public-facing dance media have been widely available for decades. Examples include the dance-heavy movie musicals of the 1930s–50s, competition and reality television shows like So You Think You Can Dance, and games like Dance Dance Revolution. All of these have been the subjects of inquiry for media scholars seeking to understand not only the kinds of meaning-making in which these artifacts engage, but also how dance is involved in the process.1 However, both the general public and media scholars are less familiar with media created by and for “the dance world” itself. These are normally documentary-style moving-image media consisting primarily of rehearsal or performance footage, originally created for a range of utilitarian purposes: to learn and teach choreography, to evaluate performance quality, to keep an archive of finalized dance works. Indeed, video has become a crucial tool for dancers, largely replacing written notation as a means for preserving choreography. Many dance documentation films are ephemeral—they are recorded over, deleted, discarded, or otherwise lost after their immediate utility fades. However, in some cases they are collected, preserved, and thus available for analysis.In what follows, I conduct a foray into the largely untouched and unstudied archives of such moving-image dance recordings. They have slipped through the cracks of film and media studies because they are not well known outside of the dance world; meanwhile, most dance scholars have evaluated them primarily in terms of their effectiveness as faithful records of performance events or as notations intended for restaging.2 What has therefore been overlooked in the surface-level treatment of dance documentation films is the potential for them to reveal something about their creators and the institutions they represent. Indeed, I would like to suggest that while these recordings ostensibly serve a documentary or notation-like purpose, they are perhaps even more fruitful objects of study when considered as vehicles for (re)producing professional dance institutions and practices, as dance company films. I define the dance company film as a moving-image recording that is produced specifically by or for a dance company. Thus, I wish to locate the dance company film among an array of related nontheatrical film practices: it has a great deal in common with several types of what Charles R. Acland and Haidee Wasson call “useful cinema,” such as industrial film and educational film, but it also resembles documentary film and sometimes even home movies in its rhetorics.3 While each of these cinematic modes is discrete, in my discussion of dance company film, I demonstrate how each is present to varying degrees in this hybrid form.I argue that dance company film, like the rest of useful cinema, “has as much to do with the maintenance and longevity of institutions seemingly unrelated to cinema as it does with cinema per se” (Acland and Wasson 4). And I would add that it has as much to do in this case with dance processes, traditions, and communities as it does with dance per se. Thus, I also use the word “company” with careful intention; in doing so, I hope to evoke many of the characteristics now associated with industrial film, such as the creation of a company culture and a set of preferred workplace dispositions and practices—in short, company values. In dance, many such values and aspects of institutional culture are inscribed in the body as it crafts the industry's main product (a dance performance): dance company films record carefully practiced ways of standing, listening and responding, dressing, following directions, executing instructions, and so forth. Finally, I should note that the word “film” in “dance company film” is meant not to privilege celluloid formats over electronic and digital ones, but rather, as dance film theorist Erin Brannigan has put it, “to include these newer formats in a term that recognizes a continuity between the earliest screen practices and the most current” (viii).Though many dance company films are professional recordings of performances, the richest subset for my analysis here are those that might be described as non-event documents—that is, films or videos that were not recorded during a formal performance staged before an audience and that were shot by amateurs. Here I am using Patricia Zimmermann's notion of amateurism, which she defines as “doing something for pleasure, for the sheer love of it” (1)—in contrast to professionalism, which entails doing something for the promise of financial return.4 These non-event and amateur approaches provide a clearer picture of what dance company films are always doing in more subtle ways: preserving not only the dance company's ostensible products (i.e., dance works performed for the public) but also its process and organizational culture. That is, dance company films do not document choreography in general, but rather singular rehearsals or performances in particular: a specific cast dancing on a specific day in a specific place under specific conditions. Dancer-viewers often use these films to extract generalized choreographic sequences, but the films exceed this use; they discipline bodies into particular comportments, movement styles, and ways of being. In other words, dance company films conscript and condition viewers into what Pierre Bourdieu would call a bodily hexis, reflecting and embodying the habitus of the professional dancer. For Bourdieu, this bodily hexis, which consists of a systematic “pattern of postures” and “a permanent disposition, a durable manner of standing, speaking, and thereby of feeling and thinking,” is not learned by copying an explicit model but rather is assimilated via the “implicit pedagogy” of taken-for-granted everyday behaviors, all of which the dance company film records and presents as correct and expected (78–95, italics in original).Like other industrial, educational, and otherwise “useful” films from the pre-video era, celluloid dance company films are quite rare. This is in part because the cinematic apparatus itself was prohibitively expensive for often-struggling performing arts institutions, but even video collections are hard to find and access. The oldest collection of dance company films in the United States is the moving image archive of the Jerome Robbins Dance Division of the New York Public Library, founded in 1944. The Dance Division claims to be “the largest and most comprehensive archive in the world devoted to the documentation of dance,” but it has just as often sought to conduct its own professional recordings of dances as it has welcomed more amateur films created by dance organizations themselves (“About the Jerome Robbins Dance Division”). Most commonly, older dance companies keep their analog films in on-site storage for later potential use, and even when companies wish to archivally preserve their celluloid or videotape materials, they often lack the funds to do so. At the dawning of the twenty-first century, the Washington, DC–based nonprofit Dance Heritage Coalition worked for fifteen years to combat this problem, gathering a number of member archives with an investment in dance conservation and offering assistance and consultation to dance companies wishing to preserve their legacy. This collection is now housed in the Dance History Video Archive at the University of Southern California, where it continues to grow.5 Thus, while there is an embarrassment of riches where dance media in general are concerned, established collections of dance company films are rare, and pre-2000 films are even rarer.Nevertheless, I argue that these ephemeral films do a great deal of important cultural work within the dance community and, occasionally, in representing professional dance to the general public. They do preserve choreography, but they also participate in creating and preserving the dance company as an organization; they offer a range of arguments for how professional dance should look, how professional dancers should act, and how dance companies should operate. Indeed, the very list of disadvantages that dance experts have often highlighted in the use of film as a choreographic preservation tool doubles as a list of advantages for its ability to perform institutional identity formation and maintenance. Media philosopher Noël Carroll writes, They argue that moving-picture documentations—or docudance—are not really very good records, especially of historic choreography, because they restrict themselves to single performances, with a single cast of dancers replete with their personal mannerisms, taken from a single angle which may not always be the best one from which to notice, understand, and appreciate the relevant movement qualities. That is, docudance is a poor instrument for telling the dancer from the dance. (54)Trying to separate the dancer from the dance misses what is some of the dance company film's most integral work. It is precisely these “mannerisms” from the bodies of many recorded dancers that dance company films aggregate and marshal as norms, thereby participating in the inculcation of future dancing bodies. Indeed, in order to create institutional memory, to construct the dancing body and the dance company as enduring standards of dance style and professional culture, these films merge the personal with the institutional. They document specific dancers, focus on institutionally sanctioned performance techniques, draw on oral histories, and in some instances, depict intimate moments of backstage interactions. But these aggregations of mannerisms and other aspects of professional dance's habitus are legible only through the viewing of many, many films. Writing on industrial film analysis in 2009, when the study of industrial film itself was a relatively new undertaking, Yvonne Zimmermann recommended an analytical method that combines both “‘serial’ film analysis and analysis of historical context.” She explains: By serial film analysis I mean a process in which the largest possible number of films is examined in regard to recurring narratives, motives, and formal and rhetoric patterns. The reason for this is simple: industrial film has not yet been studied systematically. Therefore, whenever a single film is considered, the question of its representativeness remains unanswered. Serial film analysis can provide knowledge on structural, thematic, aesthetic, and rhetorical characteristics and stereotypes that make it possible to distinguish the typical from the atypical, establish coherencies in form and content, and identify continuities and changes. (Y. Zimmerman 102–04)This is the method that I have undertaken in this first analysis of the dance company film, as I attempt to offer a lay of the land and suggest the stakes of the patterns I have uncovered. My serial analysis of the dance company film will begin to uncover its common structures, aesthetics, and rhetorics, just as Yvonne Zimmermann has begun to do with industrial film more generally.After viewing more than two hundred films, I offer analysis of example films from two sources in the United States: the archival films of the George Balanchine Foundation in New York City and the Ruth Page Collection at the Chicago Film Archives. Notably, these are both ballet company collections—ballet was one of the first dance forms to be organized into “companies” of professional dancers in the United States, and as such, it is also the form present in the most ubiquitous collection I could find (Balanchine) and the oldest (Page). The Balanchine Foundation protects the legacy of George Balanchine (1904–83), the cofounder and longtime director of the New York City Ballet (NYCB) who is widely considered to be the father of the American style of ballet.6 Its carefully curated collection, created after Balanchine's death, thus presents itself as working on his behalf to ensure that the “proper” form