THE HISTORY OF LEGACY ORAL HISTORY
by Jeff Friedman, Ph.D., Legacy Founder and Senior Advisor

Legacy Oral History Project began as the consequence of a personal loss. More than twenty years ago, I hurt my back sitting in cold, cramped planes during a performance tour of Alaska with the Oberlin Dance Collective; the physical therapist who helped me recover was a dancer and choreographer named Joah Lowe. While we were working together, Joah died unexpectedly, while visiting his family for Christmas. Neither he, nor his family, knew that he had HIV. In January 1988, a memorial service was held for Joah and a large group of mourners gathered to remember him.

There was a showing of Joah’s choreography on video, but the small, flickering images of Joah on the video felt like a travesty. Joah’s life and work were so much more than the little video portrayed, and I wanted to do better.

I searched for models to help me configure an oral history project to record and preserve a performing artist’s work and discovered that the New York City Public Library had such a program for dancers. After considerable discussion, I decided to create Legacy, initially focused on recording oral histories with dancers who had AIDS.

To learn oral history methods, I attended a course taught by a staff member from Bancroft Library’s Research Oral History Office (ROHO) at University of California, Berkeley, and completed my first oral history interview. Once I had tapes and a transcript, my next task was finding someplace safe and accessible to house them. For this, I contacted Margaret Norton at the Performing Arts Archives, then located on the top floor of the Opera House in San Francisco. She agreed to accept my collection and become Legacy’s fiscal agent, permitting me to generate funds to support the oral history work.

Growth and Development

Legacy then began to record oral histories with several dance community members with AIDS. It was difficult at first, as Legacy was new and not many people knew about my work. When I called people, it was often hard to convince them of my genuine interest in their life story. But once I explained that I, too, was a dancer and told them Joah’s story and why I started Legacy, an understanding grew.

Sometimes people would send gifts of relevant audio and video they had recorded on their own, and Legacy’s few volunteers and I would transcribe and process them according to ROHO formats and standards. Over time, Legacy’s collection expanded to include men and women with cancer and other life-threatening illnesses, as well as community elders; the mission grew from exclusive focus on narrators (usually males) with AIDS to including men and women whose life stories were at risk for being utterly lost for many different reasons.

The collection soon became substantial enough for me to request outside evaluation. The evaluator’s feedback clearly indicated that Legacy needed to diversify the collection beyond my familiar comfort zone of contemporary modern dance and classical ballet. With four years of funding from the California Arts Council, Legacy hired Patricia Bulitt in 1993, a local dance ethnographer with interviewing experience, to collect narratives from four very different cultural dance artist/educators. Interacting with narrators expressing different worldviews, Legacy learned to record, translate and edit in new ways. This was a major stepping-stone toward expanding the collection’s diversity.

During this growth period, it soon became clear that Legacy needed a group of interviewers trained in Legacy formats and standards to complete new projects. To meet this need I created Legacy’s annual training workshop in 1994, and I have taught a training workshop every year since then. The workshop’s curriculum gives students skills in project design, legal and ethical practices, interviewing, transcription, and editing that allow them to complete projects using Legacy’s model. In this way, several Legacy projects were completed over the next years by teams of students who had trained in the workshops.

In 1997, I began graduate work at the University of California in Riverside. My research was focused on oral history as a documentation format for the performing arts. After completing my Ph.D. in 2003 and starting to teach at Rutgers University in New Jersey, I realized that Legacy required a more institutionally stable base. David Humphrey, Ph.D., the new director at the Performing Arts Library & Museum (SFPALM), and his board of trustees agreed that Legacy would officially become an integrated program of SFPALM. At that time, Legacy’s mission expanded to serve all genres of the performing arts, including dance, music, and theater, and other performing arts practices.

Legacy Today

Legacy’s collection is now the largest comprehensive oral history program for the performing arts outside of the New York City Public Library program. Legacy offers many educational services to the public, including the annual summer workshop, consulting services, lectures, films, and performances based on oral histories in Legacy’s collection. Online library catalogues developed by SFPALM allow for increased public use of the collection materials; local, national, and international researchers access the collection both electronically and by visiting the library for onsite research.

Basya Petnick, Legacy’s current manager, reorganized and upgraded book production, recruited many volunteers and interns from new sources, and strengthened the program’s infrastructure. Keeping current with major oral history programs across the country, she has developed a diverse set of digital tools for recording and processing interview materials. Legacy oral histories are now produced in CD, DVD, and online presentations as well as traditional book formats.

Legacy’s collection materials are held in numerous institutional archives including ROHO at University of California, Berkeley; University of California, Los Angeles’ oral history program; the New York City Public Library’s dance collection; New Mexico’s State Archives; San Francisco Public Library; and many others. Legacy is presently working with San Francisco State’s DIVA project to make more abstracts, full-length oral histories and images available online.

Support and Awards

Since 1988, support for Legacy’s activities has been received from the National Endowment for the Arts, the California Arts Council, San Francisco Foundation and numerous other local, regional and national foundations, and a loyal group of individual patrons and advisors. Legacy is also supported by the continued dedication of the staff of SFPALM (now Museum of Performance & Design), by individual gifts, and by the continual dedication of its advisors, staff and many volunteers. Legacy has received several awards, including a 1995 Isadora Duncan award from the San Francisco Bay Area dance community for service to the field, and the 2003 James V. Mink and 2008 Forrest C. Pogue awards for contributions to the field of oral history, especially for innovative performing arts documentation and research, from the Southwest and Mid-Atlantic oral history associations, respectively.