object is appropriate for digitization – are there privacy or rights concerns? And if there are duplicates of an object, I must choose the best copy to digitize. When scanning begins it is not just a matter of sticking a stack of papers into the automatic feed on a photocopier, or placing a book or videotape into a robotic scanner. Materials I work with must be handled carefully so that they do not tear or crinkle. Additionally, in order to fully describe an object I am digitizing, I must fill in several fields to physically characterize the object or objects: how big is the object? How many duplicates are there? Is it color or black and white? Throughout this work, the materials must be handled with care, one page/photograph/poster at a time. We want these originals to last because while digital files generally allow for easier access, they do not necessarily stand the test of time. Original photographic prints, negatives, and papers cannot just go in the trash once you have a digital surrogate.

Object record for production photographs from the 1985 production of The Cotton Club Gala [OBJ.1985.0307] as viewed on La MaMa’s digital collections website.

Adding metadata also requires a human mind. The description field, in particular, even requires some creativity because, as a cataloger, I have to think about how different people will use the catalog. How will La MaMa archives staff search the catalog versus the La MaMa marketing or development staff? How does an academic researcher use the catalog versus an artist that has performed at La MaMa before? A human cataloger can take advantage of these nuances of use to create a more robust, user-oriented catalog in a way that a rigid computer program simply can’t. To give an example, I asked myself these questions while cataloging photographs from the 1985 production of “Cotton Club Gala,” directed by Ellen Stewart with music by Aaron Bell and choreography by Larl Becham. The description field is a beautiful thing because it allows you to tell the researcher in full sentences about the object: what production it’s from, who is depicted, anything of note about the object, or even if you’re not sure of the date. So, in the case of the Cotton Club Gala photographs, I made sure to address all these users in the description:

This folder contains eight photographic prints, five of which are duplicates, from “Cotton Club Gala,” directed by Ellen Stewart and produced at La MaMa in 1985. This folder also includes a typewritten letter on Vogue letterhead from assistant to Amy Gross, David DeNicolo, to La MaMa archivist Doris Pettijohn thanking her for letting them look at the photographs.

Valois Mickens is depicted in the third image.

The description is not long nor is it complicated, but it provides information in a readable format. There is information about prints and duplicates for archives staff; it identifies the production as directed by Ellen Stewart, which means it could be an important production for marketing use; for an academic researcher the whole description, including the letter from Vogue, because it gives context for the objects; an artist searching the catalog might also appreciate the whole description, or they might find information about who worked on the production and who is depicted more interesting. The description field is different for every object record, and therefore requires flexibility, creativity, and brevity to produce a paragraph that contextualizes the object without overwhelming the user.

The La MaMa Archives holds many one-of-a-kind materials; for some productions, the programs, photographs, or posters here may be the only remaining evidence that they took place. In this way, the La MaMa catalog does not just hold information gleaned from other sources, but it is a producer of information itself. When a researcher or an archives staff member notices a mistake in the catalog we usually need to consult our own material to solve the problem, a Google search will not help us. For example, when digitizing photographic prints for the 1965 and 1967 productions of The Sand Castle, written by Lanford Wilson and directed by Marshall W. Mason, I noticed that the performers depicted in the photographs weren’t matching up with the production dates that were handwritten on the back of the photographs. The La MaMa catalog was the only source I could turn to fix the confusion. I cross-referenced performers listed in the programs with who was depicted in the image and compared sets and costumes for both productions. In this way the La MaMa catalog functions as repository and generator of the history of off off-Broadway.

Production photograph from the 1967 production of The Sand Castle [OBJ.1965.0216]. (This item was originally cataloged, in error, as documenting the 1965 production.)

While my position may appear to be a solitary one, it does require person-to-person interaction at a level that a computer cannot do. I am in regular contact with James D. Gossage, a photographer who documented many of La MaMa’s early shows. His own files and memories have corrected and enriched the catalog and in March 2017, Gossage donated programs, a poster, and some photographs that the Archives did not have before. He gave us the rights to three of the photographs [OBJ.1967.0349], which depict Tom Eyen, a playwright and director of many La MaMa shows and probably best known for writing Dreamgirls. These are beautiful portraits with dramatic light and shadow and the La MaMa Archives is excited to have them. It’s possible that Gossage felt comfortable passing along these prints into our care because, despite some errors in the catalog, he could see the work that we put into describing these materials to the best of our knowledge and ability. The humanity (and therefore error) present in the La MaMa Digital Collections website, reflects the deep humanity in the artists and their productions that the photographs, programs, correspondence, and posters document.

Portrait of Tom Eyen by James D. Gossage, circa 1967. [OBJ.1967.0349]

No, my position cannot be simply automated away, but I’m sure I will continue to field questions about my position’s relevance. And while not receiving proper recognition for my work is mostly an inconvenience or a blow to my ego, it does reveal a widespread misunderstanding, or even misrecognition, of the mechanisms behind automation and making information available on the Internet. I am glad to see that there is growing scholarship on how obscuring the connection between human beings and automation deeply affects individuals and communities economically and emotionally. There is too much to delve into here in this blog post, but I would like to suggest some further reading. First, Safiya Umoja Noble’s article “Google Search: Hyper-visibility as a Means of Rendering Black Women and Girls Invisible,” examines how Google search results are not separate from human influence, but are in fact embedded in racist and sexist stereotypes that benefit advertisers. This aspect of Google is mostly ignored or glossed over. Noble reminds us that “the results that surface on the web in commercial spaces like Google are not neutral processes—they are linked to human experiences, decision-making, and culture.” Another article that reveals the human influence behind a process commonly thought of as automated is Sarah Roberts’ “Commercial Content Moderation: Digital Laborers’ Dirty Work.” Roberts exposes the human labor behind the moderation of user-generated content and how these workers impact the content they screen while that content also takes a toll on their well-being.

The third article I want to recommend here Lily Irani’s short piece “The Hidden Faces of Automation.” In it, Irani explains how the “data janitors” behind “cultural data work,” such as “transcribing small audio clips, putting unstructured text into structured database fields, and ‘content-moderating’…user-generated content” (37), are so easily and consistently undervalued and underpaid. Irani then asks two very important questions that I would like to highlight here: “What would computer science look like if it did not see human-algorithmic partnerships as an embarrassment, but rather as an ethical project where the humans were as, or even more, important than the algorithms? What would it look like if artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction put the human care and feeding of computing at the center rather than hiding it in the shadows?” I think Irani brings up a remarkable point in these questions. Even though technology fields are booming, computers continue to be limited by the limitations of humans; limitations of technical knowledge, sure, but also limitations of empathy for human workers. Perhaps technologists need to embrace this level of social responsibility in their work. It is not a failure to admit we still need to do things by hand; rather, this honesty allows light to be shed on a previously concealed issue.

