ABSTRACT
Later in 1975, a National Endowment for the Arts meeting at the Lincoln Center library discussed the impact of death on the performing arts. Choreographer James Waring had died; his protégé talked about his works being lost and dependent for their survival on people who could remember them. David White of Dance Theater Workshop (DTW) and I proposed to start a system of archiving dance for future generations. This was only a spit in a bucket, but monumental at the same time, because it was a concerted effort to record dance works. The project videotaped the entire performance with one camera located in the last row of the theater. This single-camera “adjusted wide shot” established for the downtown dance community a standard system for videotaping dance performances. It was not all the other things we could have done with it, such as talking to the choreographer, dancers, or musicians, or videotaping the concert from every possible angle. It was a single camera in the theater during a performance.
