Meet the Staff - Jeri Smalley

1.     Who are you and what is your position?

Jeri Smalley - Ballets Russes Archivist

2.     Please give us a little bit of background

I received my undergraduate and graduate degrees in dance from the University of Wisconsin – Madison and embarked on a career teaching dance, choreographing, and doing administrative work at colleges, companies, and studios in Wisconsin and Illinois. After a couple of moves and career changes, I received my MLS from the University of Oklahoma (OU) Library School in 2004 where I had taken archival courses with Kathleen Haynes of the faculty and Bill Welge of the Oklahoma History Center Research Division. I then volunteered at the History Center where I helped process a large collection donated by former Sac and Fox tribal official Mary McCormick.

3.     When did you come to the Ballets Russes Archive?

I saw the Ballets Russes film when the filmmakers Dayna Goldfine and Dan Geller presented it for a University of Oklahoma dream course. I had heard that the School of Dance had the archive and I spoke with the Director, Mary Margaret Holt, about volunteering to help organize and build the infrastructure of the archive.

4.     Why did you become a part of the Ballets Russes Archive?

I have a lifelong love of dance and was actively involved in the field for many years. Part of my study of dance history included reading about the Ballets Russes companies, their founders, dancers, and artists. Combining my dance and archival activities by working with the archive gives me the best of both worlds.

5.     What aspects of the Ballets Russes Archive have you worked on?

I came into the archive at a very early stage and have enjoyed helping shape it into a professional archive. I have helped create the infrastructure, drafting and refining the deed of gift that gives us legal right to the objects donors entrust to the archive, creating record tracking systems for donations, adopting systems for describing and arranging collections, seeking out and working with volunteers and organizations with whom we partner in order to make our holdings known and available to the public.

I have also enjoyed working with some of the graduate assistants from the School of Dance and the School of Library Studies at OU who have been involved with the archive in recent years and have worked diligently to further our goals of making our holdings available to as wide a public as possible.

6.     What are the biggest challenges you faced in working with the Archive?

As a very part time person, working with other part time personnel, there is always the knowledge that what “needs to be done” won’t happen at the speed at which you would like to see things happen. Also, as personnel graduate and are replaced, making sure that we record what we do for future personnel is ongoing and important.

7.     What are the biggest successes you have achieved with the Archive?

Helping shape the Archive (as I discussed earlier) from boxes of papers, photos, DVDs, and other items, into a useful, coherent group of archival collections. Taking a collection of not-very-organized and documented donations and helping shape them into processed collections with finding aids for many now available online. When I first volunteered with the Archive, a number of former dancers had donated manuscripts, photographs, ephemera, and digital files to the OU School of Dance. These items had been received and put into archival boxes by Peggy Chaffin, administrative assistant and donor liaison but had not been further processed.  Helping create the professional archival infrastructure and working with others to move the collections of objects into a cohesive, meaningful research resource has been very fulfilling.

8.     What are your favorite items or collections in the Archive?

One of the first collections I inspected and worked with was the Bernice Rehner Collection. This has remained one of my favorites because it is a time capsule in the life of a corps member of one of the Ballets Russes companies. It contains unique items that make the day-to-day lives of company members come vividly to life, including rehearsal schedules, snapshots, napkin art by company member George Verdak, correspondence pertaining to the American Guild of Musical Artists (Bernice was the AGMA representative for the company for a time), and correspondence with her family while she was in the company.

Although other collections including the Branitzka-Hoyer and Bechenova Collections are special for documenting transitional years from the Diaghilev era to the de Basil era, Bernice’s collection probably remains my favorite.

9.     What are your hopes for the future of the Archive?

I look forward to seeing the number of unique collections grow and become more accessible to researchers. With a web presence via our Facebook page, blog, and website we have begun to get some genealogically focused inquiries from people with family members and friends who had ties with one of the Ballets Russes companies and would like to know more about that time in their ancestor’s life.  I look forward to further use of the collection by students and researchers of dance, music, and the theatre arts both online and in house.