Take the dance collaborations that involve the work of composer John Antill, for example. Antill is probably best known in the worlds of both music and dance for his score for Corroboree. Library resources relating to Corroboree are extensive and range from Antill’s annotated score to his scrapbooks of clippings. The musical score has had continual impact and has been used by three choreographers to date: Rex Reid in 1950, Beth Dean in 1954, and Stanton Welch in 1995. Resources relating to the work of all of these choreographers exist in various formats across the Library’s collections. A researcher using the Library can quickly build up a picture of the complex interrelationship between the various elements that feature in a performance of the danced version of Corroboree.

But it is not so widely known that Antill provided scores, some of which were specific commissions, for several other choreographers, among them Valrene Tweedie, Coralie Hinkley and Dawn Swane. The Library’s collections shed particular light on a 1957 production called Wakooka. Set on a sheep station ‘somewhere in present day Australia’, this ballet, with a commissioned score by Antill and choreography by Tweedie, was originally made for the Elizabethan Opera Ballet. The score is preserved in the Library among Antill’s papers. The Library’s ephemera collections contain programmes for the original staging of Wakooka and for its revivals, both by ABC Television and by the Sydney-based choreographic ensemble Ballet Australia.

In this context, a revealing note in Antill’s papers titled ‘Music for the ballet: how a composer goes to work’ establishes the steps Antill undertook when engaged in writing a commissioned dance work. Tweedie’s own reflections on the process of working with Antill are recorded in an oral history interview in which she discusses working with the composer on Wakooka. Again, it is possible to build up a picture of the collaborative process from several points of view.

Comparable synergies come to light when looking at material relating to the Deep Sea Dreaming segment of the Sydney 2000 Olympic Opening Ceremony. Both the choreographer of this segment, Meryl Tankard, and the composer, Elena Kats-Chernin, have recently donated a collection of their papers to the National Library under the Cultural Gifts Program. Among the Kats-Chernin papers is the score for Deep Sea Dreaming; and the Tankard papers contain a range of material that documents their creative process. Tankard’s workbooks, in particular, offer a fascinating glimpse of the ideas with which she played before coming to the final realisation of the work. Among the papers, too, are concept drawings for the colourful costumes for the large cast of sea creatures that populated the work. And, as Tankard was working outside Australia when the Olympic ceremony took place, her collection contains newspaper clippings from British and French newspapers, which provide a non-Australian perspective on the event.

Many other collaborations between composers and choreographers are documented in similar ways across the Library’s collections. They include James Penberthy’s compositions for Kira Bousloff’s choreography during the early days of West Australian Ballet, and Esther Rofe’s collaboration with Dorothy Stevenson on a ballet called Sea Legend, staged by the Borovansky Ballet in the 1940s.

Do dance and music go hand in hand? Historically, two patterns of collaboration in which dance and music have played pivotal roles have particularly engaged scholars. At one end of the spectrum, Sergei Diaghilev promoted an aesthetic of synthesis with his Ballets Russes companies in the early part of the twentieth century. At the other end, in the mid-twentieth century, American choreographer Merce Cunningham and composer John Cage famously engaged in ‘non-collaborative collaboration’. Cunningham and Cage worked independently of each other, and their separate contributions were brought together only in the final moments of production. But for an Australian view of how composers and choreographers work together, the Library’s dance and music collections provide a wealth of raw material for analysis and discussion. From oral history to manuscripts to pictures to items of ephemera, the Library’s unique materials provide a rich and diverse context for cross-art form investigation.