Research instruments
Tanzquartier Wien Collection
The inventory of the Tanzquartier Wien collection precisely lists all the documentation produced by this art centre devoted to contemporary dance and performance, founded in Vienna (Austria) in 2001, during the years when Walter Heun was its director, from 2009 to 2017. The collection brings together a full set of communication documents, press reviews and posters linked to the activities and programmes of the site during this period: contemporary dance events, performances, artist’s and researcher’s residencies, readings, talks, installations, as well as courses, lessons, and workshops of all sorts. Over 300 artists are represented in this inventory which is now available online at mediatheque.cnd.fr
Complement to the Rudolf Nureyev collection: articles and press reviews
Alongside the numerous audio-visual documents donated by the Rudolf Nureyev Foundation (RNF) and by Madame Douce François, the archives associated with Rudolf Nureyev at the CN D bring together, among other manuscripts, printed matter and iconographic documents, a very considerable set of 14,000 press from all around the world, whose description has now been completed, thus rounding off the online inventory that had already been published.
This considerable collection covers the years 1957 to 1997, in other words, taking in the years that immediately followed the death of Rudolf Nureyev in early 1993. What can mostly be found in it are press cuttings from general-public dailies or weeklies, from a good thirty countries, mainly in Europe and North America, with English-speaking predominating, followed by the French. Most of these articles derive from the watchfulness of specialised agencies working for the RNF, but also from friends or fans, who kept up with the artist’s news. Filed chronologically, these articles – completed by bound collections and press reviews – provide a very detailed and doubtlessly very complete representation of the dancer’s career and public life, but above all of his international media presence, of the image he constructed, conveyed and embodied for 40 years, of his faces, masks, and of his successive reflections.
Sabine Macher archive – “Dire la danse” [Speaking of dance]
The inventory of the Sabine Macher archive “Dire la danse” provides direct access to the majority of the uncut sound recordings coming from this research project into the discourses of “people whose main attention is paid to wanting to dance”. Over sixty interviews are also available (about five hours in all) – and sometimes their written transcriptions – with contemporary dancers coming from the lessons conducted anonymously at the Ménagerie de Verre from 2009 to 2010, as well as with the dancer Vincent Druguet, who lived nearby. The result is a catalogue of states transcending the body, which are or less easily expressed, and the use of varied vocabularies, “gliding”, often “in the sphere of well-being”, but also sometimes “attaining complex and metaphysical entities”. The body, which is so present in professional situations, which have just been left behind, is often strangely rather “absent” from speech.
Four Solaire archive
This inventory describes the archives of Le Four Solaire, a collective of artists brought together around the dancers and choreographers Anne-Marie Reynaud and Odile Azagury from 1976 to 1984. Above all, an extremely large collection of photographs document, from rehearsals to performances, over twenty choreographic pieces created during the eight years of existence of Le Four Solaire. There have also been added mock-ups of sets and costumes, distribution documents as well as press review cuttings and, for some pieces, videos.
It is thus possible to see the creativity of this collective, influenced on the one hand by the work of Carolyn Carlson, who the two dancers worked with in GRTOP, and on the other by the rise at that time of the café-théâtre and the desire to mingle words with dance.
Éliane Mirzabekiantz archive
The inventory of this archive donated to the CND by Éliane Mirzabekiantz, the dancer, Benesh choreologist and head of training in Benesh writing at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse in Paris since 1995, reflects her work as a notator with the Ballet de Göteborg, in Sweden, where she was invited in 1990 by Robert North. This corpus includes nine vast scores, concerning eight choreographies by Robert North and a ballet by Birgit Cullberg, including finalised notations, acting as references for the transmission of the pieces, but also working notations. They are often accompanied by transmission notes, lighting schemes, stage plans, sketches of costumes, rehearsal schedules, or else music scores and programmes of performance nights.