Performing Arts
The Performing Arts Collection provides access to materials documenting the several disciplines of the performing arts. The collection features holdings in theater, dance, opera, and popular entertainment, including circus, vaudeville, minstrel, and other related performance genres such as puppetry and magic. The creative process, from concept and staging to publication and revival, constitutes the primary focus of this collection.
All of the behind-the-scenes work that goes into creating performed art is also represented throughout the Performing Arts collections: designs for scenery and costumes created by figures as diverse as Léon Bakst and Jo Mielziner; reviews and historical opinion ranging across the centuries from critics such as William Winter and John Gassner; producers' archives documenting entrepreneurs such as New York's Morris Gest and London's Sir Donald Albery; and the creations of composers such as Jule Styne, or choreographers such as Kay Lenz. Files containing images, production documentation, and correspondence follow the careers of thousands of British and American actors and performers from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, including holdings on actor-managers such as David Garrick, Wilson Barrett, and Sir Donald Wolfit. The comprehensive output of Broadway designers Norman Bel Geddes and Eldon Elder are held here, as are the collected photographs and negatives from photographers Fred Fehl and Bob Golby, among others.
Most of the performing arts are built upon the combined efforts of artists from a variety of disciplines, and the Ransom Center collections reveal the crossroads of creation and interpretation that result from these close collaborations.
For information about the Ransom Center's many literary archives of playwrights, please see Literature.
Major Collections
Bound volumes of plays, theatrical history, biography, and theory are joined with theater account books, original costume and stage designs, and an abundance of letters and original manuscript materials relating to the theater. The collections contain an estimated two hundred thousand playbills; fifty thousand engravings and photographs of performers in scenes from their plays; eighty thousand pieces of sheet music; and twenty thousand news clippings.
Three large collections form the foundation of the Performing Arts materials, and the Hoblitzelle Foundation's 1956 gift of the Albert Davis Collection of Theater Artifacts is the cornerstone. Having embarked on a publicist's career in the late nineteenth century, theater enthusiast Albert Davis (1865-1942) collected photographs, clippings, printed pictures, programs, playscripts, and playbills concerning hundreds of productions in New York and elsewhere. These holdings provide extensive evidence of the vitality of live performance, particularly in the period of 1890 to the mid 1920s. Davis's collection has thousands of photographic prints by studios such as Byron, White, and Hall, as well as thousands of publicity photographs in a multitude of formats. In 1958 the Messmore Kendall Collection, including those materials gathered by Harry Houdini, came to the Ransom Center, again from the Hoblitzelle Foundation. Messmore Kendall (1872-1959) was a lawyer, theater entrepreneur, and collector, whose collection was especially rich in autographs, engravings, programs, and extra-illustrated books. Also in 1958, the Edgar G. Tobin Foundation of San Antonio purchased and donated the Norman Bel Geddes Collection of theatrical and industrial design. Norman Bel Geddes (1893-1958) was a visionary stage designer, director, producer, theater architect, industrial designer, producer of model photography, and author. (See Costume & Set Design.)
Theater
The massive Theater Biography Collection consists of materials relating to over five thousand British and American dramatic and variety performers, spanning the years 1750 to 1970. Although individuals are primarily represented by publicity material such as photographs, prints, playbills, programs, and posters, the collection also contains letters, legal documents, scrapbooks, paintings and drawings, sheet music, books and pamphlets, and other memorabilia. Coverage for each performer ranges from a single piece to hundreds of items. A smaller section includes playwrights, critics, managers, designers, and other production personnel. The Barrymore family, John Hare, Edward Harrigan and Tony Hart of Harrigan and Hart, Henry Irving, both Pat Rooneys, and Lillian Russell are particularly well-represented. The "Bio File" provides valuable images of and biographical data for both well known and obscure theatrical figures.