of ballet continues to be practiced throughout the United States.7 The Chicago Film Archives’ Ruth Page Collection, on the other hand, is a more voluminous and haphazard collection gathered by Ruth Page (1899–1991), a lesser-known but also deeply influential ballet director.8 Most of the collection's films of Page's various Chicago-area companies were created by Ann Barzel (1905–2007) over the course of her long career as a dance critic and amateur preservationist, so this collection offers a window into the past that is less explicit in its proselytizing but nevertheless makes claims about how professional ballet should look and how dance companies should function. Through serial analysis of these two case-study archives, I thus investigate the cultural function of the dance company film, examining how it mobilizes moving-image technologies in the creation of a habitus for professional dancers and creates a public record of dance as an institution.The archives created by the George Balanchine Foundation are the product of well-funded initiatives to preserve the works, style, and ethos of one of the most influential choreographers in American dance history. The two initiatives most relevant to the dance company film include the Balanchine Essays and the George Balanchine Foundation Video Archives, both of which commenced in the 1980s and ’90s. The “essays” are roughly hour-long videos featuring dancers who worked intimately with Balanchine, inspired by his own vision of creating a “dictionary” of his technique (“The Balanchine Essays”). These dancers are filmed teaching specific aspects of his unique style and extremely precise technique to younger dancers. Items in the foundation's video archives are divided into the “Archive of Lost Choreography,” which contains recorded reconstructions of ballets that are no longer performed and often not fully remembered, and the “Interpreters Archive,” which contains over fifty videos of the dancers for whom Balanchine created some of his biggest roles. These dancers, usually rather old now, are shown coaching the next generation on how to dance their major roles. The rationale behind this approach is that the original dancers probably remember not only the steps, but also how Balanchine set the steps on their bodies and coached them through the learning process—so they can now pass on this coaching experience to the next generation and beyond. Significantly, the foundation has made efforts to distribute its professionally produced videos to interested institutions around the world; its website features a list of the seventy-six “qualified research libraries” that have paid the “nominal fee” required to house a copy of one or more of the VHS tapes (“Listing of Archival Libraries”). Thus, the Balanchine Foundation's efforts extend worldwide, and by virtue of the ubiquity of Balanchine's name and ballets, the footage associated with him has a certain degree of visibility. The Interpreters Archive in particular continues to grow, with its most recent recording (as of this publication) having occurred in December 2021.The Lost Choreography tapes are not functionally dissimilar from documentary recordings of live stage performances since their stated purpose is to preserve works at risk of being forgotten rather than passed down, as many Balanchine ballets have been. However, the films are more self-aware and interactive than a simple documentation of choreography would be, for they feature an interviewer and present a coaching process (filmed over the course of several meetings) rather than a singular and polished public performance. As a result, the films quite pointedly indicate which aspects of the half-forgotten works are important to remember and why. This includes the reconstructors’ vague memories of not only steps but also costumes, demeanors, and ways of conceptualizing the themes or narrative of the piece. Items in the Essays and Interpreters Archive collections, on the other hand, are guided less by the directive to preserve Balanchine's works than by the desire to transmit his very way of thinking and his general aesthetic as a public good. Unlike most dance company films, the videos that make up the Balanchine Essays in particular are now widely accessible, available for purchase through online retailer Amazon.com. They are focused primarily on the Balanchine standards of ballet technique as they would have applied to the students of the School of American Ballet or to the dancers he accepted into the NYCB company while still alive. As compared to the other examples I discuss here, and indeed all of the dance company films I have viewed, these recordings are the most explicit in their self-positioning as arbiters and purveyors of proper, ideal ballet technique. I will thus go into some detail about the rhetorical strategies they employ to insist on their own importance.For example, in the 1994 video essay “Arabesque,” two Balanchine ballerinas, Merrill Ashley and Suki Schorer (retired), teach three teenage students (who clearly already know the basics of the stance) the finer points of style, placement, balance, and smooth transitions into and out of this key ballet position. An arabesque is a stance wherein the dancer balances on one leg, with the other extended straight behind the body, ideally at a ninety-degree angle (or higher) relative to the standing leg. As the instructors demonstrate the surrounding steps and physically position the students’ bodies, they explain the reasoning behind each small change—such as adjustments to the hip alignment and arm placement. They also take the students through a variety of uses for the position, placing it in combination with other steps and thus introducing potential difficulties in control, transition, and traveling. This demonstrational rhetoric and pedagogical tone indicate that there are clearly right and wrong ways for the position to be executed, though to most eyes the differences are