Suggestions for further reading:

• Irani, Lily. “The Hidden Faces of Automation.” XRDS, Winter 2016, 34-37.
• Noble, Safiya Umoja. “Google Search: Hyper-visibility as a Means of Rendering Black Women and Girls Invisible.” InVisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture, Issue 19. http://ivc.lib.rochester.edu/google-search-hyper-visibility-as-a-means-of-rendering-black-women-and-girls-invisible/
• Roberts, Sarah T. “Commercial Content Moderation: Digital Laborers’ Dirty Work.” In The Intersectional Internet: Race, Sex, Class and Culture Online, edited by S. U. Noble and B. Tynes, 147-159. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2016. https://works.bepress.com/sarahtroberts/1/

Endangered Data and the Arts

Last month, from April 17-22, 2017 archivists, librarians, records managers, educators, and researchers marked the first-ever Endangered Data Week (EDW). Designed to highlight and provoke discussion about threats to the public availability of federal and local government datasets, the week featured a wide range of events – Twitter chats, data rescue harvests, data storytelling, data-scraping workshops, letter writing meet-ups, and panel discussions. Over the course of six days, approximately 17 universities and 8 professional organizations convened more than 50 events. As the organizer of a new Digital Library Federation (DLF) working group on Government Records Transparency and Accountability, I helped to organize the project and worked to convene a webinar on the subject of the Freedom of Information Act that formed a part of the week’s events.

EDW was originally the brainchild of Michigan State University’s Brandon Locke, and was sponsored by the DLF in partnership with DataRefuge, the Mozilla Science Lab, the Council on Library and Information Resources, the National Digital Stewardship Alliance. “There is good reason for concern about the ongoing availability and collection of data by US government agencies,” Locke wrote in a recent post in Perspectives (the online Newsmagazine of the American Historical Association). Not only has the new presidential administration signaled its opposition to open data and data-collecting initiatives (“most notably those concerning climate change”), Congress has also recently taken steps to restrict public records access. For instance, federal legislation has been introduced that would prohibit recipients of federal funds from creating, using, or providing access to geospatial databases that track “racial disparities or disparities in access to affordable housing” – language that, as Locke notes, could “hinder researchers’ efforts to “analyze changes in neighborhood demographics, urban development, policing, and the impact of redlining and other discriminatory housing policies.”

You might be wondering why an archivist who spends her days working in a performing arts archives is so invested in questions of government transparency, the Freedom of Information Act, and endangered data. I can think of a dozen ways to explain the source of my interest – but here I’d like to talk about just one of them: public records and data are very important to artists, arts organizations, arts journalists, arts funders, and arts scholars.

On one hand, arts organizations routinely rely on public data and records to inform their practice and to justify the importance of their work; public data informs arts administrators’ work in the areas of audience development, fundraising, public relations, infrastructure-building, and advocacy. To take a very hard-boiled example: government-collected data is routinely used to “quantify the broad ‘impact’ of the arts and culture sector in financial and programmatic terms” (as the cultural think-tank CreativeEquity recently put it). In other words, by documenting the ways in which arts programs drive local economies, contribute to youth development, and lead to lower crime rates, arts advocates give government agencies a bread-and-butter rationale for spending public money on arts programs. The 2015 Center for Urban Futures’ report on Creative New York, for example, relied on public data to document its finding that New York City’s economic engine is powered by artists and the creative sector. This finding has, in turn, been used to advocate for increased public spending on the arts in New York City. Funding for small arts organizations is often dependent on this kind of advocacy.

Funding for my home institution, La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, has been shaped over the years by these sorts of data-driven advocacy efforts – as well as by data collection efforts designed to streamline government services. In the 1970s, for instance, La MaMa received part of its funding through the Comprehensive Employment Training Act (CETA). Established in 1973 by the Nixon administration (yes, that Nixon administration), CETA was a block grant project established in response to public data indicating that funding for “job training” and “workforce development” was fragmented and duplicative, and thus inefficient. Individual states could decide how to spend their CETA funds; and New York State decided to give a portion of that money to arts organizations. With CETA funding, La MaMa incubated several ensembles that were responsible for staging more than 35 events (plays and concerts) between 1978 and 1980.

Program for “3rd CETA Chamber Concert” (1978) (From La MaMa’s digital collections.)

Although thesedays La MaMa is more likely to get funding from private foundations or state agencies than from federal job training initiatives, our ability to fund our programming continues to depend on the availability of a wide range of public data.

For instance, like many other non-profits, we rely on data from sources such as 990-PFs – tax documents that private foundations must file with the Internal Revenue Service, which contain the names of foundations’ officers and grantees – in our fundraising and cultivation efforts. Although data found in 990-PFs is not government-created, it is made public due to a government mandate. It serves as a critical resource for a wide range of arts organizations and their allies, who use it to conduct prospect research, to understand the broader funding landscape, and to find new potential donors. It also supports a broad base for fiscal transparency, oversight, and public conversations about tax policy, private philanthropy, and funding for the arts. This kind of transparency enables us as a city and a nation to ask questions like: Who is giving to the arts? How has that changed over time? Why? (And so on.)

Of course, public records and data also serve as essential tools for scholars seeking to write about the arts in social and historical context. Scholars of the history of modern dance, or the rise of video art, or the role of the arts in the life of American cities (among other topics) all rely heavily on government-created records in their work.[1] Examples of the creative uses to which arts-engaged scholars have put public records abound. But for the sake of brevity, consider just one – Robin D.G. Kelley’s masterful biography of Thelonious Monk. In his effort to portray the life and work of this perennially misunderstood, incandescent musician, Kelley makes powerful use of land and property deeds, birth, death, and marriage records, court testimony, Selective Service records, the Census, as well as Monk’s FBI file, the annual report of the New York City Department of Corrections, and an array of other documents. Indeed, the public record becomes a rich source of evidence for the biography’s most important thematic frame: that Monk’s life and work reflected — and remixed— the idea of freedom in African-American history and culture. “Thelonious Monk’s music is essentially about freedom,” Kelley argues. In one early section of the book, Kelley does a deep dive into the public record to trace Monk’s family’s experiences with enslavement and liberty in the US over the course of a century. After locating Monk’s Great-Grandfather John Jack, born in 1797, from a combination of Census records (including the 1860 Schedule of “Slave Inhabitants of Sampson County”) and property records (including a deed of gift which transferred ownership of Monk’s Great Aunt Chaney from one slaveholder to another), Kelley learns from the Census of 1870 that Monk’s grandfather Hinton Cole, born into slavery, learned to read and write shortly after emancipation. Throughout, Kelley demonstrates that if Monk’s music was “essentially about freedom,” it wasn’t an accident. He had “inherited…a deeply felt understanding” of the topic “from those who came before him.” This foregrounding sets the stage for the rest of Kelley’s account of the pianist’s life and work.[2]

Excerpt, “Index of the Disappeared.”

