2008 Choreographers Without Companies June 6 & 7th

Come see the newest Growth In Motion choreographic work by Fanchon Shur and Karen Wissel on June 6 & 7th at the Aronoff Center. More information to come about this event!!! 

Saut du Lézard

August 11th, 2007
Growth in Motion was invited to perform at the Leapin' Lizard Gallery in Covington, KY (map) for the 24.7 Arts Festival. Ware Carlton-Ford and Chad Benjamin Potter peformed excerpts from Sticky as well as a spectacular German Wheel partnering.
(posted 8.1.07)

Sticky

July 27th, 2007
Growth In Motion takes part in Final Friday Gallery Hop at the Nicholas Gallery, 23 E. Court St. in downtown Cincinnati (map) and Carteaux and Leslie on Vine.

Chad and Ware performed a variety of partnering expression and sweetened the two galleries throughout the night. Two bodies, stuck to one another, dealing with that connection.

Dance Heritage Coalition Launches
Project to Save Analog Videos

Washington, DC – The Dance Heritage Coalition (DHC) announces the pilot phase of a new videotape reformatting project, called Dance Heritage Preservation Hubs. Thirteen dance companies and dance archives are participating in this inaugural phase of the project, with a total of 53 analog videotapes representing the choreography of thirty artists to be migrated to a state-of-the-art archival-quality digital format.

“With analog videotape formats becoming obsolete and suffering deterioration, time is of the essence in creating digital masters in a preservation-safe format,” Executive Director Barbara Drazin said. Choreography recorded on U-matic cassettes popular in the 1970s and 1980s becomes trapped when a dance company has no working equipment to play them. Improper handling as well as time itself can cause the tapes to deteriorate.

The challenge has been to identify a “lossless” digital format – one that is compressed to save archival storage space but that preserves all the visual and audio information in the original tape. Media Matters, a pioneering media research firm that works with archival collections, is heading the cleaning of the analog tapes and migrating them to the new digital format called MJPEG2000 at a prototype digitization center, or “hub,” in its research facility in New York City. In test comparisons, the MJPEG2000 codec was identified by Media Matters as the best format for both lossless compression and its “scaleability,” the ability to use it to create digital files for distribution.

The dance materials preserved through this initial effort represent choreography in ballet, modern dance, baroque dance, and tap, interviews with important dance leaders, dance-dramas and performance art, and dance reconstructions. Participants for this pilot phase were chosen for their significant contribution to America’s dance legacy and dance culture. Each company or archive had registered its videotape holdings with the Dance Heritage Coalition’s National Dance Videotape Registry. U-matic and Betacam-SP video formats were chosen for this preliminary phase of tape migrations.

Organizations participating in this pilot phase include:
Dance Archives and Collections:
Academy of Dance on Film, Brea, CA
American Dance Festival, Durham, NC
Dance Notation Bureau, New York, NY
Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, Becket, MA
Lawrence & Lee Theatre Research Institute, Ohio State Univ., Columbus, OH
San Francisco Performing Arts Library and Museum, CA

Dance Companies:
Alonzo King LINES Ballet, San Francisco, CA
Growth in Motion, Cincinnati, OH
Janis Brenner & Dancers, New York, NY
Jazz Tap Ensemble, Los Angeles, CA
The Joffrey Ballet, Chicago, IL
New York Baroque Dance Company, New York, NY
San Francisco Ballet, CA

In addition to a datatape containing their MJPEG2000 digital files, participants will also receive digital access copies on DVD, a “lossy” compressed format that, although unacceptable for archival preservation, is a convenient format for promotion or easy viewing access. Some of the choreographers haven’t been able to see certain choreographies for decades. Growth in Motion, a dance company based in Cincinnati, plans to reconstruct one of the company’s seminal works from the access DVD copy. For the Joffrey Ballet, an early work of company founder Robert Joffrey, whose work was rarely videotaped, will be safeguarded and once again accessible to the company. “By creating both archival-quality digital materials as well as easy-to-use DVDs, the products of this project benefit the company’s access to its repertory as well as the field of American dance history,” project director Libby Smigel said.

Support for the administration and execution of the pilot phase of the Dance Heritage Preservation Hubs project comes from the National Endowment for the Arts and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.


Founded in 1992, the Dance Heritage Coalition is a national non-profit alliance of institutions holding significant collections of materials documenting the history of dance. The DHC’s mission is to make accessible, enhance, augment, and preserve the materials that document the artistic accomplishments in dance of the past, present, and future. The DHC also serves as a think tank and a convener for the dance heritage field.

Member organizations of the Dance Heritage Coalition are: American Dance Festival, Dance Notation Bureau, Harvard Theatre Collection of Houghton Library at Harvard University, Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, Library of Congress, the Dance Division of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Lawrence and Lee Theatre Research Institute at Ohio State University, and San Francisco Performing Arts Library and Museum

For more information about the DHC, click here.
or contact Libby Smigel at LSmigel@danceheritage.org

For more information on selecting the MJPEG2000 digital format for this project, read “Digital Video Reformatting Project,” here.