hard to identify. Both instructors often make verbal reference to Balanchine's techniques and then emulate them (“Mr. Balanchine used to say . . . ”), equating his pedagogical approaches and stylistic opinions to incontrovertible rules of the craft, despite there being many different methods of ballet teaching, style, and performance approach.9Unlike more formal event-focused dance documentaries, the training sessions in these videos are recorded in a dance studio, and the dancers wear classroom “practice” attire; the only addition to the space is a pianist in the background. The specificities of this classroom context—the style of the attire, the presence of the pianist, even the studio construction and arrangement—are also key to the films’ habitus formation. Details that are present in a recording by happenstance rather than design become endorsed, through the enunciation of the camera and subsequent cataloguing in the archive, as the correct and appropriate way to engage in the teaching and learning of ballet. Indeed, they are almost more powerful elements than the explicit instruction precisely because they are not commented upon. By combining explicit technical and stylistic instruction with implicit habitus modeling, “Arabesque” and the other Balanchine Essays work to position Balanchine and a historical iteration of the NYCB company as the USA's premier ballet company in the eyes of both its dancers and students and the general public.Films from the Interpreters Archive combine elements from the Lost Choreography and Essays films to go beyond the details of technique; they present archetypical versions of choreography alongside careful stylistic coaching. For example, in a 1997 recording of former prima ballerina Maria Tallchief coaching a pas de deux (couple's dance) from Scotch Symphony (1952), there is a distinct focus on both clearly articulating Balanchine's original intentions for the choreography and transmitting the specific bodily hexis necessary to embody it “properly.” This might be likened to teaching both the letter and the spirit of a law; what undergirds both is the basic assumption that the law should be followed in the first place. The undergirding assumption that Balanchine's choreographic and stylistic preferences are the standard of excellence is made material by this film and the rest of the Interpreters Archive. Tallchief uses a young female dancer's body (she is called Judy, but notably, her name is not listed in the tape description, as her identity is not important to the film's objective) as a crucible for her memories of the role; she channels Balanchine's precision regarding exactly where a foot should be placed and exactly how the proceeding developé (unfolding of the leg) should be completed in unison with the corresponding plié (bending) of the other leg. Thus, although it is Judy who is directly learning the specifics of the choreography, the act of recording makes the lessons of the video both accessible to and an implicit guideline for any future dancer wishing to perform the role. Such lessons’ significance, viewed historically, is not in providing a complete record of treasured choreography—a single pas de deux does not a ballet make—but rather, in their role as inculcator of embodied values. Together, the sixty-plus videos of the Interpreters Archive define numerous canonical roles in precise terpsichorean terms, seeking to establish themselves as the authority on how these ballets should be performed and, ultimately, as a public record according to which audiences can evaluate a performance.The George Balanchine Foundation's collection of dance company films is unique in its claim to be the ballet archive in the United States due to its association with one of the country's most celebrated company director-choreographers. Aware of its visibility before the public eye (compared to other dance company archives), the Balanchine Foundation is committed not only to a certain stern, proper aesthetic in its dance company films but also to representing itself as arbiter of an important thread of American history. The foundation carefully constructs a certain image of Balanchine for public consumption at the same time as it argues for this image to be understood as the ideal for professional ballet nationwide. Indeed, its very mission statement asserts that the foundation aims to “utilize the Balanchine legacy to advance the development of dance and its allied arts in the United States and throughout the world on behalf of the dance community at large” (“Mission Statement”). Insofar as the Balanchine Foundation sees itself as a steward for the international arts community, it seeks to “spread the gospel,” as it were, of Balanchine's style and standards in equal measure. Material that ordinarily would be intended only for local, company use in any other context becomes, through the cinematic apparatus, a pro-Balanchine public relations campaign, released widely for the purposes of proselytizing. In this way, the Balanchine/NYCB dance company films are a limit case: they should be understood not only as the most public and the most circulated, but also as the most explicitly instructive of the genre. The films discipline bodies indirectly by their very existence, but the additional aspect of their pedagogical rhetoric means that they discipline bodies directly as well. Taken together, they represent a very specific theory of ballet, what it should look like, and who should perform it. In their distribution to publics all over the world, these films serve to shape and standardize not only Balanchine's and the NYCB's individual legacies, but also the institution of professional ballet as a whole.Ruth Page and her various Chicago-based ballet companies are far less well-known than are Balanchine and the NYCB, and unlike the Balanchine videos, the majority of the Page dance company films are amateur productions. This is no doubt primarily because the Page