The extensive archive of British producer and theater and ballet executive Sir Donald Albery (1914-1988) provides a comprehensive record of his career spanning the years 1945-1975, his involvement with professional organizations, and his role as a founding member and director of Anglia Television, the commercial counterpart to the BBC. Between 1953 and 1978 Albery presented one hundred nineteen plays in his four theaters—the Criterion, Wyndham's Theatre, the New Theatre (now named the Albery), and the Piccadilly—and seventy-nine additional plays outside the Wyndham's Theatres Limited group. His first production was Graham Greene's first play, The Living Room (1953). The Albery records provide a comprehensive portrait of Albery's involvement with post-war British theater. Materials include correspondence, photographs, audition notes, biographical information on actors, Lord Chamberlain's licenses, scripts, prompt copies, tapes, minutes of meetings, published books and journals, lighting and sound plots, set diagrams, details of costume and scenery, stage managers' reports, musical scores, posters, programs, and news clippings. Financial records include profit and loss statements, box office receipts, records of investments, treasury statements, and details of royalties and film rights.
The papers of British actor, director, and producer Frederick Harold Frith Banbury (b. 1912) consist of scripts, correspondence, posters, programs, photographs, scrapbooks, reviews, and financial records pertaining to his career, beginning in 1926.
The collection of Wilson Barrett (1846-1904), English actor, dramatist, and producer, includes agreements for the production of plays in Europe, the United States, and South Africa; photographs of Barrett in his various acting roles; financial ledger books showing expenses and income for tours dating from 1872 to 1904; the original manuscripts of three plays written by Barrett (The Sign of the Cross, The Manxman, and Quo Vadis); and scene renderings. Correspondence files dating from 1852 to 1904 include letters to Barrett from authors, performers, and other public figures such as Charles Kean, Sir Henry Irving, Matthew Arnold, Rudyard Kipling, Bret Harte, Eugene Field, Charles Read, John Ruskin, and Charles L. Dodgson. There are also letters from Barrett to members of his family.
Among items in the archive of Edward Gordon Craig (1872-1966), English actor, stage designer, and producer, are a collection of Craig's wood-engraving designs, a large number of letters to Craig from his mother Ellen Terry, correspondence with friend and collaborator, musician/composer Martin Shaw, notebooks concerning Craig's romance with Isadora Duncan, and volumes from Craig's library. (See also Edward Carrick, who was Craig's son, in Film & Television.)
The collection of Robert Downing (1914-1975) includes approximately ten thousand volumes, hard cover and paper-bound, scripts, blueprints, costume plates, stills, stage photos, playbills, inscribed material, memorabilia, and scrapbooks from Downing's twenty-two years as a Broadway production stage manager, plus scrapbooks covering his early experience in tent shows, showboats, and films. Published materials relate mainly to acting, directing, staging, and scene design for the theater. Other forms of entertainment represented in the collection are motion pictures, television and radio, vaudeville, magic, ballet, and the circus. The collection includes over one hundred playscripts, and over five hundred photographs of theater personalities by Carl Van Vechten.
The archive of English actress Dame Edith Evans (1888-1976) includes letters from her husband Guy Booth and from Margot Asquith, Enid Bagnold, Noel Coward, John Gielgud, Katharine Hepburn, George Moore, Terence Rattigan, George Bernard Shaw, Edith Sitwell, Ellen Terry, Sybil Thorndike, and Thornton Wilder. The balance of the collection contains clippings, programs, autograph drafts of replies and working notes, scrapbooks of press cuttings, and presentation and acting copies of books and filmscripts. A related holding is British biographer Henry Hurford-Janes' Collection of Edith Evans. Gathered by Hurford-Janes, the collection contains correspondence, programs, clippings, photographs, and other materials related to Evans.
The extensive archives of New York City theater photographers Fred Fehl (1906-1995) and Bob Golby (b. 1901) contain thousands of photographs of approximately eight hundred stagings of plays primarily on Broadway, including premiere productions, revivals, and classics from the 1930s to the early 1970s.
The archive of eminent theater historian, critic, educator, and anthologist John Gassner (1903-1967) consists of his manuscripts, correspondence, and memorabilia, as well as books used as source material for his work.
The George C. Howard (1815-1887) collection contains scripts of both the George L. Aiken and the H. J. Conway dramatizations of Uncle Tom's Cabin, actors' side for the latter version, sheet music, programs, and other items documenting Howard productions. The archive also contains materials from Howard's extended and quite theatrical family, including his wife actress Caroline Fox Howard and his daughter actress Cordelia Howard, as well as manager George L. Fox, actor Charles K. Fox, actor Frank E. Aiken, and actor and stage manager Walter S. Howard.