Finally, open data and records also comprise important source material for working artists. The public record served as an important basis, for instance, for last year’s hit Broadway musical Hamilton. (Creator Lin-Manuel Miranda has often discussed the historical and archival material upon which he based the show.) But creative engagement with government documents is hardly new, and the list of artists who have used public documents and data in their work is very, very long. In his landmark Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real‑Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971, for instance, Hans Haacke used public records to chronicle “the fraudulent activities of one of New York City’s largest slumlords over the course of two decades.” Visual artists Mariam Ghani and Chitra Ganesh also used public records in their Index of the Disappeared project, which considered the “difficult histories of immigrant, ‘Other’ and dissenting communities in the U.S” after 9/11. And in the 1980s, the activist art collective Gran Fury deployed government data in the silkscreened posters they wheat-pasted across New York City. A poster they created in 1988, for instance, featured an image of a baby doll and text that read: “One in every sixty one babies in New York City is born with AIDS or born HIV antibody positive. So why is the media telling us that heterosexuals aren’t at risk? Because these babies are black. These babies are Hispanic.” In addition to functioning as complex aesthetic works in their own right, each of these projects contributed to wide-ranging public conversations about urgent social issues.

Poster by Gran Fury. (Screen-grab from ICP)

For good reasons, this year’s Endangered Data Week focused on the importance of government data for environmental scientists, social scientists, and humanities researchers. Such scholars and their publics have a great deal to lose when government agencies can’t or don’t collect data about weather patterns and housing discrimination, among other information. But artists and their audiences also rely heavily on publicly accessible government data. It is hard to know for sure all the ways that the data upon which arts-engaged individuals and groups rely are threatened. And we must always consider the ways in which public data collection might inform more widespread government surveillance of civilians. But government data initiatives contribute to the well-being of a cross-section of people – including artists. And if we want to ensure that creative practice can endure – and can continue to inform public conversations about history, politics, and contemporary life – we need to fight for the continued existence of a robust culture of data transparency and accountability.

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[1] See, e.g. Naima Prevots, Dance for Export: Cultural Diplomacy and the Cold War (Wesleyan, 1999);  Kathy High, Sherry Miller-Hocking, and Mona Jimenez, eds., The Emergence of Video Processing Tools (University of Chicago, 2014); and Hillary Miller, Drop Dead: Performance in Crisis, 1970s New York (Northwestern University Press, 2016).

[2] Robin D.G. Kelley, Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original (Free Press, 2009), pp. 2-14 and 463-467.

Digital Collections Treasure Hunt

Maybe you’re thinking: I want to search La MaMa’s new digital collections site, but I don’t know where to begin. Or maybe you’re a history buff dying for some clues to the fascinating secrets of downtown New York’s past. Or maybe you just like a good challenge. Whatever your needs, we got you covered – with our new Digital Collections Treasure Hunt! And its a pretty rewarding challenge: there are hundreds of amazing, little-known stories buried in La MaMa’s archives.

So far, no one–even La MaMa’s most knowledgeable insiders–have been able to answer all of these questions without turning at least once to a keyword search in our Digital Collections.

Email rachel [at] lamama [dot] org for the answer key.

1. How many times did La MaMa move between 1961 and 1969?   

• Never
• Once a year
• 4 times

2. Which playwright dedicated a 1969 La MaMa production of his work to the Stonewall Rebellion?

3. Which member of the Black Panthers staged several plays at La MaMa in the 1970s?

4. Why did the American Indian Theatre Company change its name to the Native American Theatre Ensemble? (Hint: the answer is in a program for a 1973 La MaMa production)

5. Who performed alongside “The Mell-o White Boys” at La MaMa in 1984?

6. What was the first La MaMa show to feature Nicky Paraiso (Programming Director/Curator for the Club and La MaMa Moves!) as a performer?

7. Which of the following was not one of the plays that the Great Jones Rep performed?

• “The Iliad”
• “As You Like It”
• “Medea”

8. Name two Japanese theater makers whose work appeared on La MaMa’s stages before 1985.

9. Which actor from La MaMa’s 1969 production of Adrienne Kennedy’s a “Rats Mass” (directed by Seth Allen) went on win a Tony Award?

Be Kind Rewind: Setting Up A Film Rewind at La MaMa

       This Spring I have been interning at the La MaMa Archives while I complete my first year in NYU’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation program. When I first met Rachel, we discussed a few potential projects for the semester. One idea involved La MaMa’s collection of 16mm film, which had been catalogued by previous intern Genevieve Havemeyer-King. Unfortunately, the films couldn’t be inspected thoroughly at that time because La MaMa didn’t have a film rewind. But the archives needs a better record of the content of the films, how the images look, and which films should be prioritized for more long-term preservation. I thought the project sounded perfect for me.

        Very early on, Rachel warned me that working in community archives comes with its own special set of challenges. Unsurprisingly, funding is at the top of that list, and with La MaMa’s limited resources, I was tasked to get a rewind set up at virtually no cost to the archive. There are many little things that go into properly inspecting film. Ideally, I would need lint-free gloves, cloths to remove dust, isopropyl alcohol for cleaning, a spring clamp to keep the reel secure on the shaft, a light box to illuminate the film, and a loupe to magnify it. Most of these are inexpensive items, which we purchased from online retailers. And I found that I could just use my iPad as a light box. But we still needed the most important film-inspection equipment: the film rewind bench. Kelly Haydon, a Preservationist at Bay Area Video Coalition, had donated a pair of rewinds to La MaMa Archives last year. Rachel and I planned to make our own bench by screwing these rewinds into a wood plank, then clamping it to a table. But when I got a look at the set, it was clear they weren’t ready – they were missing handles and shafts (Shafts are the rods that the film reel slides onto for viewing).

The donated pair of rewinds

        So I began my search for the missing parts. The rewinds we had were produced by the Hollywood Film Company, which is still in business, but multiple requests for a quote on spare parts were never returned. I spent a lot of time browsing eBay, but when you have no money, sometimes the best option is to ask your friends for help. I don’t yet know that many people in the archiving community, but an email sent out to the AMIA Listserv garnered several kind responses. One man actually sent us a pair of shafts free of cost (Thanks Danny Kuchuck!). I am quickly learning the benefit of having a community of archivists to turn to.

