The company published a monthly magazine. It was called BATTU, subtitled “the dancer’s beat”, and it was numbered by season and issue — volume 66, issue 3, and so on — rather than by calendar year. That numbering scheme is the first interesting thing about it.
The name
Battu is a ballet term. It means “beaten”, and describes a step in which the legs beat against each other in the air: an entrechat, a brisé, a jump ornamented with a rapid crossing and recrossing of the calves. It is a small, technical, unglamorous word that any ballet student learns early and that nobody outside a studio has ever heard.
Naming a publication after it, and then subtitling it “the dancer’s beat” to make the pun land, tells you exactly who the magazine was for. It was written for the inside of the building — students, parents, company members, guild volunteers, subscribers — not for a general readership who would need the title explained.
Numbered by season
Volume 66 corresponds to the company’s sixty-sixth season, not to sixty-six years of the magazine. Dating a publication by the institution’s season rather than by the year is a small piece of institutional self-assertion: it says that the relevant calendar is the company’s calendar, that a year runs from September to May, and that the magazine is an organ of the organisation rather than a periodical that happens to be about it.
It also makes the run a usable index. If you know the season number you know the year, and a complete run would give a month-by-month record of six decades of a regional company — which would be an extraordinary primary source, and which almost certainly no longer exists in any complete form.
What was in it
The surviving evidence of content is thin but indicative. A recorded issue carried a feature on a fundraising campaign called “Save the Pirouette” and a piece on that season’s junior company. The publication described itself as exploring everything happening at the ballet, and issues were distributed online as PDFs by the last decade of the company’s life.
A house magazine of this kind typically carries a director’s letter, production news, a faculty or guest-artist profile, guild and volunteer news, fundraising appeals, term dates and a certain amount of well-earned self-congratulation. Its real function is retention: a family that reads about the organisation every month is a family that re-enrols.
“Save the Pirouette”
The campaign name is worth a note, because it is a good one. Emergency fundraising appeals from arts organisations tend to be either grimly financial or vaguely inspirational. “Save the Pirouette” is neither: it is specific, it is charming, and it converts an abstract funding gap into an image of a single step disappearing. Whatever it raised, it was better written than most of its genre.
Why small-house publishing matters to an archive
When an arts organisation closes, its records disperse along predictable lines. Financial and legal papers may reach a county archive. Photographs scatter into private hands. Choreography, unless notated, goes with the people who danced it. What survives most often, and is least often collected, is ephemera: programmes, posters, newsletters, term letters.
A house magazine is the densest of these. In one document it carries names, dates, repertoire, staffing, fundraising, community relationships and tone of voice. A single issue of BATTU is worth more to a researcher than a year of press releases, because a press release tells you what the organisation wanted the public to think and a house magazine tells you what it told its own people.
The archive holds no complete issues of BATTU. Its existence, its title, its numbering scheme, its subtitle, one campaign and one feature are what survives, and they are recorded here so that anyone holding a physical run knows what they have.
If you hold copies
Physical runs of publications like this almost always survive in the attics of former students, guild volunteers and board members rather than in institutions. Anyone with a run of BATTU, or of the earlier newsletter the company published under a different name in the 2000s, should consider offering it to a regional collection.
The State Library of Pennsylvania and county historical societies collect exactly this class of material, and the Library of Congress dance collections document the wider field. This archive is not collecting anything and cannot receive material; it has no contact channel of any kind.
Related: how the organisation raised money, and the junior company.