Manuscript materials by Joan Littlewood (1914-2002), theater director of London's avant-garde Theatre Workshop from 1945 to 1973, include eleven notebooks spanning twenty years, as well as correspondence and script files. The Littlewood notebooks contain her workings-out of dramatic concepts and dialogue, evaluations of actors, and political essays and commentary. The correspondence includes the letters between Littlewood and her husband Gerry Raffles during 1947 and 1948, as well as a file of correspondence between Littlewood and actors and playwrights, such as Isla Cameron, David Mowat, and Celia Salkeld in the early 1960s.
The Playbills and Programs Collections are massive, numbering over two hundred thousand items. Playbills, which contain performance information such as names of theaters, dates, performers, playwrights, and titles of pieces performed, are an invaluable source of theatrical documentation. The New York City Playbills and Programs Collection, spanning 1750 to the present, comprises a wide variety of playbills and programs for theater productions in New York City. Formats include early broadsides and playbills, newspaper format playbills or programs, bound collections of playbills or programs for individual theaters, single sheet and folded sheet programs, magazine programs, and tearsheets from programs. The London and United Kingdom playbills and programs represent not only the early English theaters Covent Garden, Drury Lane, and Haymarket (approximately twenty thousand playbills, dating from the 1700s to the 1860s), but also modern London and provincial United Kingdom programs.
The collection of actress Ada Rehan (1857-1916) and theater manager Augustin Daly (1838-1899) is made up of published works, promptbooks, actors' sides, and scrapbook materials about or related to Rehan and Daly, covering the years 1884-1898.
The papers of literary and playwright agent Sarah Rollitts document her work for Columbia Artists, Inc. from 1939 to 1946, when she went independent as the New York office of Salkow Agency (Los Angeles). Rollitts's correspondence files include dozens of Hollywood stars, from Tallulah Bankhead to Thornton Wilder.
The Ronald Searle (b. 1920) collection includes four hundred thirty-eight pen and ink drawings and eighty sketchbooks made by Searle. The collection provides a complete picture of English theatrical entertainment in the 1950s. The drawings are caricatures of theater productions and individuals. Those that are not contained in the sketchbooks are for the theater columns of Punch. Most of the works are signed or initialed by the artist.
The collection of Laurette Taylor (1884-1946) documents her entire acting career, especially her legendary performances in Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie.
The Theatre Guild was a notable pioneer in the production of distinguished plays by important American authors such as Eugene O'Neill, Robert B. Sherwood, Maxwell Anderson, Sidney Howard, S. N. Behrman, and Philip Barry, as well as musicals by the Gershwins and Rodgers and Hammerstein. Their records (1918-1980) include producer's files from their earliest days of theatrical production, as well as for their radio productions (Theatre Guild on the Air) and television broadcasts (United States Steel Hour). Files from several motion pictures produced by the Guild, as well as business files relating to their daily operations and several major reorganizations, are also included.
The J. C. Trewin papers hold correspondence, numerous manuscripts of his drama reviews, and other manuscripts and material relating to works by Trewin (1908-1990), who was the London drama critic for The Birmingham Post for over thirty years.
The collection of Ray Walston (1917-2001), an important and versatile actor whose career included the Broadway stage, motion pictures, and television (including his starring series role as "My Favorite Martian"), includes clippings, posters, videotapes, publicity photographs, scores, scripts, programs, awards, correspondence, original caricatures, and scrapbooks.
The Richard Heron Ward (1910-1969) collection reflects the varied landscape of this British actor and producer's writings from the 1930s to the 1960s. Correspondence documents his role as founder and director of the Adelphi Players.
The archive of New York Tribune theater critic William Winter (1836-1917) charts his career at the paper from 1865 to 1909. Winter also wrote biographies of the Jeffersons, Belasco, Booth, Irving and Ada Rehan, and published volumes of poems and reminiscences. Materials related to these works are also in the collection. A few manuscripts by and concerning others are present, most notably those of Winter's son, Jefferson Winter.
Materials documenting the career of twentieth-century actor-manager Sir Donald Wolfit (1902-1968) include prompt copies, correspondence files, and a selection of production documentation. Although the primary focus of the papers is on Wolfit's career as an actor-manager, there is a significant amount of material concerning some of the theatrical issues of the day upon which Wolfit, as a leader in his profession, felt compelled to comment. Related materials may be found in the papers of director and producer B. Iden Payne (1881-1976), whose daughter was married to Wolfit.