        As I worked on this project, I also spent time on other tasks in the archives, but after several weeks, I still hadn’t had any luck acquiring the right kind of handles for the rewind. It was admittedly turning into a frustrating situation. I took a week off to go on a class trip to the Library of Congress’s Audiovisual Conservation Center, and everywhere I looked I saw perfectly good film rewinds. I must have seen fifty of them, each one taunting me, reminding me that I didn’t even have one to work with. Then I got an email from Rachel:

“OK you’ll never believe what just happened- i found a pair of handles for the rewinds. apparently Kelly DID give me handles when she gave me the rewinds. and, er, she also gave me (wait for it): SHAFTS. i found all the hardware hidden in a secret location i had forgotten about.

ACK! so this is exciting and also annoying. sorry! and hooray!?”

        I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry, but I ended up laughing. I wish that I could have been there to see her reaction when she realized we had the missing parts.

        As soon as I got back to La MaMa, Rachel and I got to work. The two pieces of the rewind needed to be secured to a flat surface, roughly two feet apart, so Rachel and I went down to the basement, found four screws, and drilled the rewinds into a plank of wood. We brought it back up to our office and clamped the board to a table using a pair of C-clamps. This has become my workspace.

Our imperfect, but functioning rewind bench

After a month of ups and downs simply trying to set up a rewind, I can’t believe how quickly everything came together when I returned from my trip. I couldn’t be upset that we had the parts the whole time, because that time turned into a valuable learning experience. My first internship could have gone a variety of ways, and I feel so grateful to be in a place where my ideas and opinions are welcome, and where the work I do will actually matter. The final result of our rewind isn’t perfect, but it will do the job, and I couldn’t be happier. 

Now let’s look at some film.

– Caroline Roll

It works!

List of the items we acquired for the film rewind bench:

Rewinds – Donated ($0)

Shafts – Donated ($0)

Handles – Donated ($0)

Spring Clamp – eBay ($25)

Wood – Found at La MaMa ($0)

Clamps – Found at La MaMa ($0)

Microfiber cloth – B&H, purchased used ($3)

Lint-free gloves – B&H ($5)

Loupe, B&H ($5)

Split reel – found in La MaMa archives ($0)

iPad – used my own ($0)

Total Cost: $38

The Little Elephant Is Dead (La MaMa, May 1979)

In spring 1979, cities across the United States celebrated “Japan Today,” an international symposium on Japanese culture organized by The Japan Society with grants from the National Endowment for Humanities and the Japan Foundation, among other organizations with an interest in cultural exchange between the US and Japan.  The Japan Society coordinated the events held in New York, which included panels, film screenings, exhibitions of Japanese art, courses on traditional Japanese art, and performances of Japanese plays, dance, and music. These events included a production at La MaMa—the Abe Studio’s (listed as “The Kobo Abe Theater Troupe” in “Japan Today’s” promotional materials) An Exhibition of Images: The Little Elephant Is Dead from May 14th to 18th.  (New York Times C24)

Both sides of a flyer advertising The Little Elephant Is Dead. Courtesy of La MaMa Archives (OBJ.1979.0103).

Given La MaMa’s history of showcasing Japanese directors, the venue was a natural fit for the Abe Studio. La MaMa hosted about one experimental Japanese play every year throughout the 1970s, beginning in 1970 with The Golden Bat (by Higashi Yutaka) and La Marie Vision (by Terayama Shūji). Little Elephant was performed at the John F. Kennedy Performing Arts Center (May 8th-12th) before relocating to La MaMa for the next week of performances.

Uncredited production photograph. Courtesy of La MaMa Archives (OBJ.1979.0105).

The “Japan Today” celebration tour of Little Elephant marked a shift in how Abe was understood as a writer and artist in the States. Following the translation of his novel The Woman in the Dunes to English in 1964 and the success of its film adaptation directed by Teshigahara Hiroshi, Western readers and critics quickly recognized Abe’s significance in contemporary Japanese literature. The Little Elephant Is Dead, however, marked the first performances of Abe’s theatre in America. Visiting six cities that were a part of the “Japan Today” celebration, the Abe Studio introduced American audiences to the theatrical method Abe had been honing since his playwriting debut The Uniform (New York Times Magazine 33). Perhaps conscious of audiences’ expectation of complex characterizations and dialogue from reading his novels, the press materials for The Little Elephant Is Dead seem to dispel these expectations and preface Abe’s theatre as an entirely different genre of work. A press release written on behalf of “Japan Today” from March 12, 1979 sells the performance on its dream-like images rather than emphasizing Abe’s literary prowess:

In the play, Abe fully uses the bodies and language of his actors, which together with his own synthesized music and projections makes for a satisfying expression of unique art form…The accompanying dialogue, which is sparse, also suggests a series of merging and dissolving images through the poetic association of one phrase with the next. The ultimate effect is one of a dream which communicates intense vitality.

Abe’s first play to tour in the US was also the last of his playwriting career. Without knowledge of how Abe’s playwriting had evolved in the decades prior to Little Elephant, the contrast between Abe’s literature and his theatre must have been shocking to his American fans. While his novels frequently use dream-like imagery to immerse the reader in the bizarre and nightmarish situations his protagonists face, the imagery of his plays occupied a much more important role in the work in lieu of a traditional narrative to drive the performance. Accordingly, in the press lead-up to Little Elephant‘s NYC run, Abe presented the play as a focused exercise in image creation. “My intention is that the play’s dream images—like the image of the little elephant in the play–remain mysterious and unexplained,” Abe told the New York Times Magazine in an article published two weeks to the La MaMa performances (New York Times Magazine 84).

Men carry “the dream” onto the stage. Uncredited photograph. Courtesy of La MaMa Archives (OBJ.1979.0105).

To create the images of Little Elephant, the Abe Studio primarily used fabric to create dynamic set pieces and characters. In the opening scene, a large cloth spread across the stage rises and undulates. The exact mechanisms of this movement are unclear due to Abe’s commitment to describe images in his script rather than explain how they were to be made. Because of his writing style, imagining the stage using the script and limited photograph documentation is a considerable task. Abe’s script, translated by Hideo Levy, provides insight into how Abe might have intended audiences to understand his cloth creations. As much as the script is an instruction on how to perform Little Elephant, it is also a document of Abe’s process. Rather than an object of physical manipulation by actors, Abe describes the cloth is a living being:

The cloth dreams. Lifting an orange-gleaming face, it rises and, panting, grows supporting pillars and turns into a great curtain. The curtain breathes, giving off a flourescent [sic] light, and dreams of the shadows cast by the many lives which have passed before it. Yes, it dreams of the many visions seen inside it.