recordings lacked the extensive institutional backing of a heavily funded foundation; while it was indeed the Ruth Page Foundation that donated the collection to the Chicago Film Archives, it was not the foundation that commissioned the films’ production. Rather, the dance company films in this collection represent a small segment of the hundreds of films recorded by Chicago dance critic Ann Barzel, who documented dance on film as a hobby. Page compiled Barzel's films of her dancers along with many other items for her personal collection—which also included travel films and recordings from television—over the course of fifty years.10Beyond this active interest in moving-image dance recordings, Page was a pioneering dancer, choreographer, and artistic director in her own right. She founded and ran several dance companies (some of which toured internationally), forged relationships with numerous highly regarded dancers, composers, and designers (both American and foreign), was involved in the 1933 World's Fair and the Works Progress Administration's Federal Theatre Project, and established Chicago as a center of innovative dance rivaling New York City. She choreographed several types of works for her companies: story ballets like Alice in Wonderland (1977), opera ballets such as Carmen (1926), Americana ballets like The Flapper and the Quarterback (1926), and more abstract pieces, all of which are represented in her collection.11 The Chicago Film Archives acquired the vast Ruth Page Collection in 2011; it includes almost one thousand recordings in many different formats, including more than four hundred films from the 1920s through the 1990s, with subject matter ranging from rehearsal and performance footage to ethnographic films from Indonesia. Unlike Balanchine, Page appears to have been one of the few prolific American dancemakers of the first half of the twentieth century to actively concern herself with the use of film for archival purposes almost as soon as it became commercially available to the public.12 Of course, this means that Page was uniquely privileged with the economic means to access film technology at a time when it was a luxury good available only to the upper classes.13 Even with this privilege in mind, Page was clearly an early adopter: though it is common practice today to record a dance class, rehearsal, or performance and upload it to YouTube, the Ruth Page Collection offers rare early examples of the dance company film, thus providing maximum historical distance for our consideration of the genre. Another distinction of the Ruth Page Collection is that it remains uncurated, whereas the Balanchine materials have been submitted to the review, organization, and editing of directors and consultants with preconceived schemata they feel should be applied to the materials before they become available for public access. As a result, the more amateur, “rough around the edges” rehearsal materials that are present in the Page collection are without equivalents in the refined and streamlined Balanchine collections. And yet, despite these many differences in production context, the Page films are of a piece with the Balanchine films insofar as their discursive position is the same: they construct a vision of the ballet company that, by exhibiting specific bodily norms and institutional identities, seeks to shape what the future of professional ballet in America looks like.The Chicago Film Archives split the Page collection into five separate series; Series I and II consist of film and video formats that are predominantly populated by Page's own dance company films, while Series III–V include later video interviews conducted with Page and her collaborators, various audio formats, and duplicates. Even with these final three series set aside, the Page collection still contains 268 items. Importantly, not every recording represents a work entirely by itself; the collection includes eleven Alice in Wonderland films, five Billy Sunday films, nine Carmen films, eight The Merry Widow films, eleven Nutcracker films, seven Romeo and Juliet films, and so on. Here, the sheer repetition of filming—and thus its status as habitual—becomes apparent. The multiplicity of versions also helps to rhetorically position professional dance as an ongoing process, a cycle of continual rehearsal and performance that restarts with each new or remounted work.14 But most importantly, patterns emerge across these sets of films that, through their repeated presence, enact the same institutional branding as the explicit instruction in the Balanchine films. In the case of Carmen, for example, Page choreographed at least four versions that are captured in rehearsal footage over the thirty-five years between 1926 and 1962. Across these versions, each with different casts and choreography, is a consistent style characterized by Page's interpretation of Spanish folk dance steps and comportments. Though audio commentary by Page is usually (though not always) missing from these films, the recordings nevertheless work to set a standard for each ballet and build up an institutional identity. As an archived group, the sets of repeated titles both argue that any professional ballet company should have a diverse but well-anchored repertoire and show how each work within that repertoire should remain flexible and dynamic over a long period of time. The Balanchine films, in contrast, call for a well-anchored repertoire without this choreographic flexibility.It is also immediately evident that several of the Page films exhibit some interesting commonalities with home movie practices, such as amateur aesthetics and personal themes.15 Take, for example, the extended peek at backstage life in “Dressing Room Tour 1957.” It was likely filmed during the first national tour of the Chicago Opera Ballet, which perhaps explains why Page and the dancers seem excited about the backstage filming. The film documents a part of the dancers’ pr