The surviving papers from one of the most influential pairs of theatrical agents in twentieth-century American drama, Audrey Wood (1905-1985) and William Liebling (1895-1969), contain materials from their clientele from the 1940s to the 1970s, including Tennessee Williams, Carson McCullers, Jane Bowles, Yul Brynner, Marlon Brando, Paul Newman, and William Inge.
Costume & Set Design
Norman Bel Geddes (1893-1958), a pioneer in stage design, was involved as writer and/or designer in more than one hundred plays, motion pictures, and other theatrical performances ranging from the opera to the circus. Bel Geddes established his reputation in 1924 by successfully collaborating with Max Reinhardt on The Miracle. In addition to the unproduced Divine Comedy (1921), his most significant productions were Hamlet (1931), Dead End (1935), and The Eternal Road (1937). As a theater architect, Bel Geddes designed television studios for NBC in the 1950s. Bel Geddes' voluminous papers, the bulk of which date from 1914 to 1958, document his theater and industrial design work in equal measure and, frequently, in great detail. Works represented in the collection range from designs for the Gershwin musical Lady Be Good to industrial designs for the General Motors 1939 World's Fair Futurama exhibition. His theater files include renderings, drawings, production record books, photographs, publicity materials, correspondence, programs, legal documents and contracts, specifications, and source data. The industrial design work is documented with client correspondence, proposals, presentation books, contracts, research data, budgets, estimates, specifications, drawings, models, and publicity materials such as clippings and photographs. In addition, files for most projects from the 1930s and 1940s include job diaries and photographic record copy books. (See also Architecture.)
The London costume firm B. J. Simmons & Co. dressed hundreds of Britain's greatest shows, ranging from the Victorian spectacle of the 1890s to the so-called kitchen-sink drama of the 1960s. Their extensive archive reads like a history of the West End, documenting about nine hundred theatrical productions (mainly plays, but also operas, ballets, comic operas, musical comedies, revues, pantomimes, and other forms of popular entertainment), as well as the firm's work on over one hundred films. Stage landmarks represented include thirty-three productions by Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, Oscar Asche's blockbuster five-year production of Chu Chin Chow, and Sir Thomas Beecham's legendary opera experiment at the Covent Garden and Her Majesty's theaters in 1910 when he staged approximately twenty unfamiliar operas in twelve months. Also included are a considerable number of Sir Arthur Sullivan's operas and musical plays, Gilbert and Sullivan productions directed by Rupert D'Oyly Carte (1913 onward), the original production of J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan (1904), and numerous Ivor Novello musicals. Stage melodramas later adapted to film such as George Alexander's The Prisoner of Zenda (1896), Wilson Barrett's The Sign of the Cross (1896), and David Belasco's Ben Hur (1902) are also represented in the Simmons records. The reputation for excellence enjoyed by Simmons attracted the finest designers available, and the work of over one hundred identified artists is represented in the estimated twenty-nine thousand costume designs in their records. The designs, many of which have notes by and about the actors who would wear the pieces, include work by such well-known figures as Percy Anderson, Léon Bakst, Cecil Beaton, Norman Hartnell, Oliver Messel, Tanya Moiseiwitsch, Motley, William Nicholson, John Piper, Charles Ricketts, Byam Shaw, and Norman Wilkinson.
The bulk of the W. H. Crain Costume and Scenic Design Collection, gift of curator W. H. Crain (1917-1998), consists of original renderings of costume and scenic designs for plays, operas, ballets, revues, and films, augmented by works of art on paper, costumes, prints, and other material, spanning four centuries of work, from 1650 to 1993, by a wide variety of world-renowned designers.
The collection of scenic designer Boris Aronson (1900-1980) contains original sketches, photostats and copy prints of sketches, photographs, art reproductions, models, scripts, and technical drawings documenting Aronson's work as set designer for thirty-one plays written or produced between 1939 and 1977, including productions by Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and Stephen Sondheim.
Luigi Bartezago (1820-1905), whose costume designs consist of eighty watercolors, served as the major designer for La Scala operas and ballets from 1872 to 1879. Most of these designs are for ballets performed at La Scala and show a preference for oriental costumes and characters. Bartezago signed and stamped some designs with the address of his studio in Milan.