As the play progresses, both anthropomorphic and cloth-like characters converse about the nature of dreams while the clothed-over stage shifts around them. Elephants and dreams of elephants are repeatedly mentioned and analyzed by the play’s characters as they confront tangential obstacles and enigmas. These scenes include a hunt for a suitcase filled with light, a plant called shellweed that makes you dream of fish, a “pseudo-fish” dying and coming back to life, and a wrestling match that results in the wrestlers losing their desire to fight and revolting against their referee. Each individual scene introduces new combinations of characters working toward reaching an abstract philosophical conclusion about the situations they face. In the last few scenes which take place in a mock court, the motif of the little elephant becomes the center of conversation:

Cloth E: Something like that could only be an illusion! It would never be in Japan in the first place.

Cloth F: But elephant fossils have been found in Japan too.

The dream: Three to six!

Cloth E: It was extinct before man ever lived here. It’s none of our responsibility.

The dream: Seven to eight!

Cloth F: But the elephant as an idea arrived in Japan along with Buddhism.

Cloth E: So you’re telling me you recognize it—the way it hangs about like that?

Cloth F: I don’t recognize it, but I can’t ignore it either.

Cloth E: It’s started to rot.

Notably, this exchange is the only scene in which Abe attempts to connect our reality to the dream world that his characters inhabit. While the play is filled with allusions to earthly animals, it is devoid of proper nouns and places. As far as I can tell the events of Abe’s dreamworld do not serve as an allegory for a real world crisis. In my opinion this is one of the text’s greatest strengths. Because the play lacks a coherent message, the bizarre turns of the script do not read as forced. Instead, Little Elephant uses these turns to thoroughly explore the slipperiness of dreams and human concepts for its own sake. Abe comes closest to expressing an explicit message in the penultimate scene, when the words “DON’T FEED THE ANIMAL” are projected upon the ground-cloth (this time inflated into a spherical bulge).

The ground-cloth swells. Uncredited photograph. Courtesy of La MaMa Archives (OBJ.1979.0105).

Reading the script for The Little Elephant Is Dead, I wondered about Abe’s process and how he put together such an eclectic set of images. Thankfully, I discovered an interview that answered some of my questions. A year before the “Japan Today” festival, the Japan Society asked Donald Keene, one of the world’s most prolific scholars and translators of Japanese literature, to interview Abe Kōbō for their newsletter. They met at the Keiō Plaza Hotel in Tokyo, where Keene observed “not only the sound of Abe munching peanuts but the celestial strains of a harp being played in the distance, a feature of the elegant club.” (Keene 190) The transcript of the interview was later reprinted in Keene’s anthology, The Blue-eyed Tarōkaja. Keene opened the conversation by asking Abe what led Abe to start writing plays, to which Abe replied “it was an accident” (190). His first play The Uniform was written the night before the deadline for a short story requested by a magazine. Desperate to complete the story, Abe admits,”it occurred to me that it might be easier to work out something if all I had to do was write dialogue, and I didn’t have to go to the trouble of writing descriptions and the rest.” (190)

As Abe became more comfortable writing for the stage he began to focus on the images he presented on stage rather than dialogue: “Basically I had come to feel that writing a play and staging it were almost the same thing.” (191) By the time Abe started writing plays, he had already published several novels and a number of short stories. Experimenting in this new format, Abe desired to present experiences that he could not express effectively in prose. In my view, his desire to experiment with wordlessness and breathtaking images is directly related to his familiarity with words and how to use them effectively to produce emotions. The scarceness of words in his later plays can be understood as a reaction to the strength and volume of his literary work. He told Keene:

The dialogue of a play is also a kind of action and movement. Words that are not movement I can employ in my novels, and there is no special need for them on the stage. I don’t like plays, whether by myself or by other people, the meaning of which can be communicated in the form of fiction. Novels do that sort of thing much better. The dialogue of a play must be related to the action, and within the words themselves there must be action. The words must be part of the action. Words without an element of action have no place in the theater. (193)

Abe’s commentary on dialogue in plays brings into question whether or not Little Elephant should be categorized as a work of experimental theatre. In comparison to the Western theatrical canon with which his New York audience was most likely familiar, the prioritization of image over dialogue was definitely shocking. From Abe’s perspective, however, his process is the Occam’s Razor approach to eliciting reactions from an audience: Among competing hypotheses, he seems to be telling his audience, select the one that relies on the fewest assumptions.  By employing non-human characters, Abe cuts out the responsibility of characters to establish connections with the audience and embraces the simpler and more immediate approach of using them as aesthetically compelling creatures.  As Abe contextualized Little Elephant, “Some people may feel on first seeing this play as if it is rather far removed from theater, but I believe that structurally it consists of a groping for the very origins of theater.” (193)

In press reviews of The Little Elephant Is Dead, critics of New York generally praised its visual spectacle while acknowledging the lack of cohesion inherent to its format. Comparing Little Elephant‘s use of visual imagery to Tadeusz Kantor’s Dead Class (which ran at La MaMa earlier that season) Mel Gussow of the New York Times applauded Abe for the play’s ambition and scale:

The Little Elephant is Dead…has a script–one that is poetically descriptive, but not fully suggestive of the sweep of the experience. In the case of Mr. Abe, the play is the performance… a sequence of impressions, both visual and aural. The world is illusory; watching it, we enter Mr. Abe’s fantasy. In a sense, the author is like an action painter, drawing from a palette of light, sound, film, props and actors…this is experimental theater with a sense of humor… (New York Times C24).

Some critics were understandably frustrated with the way Little Elephant’s blunt, conceptual dialogue worked against its strong images. While Abe’s dialogue is entertaining when read on the page, I can imagine that some audience members might have disliked the play’s attempt to provide commentary on a visual spectacle that speaks for itself. Eileen Blumenthal of the Village Voice succinctly expressed this frustration, writing that “while the work suffers from both expressed lack of and pretensions toward ‘meaning,’ its individual images range from funny to unnerving to exquisite…” (Village Voice 89)

Promotional photograph of Abe by Thomas Haar. Courtesy of La MaMa Archives (OBJ.1979.0105)

The Little Elephant Is Dead encapsulates Abe’s unique contribution to Japanese theatre.  He crafted his plays with an utmost respect for the visual and performative components of theatre that distinguish it from the novel. Theatre provided Abe a way to painstakingly recreate the dreamy images that inspired the prose of his greatest written works. In selecting Abe’s piece for the “Japan Today” celebration, the Japan Society deliberately offered American audiences a work with an unabashedly modern theatrical vision to compliment their plurality of traditional performances. By providing a venue for The Little Elephant Is Dead, La MaMa continued its legacy of showcasing works by Japanese artists that expanded on the limited representations of Japanese theatre in America, which exposed audiences to a great deal of nō and kabuki while largely excluding contemporary Japanese artists. The American tour of The Little Elephant Is Dead was a significant theatrical event that contributed to the international recognition of Abe as a playwright in addition to the diversification of representations of Japanese art in America.

—Jameson Creager

 

Published Works Cited

Blumenthal, Eileen. “Animal Dreams.” The Village Voice [New York] 28 May 1979: 89. Print.

