Scholars, students, and artists studying historical performances (whether theatre, dance, or music) face distinct challenges. Performance is ephemeral; both intangible and dynamic. The experience is subjective to each audience member in the moment and colored by memory after. Documentation of any kind can provide invaluable insight. The ability to provide actual footage of such a broad array of artists’ work over so many decades is one of the La MaMa Archive’s most important contributions to performance research.
We are proud to announce that thanks to an award from the Recordings at Risk program, the La MaMa Archive can continue the work of digitizing our unique collection with funding for our project, Preserving Performance: Digitizing the Production Footage Collection at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club.
The grant provides support to digitize 100 VHS tapes in our collection. These tapes contain performance footage from 1978-2006; during which time La MaMa fostered trailblazing artists such as Elizabeth Swados, Denise Stoklos, Andrei Serban, and George Ferencz. Footage selected also features La MaMa artists on international tours, capturing consequential moments of cultural exchange in Italy, Turkey, Kosovo, India, and South Africa. In many cases, these tapes are the only existing video documentation of these works.
This Recordings at Risk grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) allows the La MaMa Archives and project partners, Bay Area Video Coalition and Digital Bedrock, to create and preserve high-quality digital surrogates. These works will be added to our digital collections site, catalog.lamama.org, and made available to researchers. Through digitizing and cataloging, we aim to improve access to this production footage.
Together with this digitization grant from CLIR’s Recordings at Risk, a matching funds grant to improve environmental controls in the Archive from the National Endowment for the Humanities will protect our unique audiovisual collection for years to come.
Donate here to help put critical climate control measures in place.
La MaMa’s audiovisual collections are held onsite. It is important for us retain physical control over the tapes for preservation, but also to protect the work of the artists involved. Even once footage has been digitized for access and preservation, safeguarding the originals remains of vital importance. Newer technology itself becomes obsolete, and copies made from copies can quickly lose data and quality. Retaining the originals ensures that we are not someday left with a facsimile of a facsimile without reference to an original.
The present environmental conditions in the archive are hardly ideal for keeping our VHS tapes, reel-to-reel, film, audio reels, dvds, cassettes, albums and other media formats in their best possible state. Age, environmental fluctuations, and increasingly obsolete playback equipment put these items at high risk for future inaccessibility. High humidity can cause mold. On the other end of the spectrum, overly dry conditions can cause tape to become brittle.
With this support from CLIR and the NEH, the La MaMa Archive can build upon previous efforts to improve the long-term accessibility and stability of our entire audiovisual collection. We are excited to move forward with this important work as we strive to digitize and preserve all of La MaMa’s production footage, a treasured resource of Off-Off Broadway theatre history.
Cataloging La MaMa's Pushcart Years and Beyond 