Native Texan Gordon Conway (1894-1956) was a costume designer for musical revues, musical comedy, and the early film industry, who maintained design studios in London and Paris. Her career encompassed fashion design and editorial cartooning as well as work for performance. Her collection includes original art; photographs of family, friends, and productions; and diaries, datebooks and numerous scrapbooks. More than sixty shows are represented.
Emanuele Luzzati (1921-2007), who studied at L'Ecole des Beaux Arts in Lausanne, began working at La Scala in 1948 as a costume designer of operas, ballets, theater and, later, films. He produced major operas in the United States, South America, and Europe. Four of Luzzati's costume designs are for the Russian ballet Chout and three are for Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.
Alessandro Sanquirico (1777-1849) was a prominent figure of the nineteenth-century Milanese school of scene design and directed all stage designs for La Scala between 1817 and 1849. He was also responsible for the interior decorations of the opera house. Included in the collection are eighteen of Sanquirico's hand-colored lithographs for set designs of operas performed at La Scala during the years 1820-1828.
Popular Entertainment
Circus
The Joe E. Ward Circus Collection was assembled by Joe Ward (1894 or 1895-1971), longtime clown with the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey circuses, and contains nineteenth- and twentieth-century circus memorabilia, including rare books, photographs, letters, programs, route books, costumes, and props from his career. Additional sixteenth- through nineteenth-century materials provide a substantial history of the circus. Ward, a University of Texas graduate, began a career as a civil engineer in Wichita Falls, Texas in 1912. During the summers of the 1930s and 1940s he also performed as a clown with Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey's Combined Circus. Ward's collection of circus-themed salt and pepper shakers, the touring trunk of fellow clown Paul Jung, and many copies of circus periodicals, such as White Tops, Bandwagon, and Circus Review, round out the collection.
The W. H. Crain (1917-1998) Barnum & Bailey Circus Collection spans the years 1805 to 1902 and consists largely of correspondence and legal documents concerning P. T. Barnum, James A. Bailey, and Joseph T. McCaddon and their business dealings. Notably present are business letters from Barnum, legal documents, manuscript calculations, and endorsed bank checks written during Barnum and Bailey's partnership agreement, 1887-1888. Much of the information in this collection relates to Bailey and includes biographical notes and clippings, correspondence, various legal and financial documents concerning his property and estate, and other ventures, such as his purchase of Cooper's share of Forepaugh's Show, 1890-1892. Joseph T. McCaddon, Bailey's brother-in-law and business partner, is also represented in the collection by correspondence, typed and manuscript notes for a proposed Wild West Show, and his own marriage certificate among other items.
Magic
Parts of the Harry Houdini (1874-1926) collection pertain to the numerous magicians with whom Houdini cultivated personal relationships, but the focus of this collection is the life and career of Houdini himself. Manuscript material in the collection includes Houdini's correspondence with magicians and writers; letters to his wife Bess, 1890s-1926; manuscript notes and revisions for A Magician among the Spirits (1924), along with Houdini's annotated printed copy; the correspondence of A. M. Wilson, editor of The Sphinx, 1905-1923; and correspondence with James Northcote. Houdini's films are represented by the script for The Master Mystery (1918), news clippings and a press kit for The Man from Beyond (1922), and publicity photographs. His interest in spiritualism is documented by a newspaper clipping file on spiritualism, manuscript notebooks on spiritualism and theater, and history of magic scrapbooks, 1837-1910.
The Houdini collection is complemented by the Magicians Collection, which contains correspondence, clippings, photographs, and other publicity materials (including two thousand posters) pertaining to magicians and the history of magic from 1750 to 1920. Approximately three thousand magicians are represented, among them Professor Anderson, T. Nelson Downs, Robert Evans, Robert Houdin, Harry Kellar, Augustus Rapp, Edwin Fay Rice, William Robinson, and Chung Ling Soo.
The McManus-Young Collection contains twenty-five hundred books on the art and history of conjuring, sleight of hand and stage magic, hypnotism, spiritualism, and witchcraft. This is supplemented by other Performing Arts book holdings, including Reginald Scot's Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), the earliest work to contain a section on magic tricks and legerdemain.