Gussow, Mel. “Stage: ‘Little Elephant Is Dead,’ a Japanese Play; Action and Imagery.” New York Times [New York] 16 May 1979, The Living Section sec.: C24. Print.

Scott-Stokes, Henry. “JAPAN’S KAFKA GOES ON THE ROAD.” New York Times Magazine [New York] 29 Apr. 1979: 33, 84. Print.

Keene, Donald, and J. Thomas. Rimer. The Blue-eyed Tarōkaja: A Donald Keene Anthology. New York: Columbia UP, 1996. Print.

Archival Objects (from La MaMa Archives) Cited

Program: “The Little Elephant Is Dead” (1979) (OBJ.1979.0102)

Promotional Flyer: “The Little Elephant is Dead” (1979) (OBJ.1979.0103)

Press: “The Little Elephant is Dead” (1979) (OBJ.1979.0104)

Production Photographs: “The Little Elephant is Dead” (1979) (OBJ.1979.0105)

Booklets about “The Little Elephant is Dead” (1979) (OBJ.1979.0107)

Promotional Material: “The Little Elephant is Dead” (1979) (OBJ.1979.0201)

 

The Moving Images of La Mama: Cataloging the Film Collection

Cataloging and rehousing “C.O.R.F.A.X (Don’t Ask)” production footage.

Guest Post by Genevieve Havemeyer-King

Last summer, I dusted off and dove into La Mama’s small but rich film collection – a project that unearthed exciting documentation of performances from the late 1960’s and 70’s. La Mama’s film collection includes various reels of footage related to Wilford Leach’s 1974 production of, “C.O.R.F.A.X. (Don’t Ask)” and some rare recordings of Andrei Serban and Elizabeth Swados’ “Medea.” Other gems include shorts and features gifted to La Mama over the years such as a 1973 film titled “Ta’zieh” (Persian for “condolence theater”) and one reel that is likely a recording of the Ruth Escobar Theater’s 1970 production of Genet’s “The Balcony” in Sao Paulo, Brazil– a production directed by Victor Garcia that was well known for having been staged under the military regime of Garrastazu Médici. Other productions that are documented in some way by the collection include Tom Eyen’s “The White Whore and the Bit Player,” Jeff Weiss’s “How the Rent Gets Paid,” an early staging of “The Maids”, The Playhouse of the Ridiculous’s “The Magic Show of Dr. Ma-gico”, and Wilford Leach’s “Carmilla,” to name a few. The collection also contains numerous unidentified rolls of camera original footage captured by La Mama’s in-house documentarian, designer, and playwright – Amnon Ben Nomis.

As Rachel noted in a previous blog post about the trials, tribulations, and joys of archiving performance documentation, I have found the work of cataloging and inspecting this collection of films to be both exciting and frustrating. La MaMa’s collection of film materials suggests the complexity of archival attempts to capture accurate representations of the history of performance art. Some of the 16mm films in La MaMa’s collection were shot during rehearsals and performances that used dramatic lighting; as a result, in some cases, barely anything can be seen on the film itself. This is especially true for “Medea,” which was often lit only by candle and fire-light! These obscured records often conjure up memories of productions, without which the details of their history would be lost, but contain little information in and of themselves. In piecing together the materials more cohesive pictures of the productions are formed, but at the same time this process poses questions around the collection’s preservation and place with La Mama’s history.

The Archival Mysteries of C.O.R.F.A.X. (Don’t Ask)

“C.O.R.F.A.X. (Don’t Ask)” flyer, 1974

A large percentage of La MaMa’s film footage relates in some way to C.O.R.F.A.X.–approximately 16% of the collection, or eleven film cans out of the 67 in La MaMa’s collection. (The next most-documented play is “Medea”– four cans definitely contain camera original footage of “Medea”; another 17 cans contain multiple rolls of unidentified film, which might include additional “Medea” documentation.) Cited by critics in the 1970s mainly for its “theatrical effects, surprises, and pursuits” (including its use of film projection as an element of the performance) “C.O.R.F.A.X” was a science fiction tale “about a tribe of humanoids who invade middle America and camp out in a veterinarian’s office.” The play continues to reveal itself as a mysterious production with a multitude of audiovisual components.

Because La MaMa does not have a working film-rewind, I relied on visual inspection in cataloging their film materials. Many of the film rolls labeled “C.O.R.F.A.X” appear to be production elements – work prints and original trims of audiovisual components of the performance, rather than documentation of rehearsals or performances. These records are creative works in themselves, with their own scripts, performers, and histories. Does this fact present the need to expand the scope of La Mama’s archival mission, to include the conservation of these experimental film works in addition to documentation of theatrical performance?Is it possible to hold a complete archival record of a production like C.O.R.F.A.X –that relied so heavily on multi-media elements– without preserving those multi-media elements as works in themselves? Similarly, the collection contains a number of films, some of which are mentioned above, that do not depict La Mama productions but are linked to La Mama through connections and relationships among performers, venues, and the history of the experimental theater community as a whole. What is La MaMa custodial responsibility toward these films? How would we tell the story of La Mama without these film materials?

–Genevieve Havemeyer-King

New additions to our team

I’m thrilled to be able to introduce, now, several new additions to the La MaMa Archives cataloging team. This great crew is helping us successfully complete the final quarter of our CLIR-funded Hidden Collections cataloging project.

Michael Grant joined the team as a part-time Cataloger back in September. Michael graduated from New York University’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Masters program last spring. In addition to contributing to La MaMa’s cataloging projects, he works at NYU Libraries reformatting and preserving critically out of print VHS and audiocassette titles, ensuring their accessibility for use and study in the future. He is also a member of XFR Collective. At La MaMa, Michael has been working on a describing video materials from our Pushcart Collection.

September was also the month that Deborah Shapiro began what is becoming a yearlong archives internship here at La MaMa. Deborah is in her final year of the master’s program in Archives/Public History at New York University. As an intern at the La MaMa Archives, she is currently working on a digital exhibit about xerographic reproductions in La MaMa’s holdings. This exhibit will investigate questions about archival practices related to photocopied materials, and will offer (she hopes) a few ideas about what kind of information and evidence photocopied materials might provide to researchers.

In November, we welcomed two additional part-time Catalogers to the team. Jameson Creager  is a recent graduate of Princeton University where he studied East Asian Studies and worked at the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections. In addition to cataloging at La MaMa, he currently works in the archive department of the news program Democracy Now!  Amilca Palmer comes to La MaMa with 10+ years of experience in the world of documentary filmmaking. She has worked as a researcher and producer on a wide range of documentaries, including Koch (2012), African American Lives II with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (2008), and Sweet Honey in the Rock: Raise Your Voice (2004).  At the moment, Jameson and Amilca are working to catalog materials from La MaMa’s Director’s Files.

