A Treasure Unlocked

The show is called “Transformations.” In the elegant new gallery space, two stories high and able to vie with any Chelsea art dealership in its spanking-new whiteness and spacious proportions, exhibits from the fields of dance, theater and music reflect the ways in which art transforms one thing into another.

One exhibit, moving from a hand-cranked gramophone to digital audio tapes, tracks the transformations in recorded sound since the medium’s inception. Another, with documents relating to the musical “West Side Story” (a transformation of Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet”), reflects different aspects of a neighborhood’s transformation: First, the transformation of a gritty urban cosmos into the setting for one of the greatest works of American musical theater; and, second, that same neighborhood’s real-life transformation into one of the most desirable residential areas in Manhattan. Sparking the latter transformation, in the 1960s, was the construction of the performing arts complex known as Lincoln Center.

“Transformations” also bears witness to a significant transformation within Lincoln Center itself. The gallery in which it’s housed is a new feature of the new New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, which will reopen after a $37-million renovation, with a ribbon-cutting ceremony on Oct. 11.

The old library was already a pretty popular building. Not that it was particularly striking, tucked away as it is in a corner of the Lincoln Center plaza, with the Metropolitan Opera overshadowing it on one side and the Vivian Beaumont Theater dominating it on the other. But its archive of about 9 million objects relating to theater, dance and music, combined with exhibitions and a program of about 200 free performances and lectures a year, made it one of the most important buildings on the complex to a range of people: Broadway directors, dramaturges and interested members of the public.

One significant feature of this collection is that only about 30% of it is books. Dedicated to documenting every aspect of the performing arts, in any form, the library has huge holdings of old recordings, clippings and theater programs, personal documents (such as Nijinsky’s diaries) and an unparalleled wealth of performance videos. Researchers here can find everything from John Cage’s manuscripts to a lock of Franz Liszt’s hair, the Lillian Gish archives to the Mapleson wax cylinders that were the earliest means of recording opera stars at the dawn of the 20th century.

The Theater on Film and Tape Archive, which has been videotaping current performances for its archive for more than 30 years, has helped give the collection importance to the theater world. Founded by Betty Corwin in 1970, and overseen by her until her retirement this year, it’s an invaluable tool for any director of a new production or performer preparing a role. Because it includes current shows, access to the public is limited, but those with the right professional credentials--including Bernadette Peters, Kevin Spacey and Sam Waterston--can research to their hearts’ content. The collection’s importance to the theater world was recognized this year with a Tony Award for excellence in theater. (The theater collection had already won a Tony for distinguished service to the theater, in 1956.)

Of course, in 1965, when the library was built, video was still in its infancy. Nor was the library equipped for other advances in technology, such as computers for searching the card catalog. Renovations over the years happened in a rather haphazard fashion, where they were most needed. It didn’t help that the library’s individual collections were, in effect, separate fiefdoms.

The four arms of the library’s research collections--the Jerome Robbins Dance Division, the Music Division, the Rodgers and Hammerstein Archives of Recorded Sounds, and the Billy Rose Theater Collection--maintained separate reading rooms. This complicated matters for users. Anyone who wanted, say, to watch a video of “West Side Story,” refer to the score, and look into Jerome Robbins’ contribution to it might have to go to three different rooms, and three different librarians.

The renovation has broken down such divisions literally and figuratively, thanks to James Stewart Polshek’s new open design. The exhibition spaces, formerly scattered through the building’s upper floors, have been consolidated in big, elegant spaces near the library’s two entrances so that people can check out, for example, the “Transformations” exhibit in the main-floor Donald and Mary Oenslager Gallery without entering the library itself.

Large new rooms with windows accommodate the library’s staff. A bank of computers by the main entrance allows users to get up to speed on the computer systems installed throughout the library. And most significant, the walls between the individual research divisions have disappeared. Instead, a single research reading room extends the length of the top floor, with natural light filtering down from skylights over the banks of computer-linked, state-of-the-art terminals and video screens. Audio and video stations here are linked to the same centralized system; users’ requests are all supplied through a new control room in the basement.

The library even has a new director: Jacqueline Z. Davis.

Davis, attractive and dynamic, is already a familiar face on the American performing arts scene; she was the founding director of the Lied Center at the University of Kansas, one of the most important university performing arts venues in the country. Davis is no longer an arts presenter, but in another sense, there’s a sense of continuity in her mission. “It’s about providing the context for the audience,” she says, be they concert-goers or library users. At the Lied Center, that context came in part through performance series she established, with titles such as New Directions or Broadway and Beyond. Establishing context in her former position could mean putting the Mingus Big Band, a classic jazz group, on her Great Performers series, or educating an audience about the eclectic banjo polymath Bela Fleck.