Pantomime
The Pantomime Collection comprises roughly four hundred items relating to pantomime on the English stage, covering the years 1793-1977, with a strong concentration on nineteenth-century productions. The collection consists predominantly of printed scripts, programs, and souvenir programs for numerous pantomimes. There are also eight holograph manuscript pantomime scenes and playscripts, three typescripts, and one promptbook with holograph notes. The remaining items in the collection include pantomime annuals, books on the history of pantomime, original watercolors of characters in Little Red Riding Hood, as well as sheet music covers, a book of music, and a book of songs.
Puppetry
The collection of Sicilian marionettes was assembled by entrepreneur Stanley Marcus (19052002). The sixty marionettes in this collection form a troupe of characters from the Orlando Furioso story cycle. These puppets, which were in use from the mid-nineteenth century through the early twentieth century, include the characters Charlemagne, Orlando, various Frankish knights, Moors, princesses, and other female characters, horses, demons, dogs, and mythical creatures. The secondary characters stand about three feet in height; the primary, four to five feet. Their armor can weigh up to eighty pounds.
Vaudeville, Variety & Minstrel Show
The collection of Tony Pastor (1837-1908), who was known as the "Father of Vaudeville," spans his entire career as a comedic singer, minstrel singer, manager, variety show performer, and director. Scripts and actors' sides make up the bulk of the collection that documents much of Pastor's career as a theater manager, and, to a lesser extent, as a performer.
Photographs and sheet music make up the bulk of the Florenz Ziegfeld (1867-1932) collection, which documents Ziegfeld's career as a producer of the Ziegfeld Follies and, to a lesser extent, the contributions of some of the theater professionals associated with him.
From its first performance on September 12, 1866, at Niblo's Theatre in New York, The Black Crook became one of the earliest successful musicals in the United States. The script from a Faustian melodrama, songs by assorted composers, and the services of a stranded Parisian ballet troupe were combined with elaborate sets and costumes to create a spectacle that spawned fifteen subsequent Broadway revivals and numerous touring productions. The Black Crook's scandalously dressed dancers, who were the first to perform the Can-Can on an American stage, delighted and shocked audiences. After attending a performance of The Black Crook in New York, Mark Twain wrote that the musical "debauched many a pure mind." The Center's Black Crook Collection (1853-1929) contains books, sheet music, playbills, programs, clippings, drawings, and photographs related to the musical.
The Minstrel Show Collection (1821-1959) documents the form of entertainment known as the minstrel show and, to a much lesser extent, other entertainments that used blackface makeup. The collection documents over seven hundred individual performers and minstrel show companies, as well as touring companies; motion picture actors and variety performers from the 1920s and 1930s who utilized blackface makeup in their routines; and female impersonators and banjoists. Materials present in the collection include photographs, prints, letters, clippings, programs, playbills, scrapbooks, sheet music, songsters, and jokesters.
Minstrel and variety show performer, theatrical manager, and operator of a traveling dime museum, Al Emmett Fostell (1856-1920) had a theatrical career that incorporated almost every kind of variety skill: singing, dancing, comedy sketch, playing various instruments, and yodeling. During his half-century career, Fostell formed business partnerships with a wide range of performers and stage companies, and was renowned for his collection of Abraham Lincoln artifacts. His archive contains letters, clippings, programs, and ephemera relating to all aspects of his career.
Dance
The Dance Collection comprises publicity and production photographs, prints, programs, and clippings pertaining to two thousand dancers and choreographers and four thousand dance companies from the United States and Europe. Coverage varies, but holdings are extensive for Ruth St. Denis, Kay Lenz, Mary Wigman, Katherine Litz, the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo, Sadler's Wells Ballet Co., and the Marquis de Cuevas dance company. A separate collection includes instruction manuals and assorted publicity material related to square dance and folk dance.
The Costume and Scenic Design Collection includes garments for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes by Léon Bakst (1866-1924) for Narcisse, and by Nicholas Roerich (1874-1947) for Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring. The Diaghilev materials are augmented by the correspondence of dancer Romola de Pulszky Nijinsky (1891 or 1892-1978) and choreographer Serge Lifar (1903-1986), which is contained in the archive of literary agent William A. Bradley (1878-1939).
The dance photographs of Fred Fehl (1906-1995), a pioneer in the use of available-light photography in recording stage productions, are housed here. His collection holds prints and negatives for over sixty ballet and dance companies performing in New York City from 1940 to 1985, and are particularly extensive for the American Ballet Theatre, the Joffrey Ballet, the New York City Ballet, and the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo.