For more about each of these (amazing) folks, see About the Team.

La MaMa at #AMIA15

I don’t travel to all that many conferences, but when I can, I try to make it to the meeting of Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA). This annual event brings together a cross-section of scholars and practitioners, and offers a wide range of workshops, panel discussions, screenings, and networking events. Attending AMIA conferences has made me a far more competent and thoughtful archivist.

At this year’s conference, I had the opportunity to give a 5-minute “lightning talk” about La MaMa at a panel that was part of a daylong stream devoted to “Access, Outreach, and Use.” Below is a slightly edited version of this talk, which was entitled “Candy Darling and Copyright: Expanding Access to the Videotaped Record of 1970s-era Experimental Theatre.”

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Hi, and thanks to the organizers of the Access, Outreach, & Use stream for all their hard work. I’m here at this pop-up/lightning talk session to very briefly discuss the approach that one community-based performing arts archive is taking to access, use, and preservation of its analog moving image materials.

Specifically, I’m here to talk about work that’s happening in the Archives of La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club. Sometimes called the birthplace of Off-Off Broadway theatre, La MaMa was founded in 1961, in a basement in Manhattan’s East Village, and it quickly became an important site of theatrical experimentation. I don’t have time in this lightning talk to detail the long list of artists who found a creative home at La MaMa over the past five decades, but as Harvey Fierstein notes, the theater has played a critical role in shaping American theater and culture for half a century.

One of the most infrequently noted of La MaMa’s many remarkable features is its archive. Occupying 5000 square feet in a building on East 4th Street, this archive holds over 30,000 unique objects–photographs, posters, flyers, masks, puppets, costumes, set pieces, and audiovisual materials. The archives has been run on a really small budget for years, but in the past decade, La MaMa has taken steps to make its collections more accessible. In 2014, we received a CLIR Hidden Collections grant, which supports the creation of a searchable catalog of materials from La MaMa’s earliest “pushcart” years (1961-1985).

Among the most vulnerable and valuable of materials in this collection is a set of ½ inch open reel video—which document approximately 170 Off-Off-Broadway theater performances staged between 1972 and 1980. They comprise the most complete audiovisual record of the early Off-Off-Broadway experiments in existence.

Productions documented in this collection include: A half a dozen experimental theater productions staged by the Native American Theatre Ensemble in the early 1970s in the aftermath of several high profile confrontations between the American Indian Movement and the US government;

A recording of a March 1976 performance of playwright Adrienne Kennedy’s “A Rat’s Mass,” directed by Jazz musician Cecil Taylor (Kennedy was a key figure in the 1970s-era black arts movement. One critic called “A Rat’s Mass” “a kind of black spiritual” in which brother and sister rat “gnaw and nibble…on the standards of life that Americans use to hold themselves together”); 

Three early works of the Pan Asian Repertory Theatre; two performances by Grand Union dance company; an early performance by the all-male Trocadero Gloxinia Ballet; a dozen productions staged by the Playhouse of the Ridiculous;  collaborations between composer Elizabeth Swados and director Andrei Serban;

And a bilingual (English/Spanish) production of Tom Eyen’s “The White Whore and the Bit Player” featuring Warhol superstar Candy Darling in role of White Whore.

Among the many challenges we face in making this collection accessible are five core issues:

1)Format obsolescence: Playback equipment for ½ inch open reel video is fragile and rare–the last machine of this kind was manufactured in the 1970s, parts are difficult to replace, and only a handful of living technicians know how to repair them. In 2011, Bay Area Video Coalition’s then-Director of Preservation, Moriah Ulinskas, wrote that she informed clients and partners “that they have 5, maybe 10 years left” to digitize their ½ inch open reel video–after which time “these recordings are gone for good.” As a result: digitization is a critical piece of our access strategies. Without digitization, no access to this material is possible.

2)Copyright and Actors’ Equity regulations: Audiovisual materials documenting live performances require consideration of two sets of rights: 1)rights to the recording itself and 2)rights to the underlying performance. Additionally, if members of Actor’s Equity appear in any of these productions, the recordings are also subject to Equity code regulations.

3+ 4) Preservation infrastructure + Resources: La MaMa has limited financial and staffing resources. As a result, collaboration has been critical—with NYU’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation program, for instance; and with Bay Area Video Coalition.

5)We also face several issues that make cataloging these materials to facilitate access challenging.

On one hand, there is no well-established controlled vocabulary to assist in the description of theater materials. The Art and Architecture Thesaurus, which is may be the most likely, offers only very limited terms to describe theatrical performances.

Meanwhile, Library of Congress Subject Headings and other, more general controlled vocabularies, offer very limited terms for describing avant garde theatre artists, productions, and archival materials. Take, for instance, the ½ inch open reel video documenting Candy Darling and the production of “The White Whore and the Bit Player” in which she appeared. Is this queer theater? It is not about queers. More importantly, the term “queer theatre” is, in this context, anachronistic; or, at least, it wasn’t used by the people making this work. And anyhow, queer theater isn’t a Library of Congress subject heading.  And yet, to my mind, it is critically important to offer user-findable access points to help artists and scholars interested in the history of theatrical work created by LGBT people and communities locate related materials.  Similar descriptive issues arise in relationship to many of the other artists and productions documented by these videos.

OK: my five minutes are up! Read our blog, tweet at me, and tune in next year when (hopefully) more of this collection will be in the process of being digitized.

-Rachel Mattson

 

Archiving My Time at La MaMa: A Goodbye Note from Suzanne Lipkin, La MaMa Cataloger

For the past year and a half, I have had the joy of cataloging many of the programs, flyers, letters, brochures, clippings, contracts, receipts, photographs, and the occasional Frisbee residing in the La MaMa Archives. From 1962-1985, La MaMa’s “pushcart” years, Ellen Stewart’s vision propelled a generation of theatre artists to launch the off-off-Broadway movement. Starting from a basement in the East Village, by 1985 La MaMa had grown to a campus of several theatres in the neighborhood and sent many of its productions and artists well beyond it, to Broadway, to the silver screen, and around the world.

Suzanne at her desk at La MaMa.

My journey through the material treasures saved from this era has followed a similar trajectory. In the early days, I cataloged documents from the very first year of La MaMa’s existence. Some of these shows had only a single program or flyer remaining to mark their place in theatre history. As time went on, the files became more complex. La MaMa and its personalities garnered more press clippings, business and personal correspondence piled up, and productions extended their runs or went on tour, leaving behind an extensive trail of administrative and artistic documents.

