‘FIDDLER’ ROYALTIES SUPPORT DANCE FILM COLLECTION : ARCHIVE NAMED FOR JEROME ROBBINS

The Dance Collection of the New York Public Library has taken time to give a name to one of its most popular and extensive assets: the ever-growing store of filmed and videotaped dance documentation. It will hereafter be the Jerome Robbins Archive of the Recorded Moving Image, in honor of the choreographer who continues to be instrumental in its success.

The dance-film holdings of the collection began to grow steadily and rapidly more than 23 years ago when Robbins published a New York Times article on the importance of recording dance. He then followed up by donating 1% of his royalties from “Fiddler on the Roof” to the library in support of the purpose. In an informal news conference before the ceremony on Monday, Robbins said that he didn’t know exact figures, but the royalties from “Fiddler” were still coming in. “They seem to go on and on,” he said with a somewhat shy smile. “It’s always playing somewhere.”

Vartan Gregorian, president of the library, happily summarized what Robbins’ support had meant to the archive: From eight cans of film in 1960, the archive has grown to about 10,000.

Genevieve Oswald, dance collection curator, took her moment on the podium to report that the archive not only acquired items through gifts, but also was responsible for creating more than 400 film/video documents of its own.

Mikhail Baryshnikov, who acted as the ceremony’s chief celebrant, paused before giving the holdings Robbins’ name and singled out, arguably, the most stellar of the evening’s guests.

“I would like to use this wonderful occasion,” the Russian emigre said, “to welcome to our country and our city our dear friend and idol, Maya Plisetskaya.” (The great Russian ballerina from the Bolshoi Ballet is in New York to do some guest teaching.) Baryshnikov then quipped that all the dancers documented in the collection had Robbins to thank as “all our mistakes get recorded for posterity.”

In his remarks, Robbins began by relating how his Russian-born parents took him as a child to the New York Public Library’s children’s room and how, when he was working on “Fiddler,” his research took him back to both the library and his parents. “That this archive is funded through ‘Fiddler’ makes a nice circle,” Robbins said. “I feel so happy to give back to the people of dance and to the fine dancers,” he added, before calling it all “a real pleasure for me.”

Besides Robbins’ Aunt Fanny and his sister Sonia--once an “interpretive” dancer who was his first dance teacher--the crowd of well-wishers included a wide range of dancers and choreographers from Broadway to ballet, among them Tamara Geva, Igor Youskevitch, Suzanne Farrell, Donald Saddler, George S. Irving, Arthur Mitchell, David Gordon, Valda Setterfield, Pauline Koner, John Butler and Darci Kistler.