The Brooklyn Rail

Despite the dance teacher aunt that helped raise me, I cannot attribute my love of the art to any relative. What I credit instead is 450 VHS tapes.

I can trace my interest in VHS to the very first time I recorded a television program onto a tape, carefully scrawling “MigHEal JacKson” on the label in green crayon afterward. Suddenly, it didn’t matter that the concert had ended and the network might never re-air it. Inside my videocassette recorder, there was no limit to how many times I could press rewind and play to watch it again. Outside the VCR, the tape was an object I could possess. Nothing else in my life gave me the power the VCR did: the ability to preserve whatever I wanted and relive it whenever I wanted. I recorded a lot of TV.

After my brother died and my fascination with revisiting memories and safeguarding the past grew into an obsession, I returned to my old analog recordings. I found that my favorite parts were those unintentionally captured: the commercials.

How better to explain than by describing one of these ads? In a Kodak commercial from 2005, a group of children is being led around a museum of photographs. “Listen,” the tour guide tells them. “The pictures, they’re talking.” The kids are incredulous, asking what the photos are saying. The guide answers, “They’re saying ‘Keep me. Protect me. Share me. And I will live forever.’” While others might overlook the value of commercials past, I saw instead the need to help them live forever. So many hands worked on each one, designing them to be as memorable as possible. Yet all that effort typically disappeared after a few months of airtime. With it went the ability to see how we viewed ourselves at any given moment. These 30-second narratives tell the stories of American life. (They tell them through consumerism, but what’s more American than that?)

A taped program complete with ad breaks presents a full, “warts and all” view of the past that nostalgia can otherwise muddy when it ignores the nuances—and nuisances—of the everyday. Aside from any deeper meaning, the jingles and bright colors of old commercials are just plain fun. I started a YouTube channel for ads from my collection. I knew I could find others who shared my opinion that they were worth saving. So, when my aunt inherited from her late mentor Rosalie, another dance teacher, 450 tapes recorded from television, I jumped at the chance to go through them.

Rosalie’s cache offered the tantalizing potential for TV rarities from the early days of VHS. Five years after the format was introduced to the US in 1977, only a very small percentage of American households had a VCR. Rosalie had one in 1978. I didn’t know any of this at the time. I didn’t even really know Rosalie, a woman I had met a few times as a kid. The closeness I feel to her now—the fact that I can tell you her habits, history, interests—only comes from what I pieced together by pressing play on tape after tape after tape.

To my great misfortune, I discovered that every single recording was related to dance, something I cared nothing about. It took hours to digitize a tape and edit out the programming from the ads. Worse, many of the recordings were from PBS, which didn’t air commercials. And then things started to change when I found a tape of a 1987 episode of Great Performances called “David Gordon’s ‘Made in U.S.A.’”

Mesmerized, I watched the first segment, “Valda and Misha,” in which Gordon’s wife Valda Setterfield dances around a room with Mikhail Baryshnikov while they have a conversation about their native countries and coming to America. The choreography is not quite the postmodernist pedestrian movements I now know Gordon is famous for, but it is relatively basic and unfolds slowly—a languid series of steps punctuated by a raised leg or the duo taking each other by the hand. Behind them, the walls of the studio look hand-drawn. Cartoon sketches that appear on screen during the performance transport us to the memories the dancers speak of. Every action flows. I couldn’t believe that movement that appeared so casual and effortless could be so graceful. I didn’t know you could do that, I thought.

The next piece, “TV Nine Lives,” made the feeling even stronger. I didn’t know you could do that! The choreography is built around a single brown folding chair as both partner and prop. Baryshnikov and the rest of the cast sit on the chair, stand on it, lay on it, use it as a lever, use it as a gun, go over, under, around, and through it. Something this much fun could be a dance performance?

Soon after, I unearthed a tape of He Makes Me Feel Like Dancin’, a 1983 TV documentary about Jacques d’Amboise teaching dance to kids in New York City public schools, and it evoked in me the same joy that watching old commercials did. D’Amboise’s passion for showing students what they are capable of is infectious. As the young dancers pushed themselves past what they thought were their limits, they were, like me, learning the thrill of discovery.

