I can’t believe I almost forgot about this. JAZZDANCE came to a close with a two week retrospective at the Southern Theater in Minneapolis over two weekends, April 14-17 and April 21-23.
Les and I were living in a wonderful carriage house at 121 and 1/2 Franklin Avenue. The mail was an issue at first as were getting the utilities to recognize 1/2 as an address. It was a great place to live.
In preparation for moving to Dallas and beginning my position at SMU, I contacted the Andersen Library for the Performing Arts at the University of Minnesota.I spoke with Alan K. Lathorp and it was agreed I would donate the organization’s archives to the library. This included videotapes of performances, programs, posters, photos, press materials a board minutes. There may even be some tax returns. I had to sign an official Deed of Gift, giving the University of Minnesota and the library ownership of the materials .
They agreed to pick up the materials after I had prepared them for release. I had duplicate copies of a lot of the performances and gave them one. Others I gave to former members of the company and the rest I kept. Two summers ago, I digitized all of the VHS tapes. It was a huge project. I kept the videotapes. They are in my office at school. One morning, a very large truck pulled up to the carriage house. There must have been about a dozen boxes and also lots of posters. They took them away. It was the right thing to do.
Last thing – when the university granted me a sabbatical in the fall of 2014, I went back to the library. I needed to fill in some blanks I had in preparation for creating this website. They had done a beautiful job cataloging the materials, easy to figure out and easy to navigate. Happy I remembered to write about this.