The Purchase Dance Archives: 50 Years of Legacy
By Chole Gulvin
Every college has a story. Schools like Harvard and Yale have been around longer than the Declaration of Independence, showcasing their history through ornate architecture and centuries-old traditions.
While Purchase, founded in 1967, only has a fraction of that history, it still has plenty to show for itself. This is especially true when it comes to its contributions to the arts. Thanks to recent dance graduate Aubrey Mailloux, students are able to access countless materials through the Purchase Dance Archives.
The main mission of the archives is to honor the Conservatory of Dance’s impressive history through the preservation and organization of programs, posters, recordings, and more, from the past five decades.
“I’ve always been interested in knowing where we come from,” says Mailloux, who started working on the archives in 2024. Previously, she had interned at Jacob’s Pillow, a historic dance institution located in Becket, Massachusetts, and known for putting many modern dance pioneers on the map. It was there that she was able to gain knowledge of how to sort, label and classify archival footage, skills that she brought back with her to Purchase.
“The amazing thing she did was go through everything and find a system to sort it,” says Dance Performance Department Chair Nelly van Bommel. “She was able to kind of dive into that basically all alone, doing this incredible analog and digital work.”
A lot goes into the process of preservation. Video materials, for example, are referred to as the Moving Image Collection, and must go through what’s called appraisal, which consists of evaluating the materials to determine their value. Interns in the dance archives must fill out a seven-page form detailing specifics such as biographical elements, scope and content, and how the material is arranged.
Since graduating last year, Mailloux has been in the process of receiving a master’s in library and information science from the Pratt Institute in New York City. Her hope is to continue to document performance art history because it can be “gone in the blink of an eye,” and she feels strongly about the importance of the work she does in “cultivating our own legacy and appreciating who came before us.”
This hard work doesn’t go unnoticed, and many other dance professors recognize the impact that a well-organized archive can have.
“Dance is really hard to document; it’s ephemeral, it passes through the body,” says Darrah Carr, director of the dance conservatory, “but having access to programs, posters, playbills, helps to pinpoint that kind of nebulous dance history and remind folks that there are permanent artifacts left behind.”
When asked about the future of preservation, Carr mentioned Jacob’s Pillow’s digital newsletter, which can be found on their website. It features videos, multimedia essays, and podcasts that cover a variety of topics related to the history of the art form.
It is worth considering whether a digital database such as this one would benefit the Purchase Dance Archives, as they still remain largely inaccessible, especially to non-dance majors. Some, such as dance history Professor Caroline Copeland-Nizam, believe it would. “Financially, it was much harder for people to do their research in the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s,” she said. “Now that everything is more accessible online, people are a little more generous about sharing their findings. It opens up the field more.”
Mailloux agreed that technology such as this has its benefits, although she also emphasized the crucialness of physical, over digital artifacts and the “invisible labor,” involved in the making of digital archives like these.
The immense amount of work that goes into running an archive, in general, often isn’t recognized. Bizy Jacobs, a senior dance major who hopes to continue what Mailloux started, calls it “a labor of love.” Despite its challenges, however, she also emphasized how much faith she has in the students here. “Because they are dancers,” she says, “they will take a certain amount of care with the materials because they understand that this was somebody’s passion.”
Students and faculty alike seem optimistic about the future of the Purchase Dance Archives, offering multiple solutions for how it could expand in the future. Both Van Bommel and Copeland-Nizam offered suggestions on how to open it up to other majors, such as turning it into a library or hosting lectures about it around campus. All agree that Mailloux’s work has offered a way of reconnecting with one’s past and understanding one’s future.
“When you’re in a dance class, sometimes you feel like you’re just going through the motions,” says Jacobs when asked about the importance of the archives, “and knowing where it came from can make you feel like you’re part of something.”
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