The last broadcast that really drew me to dance was much more sedate. In Conversations About the Dance from 1980, esteemed choreographer for film and stage Agnes de Mille, then in her seventies, delivers a lecture highlighting the art form at specific historical moments. Dancers from the Joffrey Ballet stand behind her, enacting some of the steps as she’s talking. I knew that dance had a history that could be studied, but before I saw this program, it didn’t occur to me that dance history could be embodied, brought back to life. It was something not just to learn, but to enjoy. Suddenly, I was approaching these tapes with a new hunger. I wanted to see more.

Even more than TV commercials, dance is viewed as ephemeral. Despite the development of film and methods to record choreography in written form, there is a sense that the full experience of watching a specific live performance cannot truly be captured for future audiences. Although evidence from a singular event remains, some of its richness can only be lost to time. Perhaps this futility is why some creators don’t even try to save everything, leaving gaps in their archives. For instance, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts has in its collection several rehearsals for “David Gordon’s ‘Made in U.S.A.,’” but not the program itself. Sergei Diaghilev outright refused to allow his Ballets Russes to be filmed, even though the technology had existed for over thirty years by the time Diaghilev’s death ended the company in 1929.

When I see my dance videos, I can recognize them as distinct from a live performance. Yet I see them not as reductive facsimiles of a staged production, but something still valuable. How different would it be to watch a show by New York City school kids without getting a sense of all the hours of work they put in? Would I enjoy watching Valda and Misha converse if they had to shout into microphones, instead of providing the intimacy they do on TV, speaking to each other as if no audience will ever hear it?

It’s intimacy that comes through so clearly no matter how you watch dance. Sitting facing a stage, you’re part of a small group of witnesses to a series of moments that can never be recreated. And viewing video, you’re never more than steps from the dance. It’s just you and the performers. When I watch my tapes, I imagine that I might be the last person to ever get to see them, the last person to know about a particular performance. I imagine that they were recorded just for me to find years later, even though that’s impossible. I’ll never actually know, however, what exactly Rosalie’s intentions were in taping dance programs.

In a 1973 issue of Dance and Dancers that Rosalie saved, Peter Williams writes, “How can anything develop if there is nothing left of what has gone before?” Without the restaging of classics, “Ballet and dance theatre would become nothing more than an everlasting workshop.” Did Rosalie fear this possibility? The dance past seen on the VHS tapes was dance present when she recorded it. I’m not sure how far into the future she was looking to safeguard it—maybe she just wasn’t home the night Magnum, P.I. featured a ballet-related plot and wanted to watch it the next day. I don't know how strongly she felt that dance should be preserved, or if she thought she would be one of the few to attempt a particular kind of preservation. But this I know: She recorded absolutely everything on TV remotely related to dance. She must have not only read TV Guide weekly, but studied it, lived by it. Its clippings are still on some of the VHS boxes. Other tapes are labeled more scantily. (When I started exploring my aunt’s inheritance, I could name maybe one dancer. Now I have so learned the language of dance and of Rosalie that I instantly recognize “Good tape” as her abbreviation for “Alexander Godunov.”) Their lengths vary, but I estimate that if you do the math, they each contain four hours of content on average. That’s over two months, twenty-four hours a day, worth of dance. At about 15 dollars a pop, Rosalie spent 400 dollars a year on blank tapes, and a lifetime total of over 6,000 dollars. You don’t go to all that trouble if you don’t care about dance history. You do it because you want to look to where we’ve been to see where we’re going. I think Rosalie recorded these tapes with an aim to capture the same thing that I found in them: not a performance exactly the way it looked on stage, but a piece of it, some sparks of inspiration. Something that keeps you wanting more. This desire to see more—and to learn the best ways to share it—led me first to start frequenting libraries, following rabbit holes of research, and later, in my mid-twenties, to enroll at a college where I could study dance history. I graduated from Columbia University this year. Above all, Rosalie was a student of the art, the way I have become.

When I first started watching old VHS tapes, I appreciated that they were unedited and showed the past exactly how it was. But I see now the curation involved. Whether we taped a program to watch it once the next night or keep it indefinitely, anyone who pressed record on the VCR was making a statement: This is valuable. This is worth saving. Like advertising, televised dance tells stories. Each program, in both content and the fact that it was aired when it was, reveals how we were viewed as a society at a particular point in time, and how we viewed ourselves. But what we choose to save also tells our stories. Who we are is held in what we try to make live forever.