Contemplating these artifacts or peering at a wealth of historical dance footage are now a natural extension of the city’s vast cultural offerings. Just as important, the materials helped to preserve a fragile art form’s legacy.
It would not have been possible without the work of one woman, Genevieve Oswald. Oswald was the founder, and for its first 43 years, the curator and tireless champion of the library’s dance collection.
She died March 19 at her home in Santa Clarita, California. She was 97. Her daughter, Anne Johnston, confirmed the death.
In 1944, armed with a fresh undergraduate degree in music, Oswald came to New York to study singing. At first she supported herself with a job selling train tickets at the old Penn Station, but before long she was working at the New York Public Library.
Oswald began by cataloging the 375 dance-related books and three dozen boxes of dance programs and clippings then held in the music division at the library’s main building on 42nd Street.
She became curator when the dance collection was formally established in 1947, presiding over a room on the library’s ground floor. In 1965 the dance collection moved into a new branch of the library at Lincoln Center. This year it celebrates the 75th anniversary of the beginning of that tiny collection, which has grown to more than41,000 books, 26,000 films, 2,700 prints and many other things.
Alastair Macaulay, the former chief dance critic for The New York Times, wrote earlier this year that it was “the largest, most eclectic and most enterprising collection of dance materials anywhere.”
And it is open to anyone, without the need for credentials or scholarly affiliation. All one needs is a library card.
This freedom of access was central to Oswald’s project, as laid out in an article she wrote for The Times about the collection in 1954: “It is important that the public be able to get dance information, because the dance art can be considerably strengthened and more firmly established if its public is well-informed.”
Oswald, known as Gegi (pronounced “Gigi”), also saw herself as an advocate for a fragile art.
There is no commonly accepted notation system for recording dances, which means that for centuries, before film, many dances fell out of the historical record.
“Gegi always talked about how she was collecting around the absence of the dance itself,” the current curator of the collection, Linda Murray, said in an interview. “That’s why she collected sculptures and shoes and photographs and musical scores.”
Oswald tirelessly pursued new collections, with a wide focus. After seeking out materials related to American modern dance — the library contains the collections of the dancer-choreographers Doris Humphrey, Charles Weidman and Ted Shawn, as well as extensive material on Katherine Dunham, among others — she turned her attention to ballet, and later to Asian dance. She even sent raw film stock to dance companies in India, China and Japan, asking them to record their work and send it back for safekeeping.
Sometimes those records became a vital link to a tradition in peril. As dance historian Lynn Matluck Brooks described in a 2011 essay for Dance Chronicle about Oswald, recordings made of the Classical Khmer Ballet of Cambodia at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1971 later became teaching tools for Cambodian dance teachers who had survived the massacres of the Khmer Rouge. The regime had attempted to obliterate all traces of Khmer culture, including dance.
In the 1960s, Oswald turned her energy to assembling an extensive archive of dance films. The film archive became one the most important and widely used parts of the collection. It is not unusual to see dancers from various companies seated at monitors watching performances from the past.
“The film archive is a second home for me,” New York City Ballet dancer Silas Farley said in an email. “It’s like an immersive family tree. By studying the footage of my teachers when they were in their dancing glory, I come to better understand my place in that lineage.”
The ever-growing film library is financed in part by a gift from Jerome Robbins, who in 1964 dedicated 1 percent of his royalties from the musical “Fiddler on the Roof” (he directed and choreographed the original production) for its upkeep. He also left his personal archive to the collection, which was renamed the Jerome Robbins Dance Division in 1999, a year after his death.
Until her retirement in 1987, Oswald continued innovating: developing a comprehensive cataloging system for dance, starting an oral history project, mounting countless exhibitions. She also taught dance history at New York University from 1970 to 1994.
Genevieve Mary Oswald was born in Buffalo, New York, on Aug. 24, 1921, the elder of two daughters of Charles Oswald, a shipping company clerk, and Jeannette Glenn Oswald. Her sister, Jeanne, died some time ago.
Oswald attended the Sacred Heart Academy and then went on to the North Carolina College for Women, which later became the University of Northern Carolina at Greensboro.
She met her husband, Dean Leslie Johnson, while she was working in the public library’s music division. He was a graduate student in music, doing research there, and went on to become a music teacher in the city’s public schools. They married in 1949. Johnson died in 1981.
In addition to her daughter, Oswald is survived by a son, Charles John Johnson, and four grandchildren.
“She had this prodigious energy, focus and enthusiasm,” Ann Johnston said of her mother. “There was always music in the house, and lots of esoteric knowledge. Even as kids, we knew about Lincoln Kirstein and the 19th-century ballerina Marie Taglioni.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.