I have had the cataloger’s privilege of deep engagement with these documents: I have felt the texture of the papers upon which La MaMa’s history is printed, I have come to recognize Ellen Stewart’s scrawled handwriting upon any blank space in any kind of document, and I have glimpsed the nature of the relationships between some of La MaMa’s most beloved and influential figures. At the same time, these materials cannot fully capture the essence of witnessing an early La MaMa production or, behind the scenes, the countless telephone calls exchanged in the course of artistic creation.

The purpose of this project is to reveal what has been hidden. Through our Collective Access catalog, which will be accessible through a public website in the next few months, our cataloging team has striven to bring La MaMa’s history in an accessible manner to anyone who seeks it. While much of La MaMa’s story lies in the people who lived it, this project has, for the first time, given thousands of archival materials unique classification and description, and it has linked La MaMa people, productions, and objects to one another in clearly denoted relationships. In my time with the project, I was able to contribute over 2,000 object records to the catalog.

This month, I embark on a new stage of my professional journey as a staff member at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. My time at La MaMa has immersed me invaluably in theatre history, the off-off-Broadway community, and the triumphs and tribulations of archiving and cataloging. I am immensely grateful for this experience, and I look forward to continuing to bring theatre history of all kinds to the researchers, artists, and enthusiasts who pursue it.

Preserving the Videotaped Record of 1970s-era Experimental Theatre*

We had a packed house on October 19 for “Preserving the Videotaped Record of 1970s-era Experimental Theatre: A Screening and Panel Discussion.” More than fifty people gathered in La MaMa’s newest venue, The Downstairs, to screen newly digitized clips documenting La MaMa’s 1972 and 1973 seasons– and to discuss the challenge of preserving this kind of legacy video material.

The event had its origins in a collaboration in which La MaMa Archives was fortunate enough to participate last year. In late 2014, faculty from NYU’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation program (MIAP) asked us to serve as a host site for a Spring 2015 student project designed to introduce new archivists to the challenges of planning and overseeing a video digitization project. After inspecting a subset of our obsolete video collection (5-15 objects), students would be required to draft an RFP for the digitization of these materials, select a vendor, and then ensure the successful completion of a preservation-level digital migration of these materials. NYU would cover the cost of the transfers, and at the conclusion of the project we would receive a)a set of preservation-level digital copies of our materials and b)recommendations that might inform future migration projects. Meanwhile, participating students would learn how to apply their knowledge of archival best practices in the context of an actual collection.

We jumped at the opportunity.

MIAP Student Erica Gold inspects La MaMa’s half inch open reel video collection.

The invitation to participate in this project came at an auspicious moment in the life of the La MaMa Archives. In 2014, we received a Hidden Collections Cataloging Grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources to support the creation of a digital catalog describing materials from our earliest collections (1961-1985). That grant enabled La MaMa to hire one additional full-time and two part-time Archives staff. (I’m the full-timer.) A year and a half later, we’ve cataloged roughly three-quarters of all the material in this earliest collection.

Among the most important results of this cataloging project is that we can now very clearly see which elements of our collection are most in need of conservation and migration. At the top of this list is a cache of rare video, shot between 1972 and 1980 on a Portapak camera, documenting 170 early Off-Off Broadway productions. These videos represent what is likely the most extensive video documentation of the theatrical experiments of the early Off-Off Broadway theatre movement in existence. But video shot on Portapak cameras—a format known as half inch open reel video—is obsolete and at-risk, in large part because the equipment required to play these materials back is scarce. The last machine of this kind was manufactured in the 1970s, parts are difficult to replace, and only a handful of living technicians know how to repair them.

So when MIAP asked us to collaborate on this project, we were extremely receptive. We had already begun developing a strategy for migrating these videos to digital. But we were not yet ready—logistically or financially—to undertake a wholesale project. Partnering with MIAP presented a low-risk opportunity for us to gather information that will enable us (we hope!) to mount a large-scale half inch open reel video migration project in the near future.

A still from digitized video of “Short Bullins” at La MaMa (1972).

The official collaboration concluded successfully in May 2015 when students returned to us our original reels along with a harddrive containing a set of digital files. But we didn’t want to the collaboration to end there. So last week (October 19, 2015) we revved up our video projector, opened up our doors, and invited all comers to a post-game roundup. The discussion featured comments from Peter Oleksik (Assistant Media Conservator at MoMA and professor of MIAP’s Video Preservation II course); Genevieve Havemeyer-King, Ethan Gates, and Michael Grant (students who worked on this project); Rachel Mattson, Suzanne Lipkin, and Ozzie Rodriguez (members of the La MaMa Archives team); and Bill Seery (Director of Preservation Services at The Standby Program, who performed the transfers of our video). How, we asked, can small organizations meet the challenge of preserving historic, live performance captured on video formats that are now obsolete? What specific preservation concerns do half inch open reel videos present? And how are we educating a new generation of archivists to handle these challenges?

And then we screened excerpts from the videos—material that had not been publically viewed in over 40 years. These clips showcased four productions: “Short Bullins”—an evening of non-naturalistic one acts written by Ed Bullins (an important figure in the Black Arts movement); Tisa Chang’s Peking Opera adaptation “Return of the Phoneix”; Paul Foster’s “Silver Queen”; and Tom Eyen’s “Three Drag Queens from Daytona” (a queer satire based on Samuel Beckett’s “Endgame”). The response from the audience was extremely positive—so much so that we’re thinking of organizing an upcoming series featuring screenings of the full-length videos.

A still from digitized video of “Return of the Phoenix” at La MaMa (1973).

From La Mama’s perspective, this collaboration was important for a few key reasons. On one hand, it offered us a low-risk opportunity to consider and experiment with what we wanted from a vendor. We chose, for instance, not to ask for mezzanine-level digital files. We requested only 10-bit uncompressed preservation-level files and Mp4 access copies. But as I prepared video clips for the big screen, I regretted that decision because mezzanine-level files would have made my editing process easier. This collaboration also offered us the opportunity to teach new archivists something about what it looks like to work with a small, community-based archive. Valuable, at-risk video is as commonly found in small arts and community-based organizations as in large university or government repositories. But the needs of small repositories are distinct from the needs of larger institutions. We’re going to need a new generation of archivists who understand these distinctions, and who believe in the importance of small organizations’ collections.

Finally, this collaboration made it possible for us to begin to share these videos with researchers and members of our communities for the first time in 4 decades—and to plan for future migration projects. We still have approximately 245 half inch open reel videos that haven’t been digitized at the preservation level. So our work in this area is far from over.

We hope to make video of the October 19 event available soon, so keep your ears peeled for details.

*This blog post originally appeared on the website of the Theatre Library Association. Photograph at the top of this post: a still from digitized video of Tom Eyen’s “Three Drag Queens from Daytona.” The videos discussed in this post were most likely shot by Amnon Ben-Nomis.