At the library, the context is provided by 9 million objects of every conceivable description. Here, the mission becomes about “animating the collections for the users,” Davis says, “any way that we can.” That’s the goal underlying all of the library’s legion auxiliary programs, from performances of music in the collection’s archives to exhibits such as “Transformations,” Davis’ brainchild. For the exhibit, the directors of each division brought out jewels from the depths of their collections, spreading them out for her perusal. Objects that made the cut range from posters advertising Houdini’s tricks (which transformed reality) to costume sketches for the bees on “Saturday Night Live,” presented as an example of animal transformations (effectively inscribing John Belushi in the same tradition as Ovid).

Davis is heading a staff that is passionate about the arts and what they do, and are, in many cases, library lifers. Library assistant director Mark Tolleson began here as a clerk, having come to New York to study flute; today, he looks on the vast clippings archive--file drawer after file drawer of folders holding every manner of performance-related document--with pride. “You can’t use an outside clipping bureau,” he says. “You have to have people who care about these things, who know what’s interesting; there’s no substitute for that kind of passion.” Indeed, some former staffers have gone on to arts careers, including Barry Sonnenfeld, the film director.

Others have developed unexpected careers within the library. Alan Pally, who produces its public programs, remembers an older staffer advising him, years ago: “‘You’ll find you can do anything you want within the library itself.’ And here I am,” Pally adds. He’s been at the library for 34 years.

The library’s programs have ranged from actors reading Oscar Wilde to James Levine leading Varese’s “Ionisation.” One hitch to the musical presentations, however, was the indifferent acoustics of the Bruno Walter Auditorium, originally a dry space more like a lecture hall. Pally remembers a musician from the Metropolitan orchestra coming to him to express how difficult the hall was to play. “I never thought we could afford a complete renovation,” Pally says.

He was wrong. Thanks to grants (including more than $20 million from the city of New York), the auditorium too has been revamped and redesigned with wood paneling and other acoustic fittings that have dramatically improved its sound. Now, Pally’s challenge is to scale back. During the library’s year in “exile,” he presented concerts at the Great Hall in Cooper Union, which often filled to its capacity of 1,000 seats. The Walter Auditorium holds only 203.

Pally tries to “reflect the collection’s richness and diversity” with concerts and lectures, dramas and dance. They are often calibrated either to anniversaries--such as the centennial of French composer Francis Poulenc--or new collections, such as the Lillian Gish archive, which the library acquired in the mid-1990s. The library doesn’t want to be seen as an auxiliary to any of the larger institutions that surround it; and even when Levine or members of the New York Philharmonic play here, it’s on their own time and as individuals, not as an official collaboration. When the library does join forces with other organizations, it’s in the context of a citywide festival, such as the UK in NY festival scheduled for this October. The library’s contributions to this include an evening called “British Theatre: A Tantalizing Glimpse Through Historical Letters and New Plays”; an interview/discussion with Akram Khan, a choreographer who combines elements of classical Indian and contemporary dance; and performances of music by Iain Hamilton, a Scottish composer who has earmarked his own archive to the music division.

Such bequests have contributed to the steady transformation and growth of the library’s collections since the future New York Public Library acquired a collection of music manuscripts from Joseph Drexel, a financier, in 1888.

Other bequests swelled the size and scope of a collection that, until its Lincoln Center campus opened, was housed in the library’s main building on 42nd Street.

“At one corner of the third-floor reading room was a glass enclosure behind which were these card files of all the material in the theater and dance collections, with a librarian sitting behind the desk,” says theater director Harold Prince, a trustee of the Performing Arts Library and the chairman of its reopening advisory committee. Prince says he “haunted the place” as a 10-year-old, feeding his theater habit--evidence that the library helped fuel the trajectory of at least one major American career.

The most recent large addition to the library’s collection is the entire archive of the American Music Center. Founded in 1939 by Aaron Copland and other composers, the AMC is devoted to propagating contemporary American music--including circulating scores to interested performers.

It now includes about 40,000 scores and 20,000 original recordings, many of them unique. “We’ve got a live recording of the original cast of ‘1600 Pennsylvania Avenue,”’ says Richard Kessler, the center’s director, “which, we were told, doesn’t exist.”

The new arrangement with the library is “a partnership,” Kessler says, “that best suits the nature of this particular collection.” The library will restore decaying reel-to-reel tapes, repair scores and incorporate the whole archive into its research collection. The AMC retains the right to go in, copy the scores and send them to interested parties, as it has done all along. This sense of being part of a living tradition--in so many fields--is what sets this library apart. And the fact that so many arts professionals feel so passionately about it ensures that it remains, in Prince’s words, “an investment in the future of all these art forms.”

“This generation of young people,” he says, “has been sorely tempted to leapfrog a whole lot of acquisition of information in search of fame and fortune, quickly.” But “it’s a long journey which makes a good career. This library documents that.”

And like many arts, the library elicits very personal reactions, and attachments. When she heard that Davis had gotten the library post, the classical singer Joyce Castle sent a large bouquet of roses, in congratulation. “On the card,” says Davis, “was written, ‘Please take care of our library for us.”’ The library’s recent physical transformation should make that job a whole lot easier.

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The library is at 40 Lincoln Center Plaza. “Transformations” is on exhibit until Jan. 5.