| Collecting Strand | National Resource Centre for Dance |
| Level | Collection |
| Ref No | CDC |
| Title | CYCLES DANCE COMPANY ARCHIVE |
| Date | 1970s-1987 |
| Extent | 51 folders of papers, 71 black and white photographs and 8 black and white contact sheets, 5 posters, 31 theatre programmes, 10 periodicals, 2 badges |
| Name of Creator | Cycles Dance Company, 1974-1982 |
| Description | Cycles Dance Company (1974-1982) was a small-scale touring company based in Leamington Spa. Its aim was to take dance to towns in the West Midlands that the larger dance companies did not visit, thus expanding the dance audience of the UK. Company members choreographed dances in various styles in order to interest a broader spectrum of audience. Cycles was founded by four London Contemporary Dance School graduates: Cecilia Macfarlane, Peter Allan, Rosanne Donahoe, and Sally Mason. They worked as a collective with no defined leader. In the first season, all four shared the administrative work; after the first season, they employed another dancer, Randall Newsom, and an administrator, Irene Fawkes.
The company was established through a loan from a private donor, which enabled the group to buy necessary equipment and pay the dancers a retainer fee. There followed a series of one-off project grants from West Midlands Arts Association, the Arts Council of Great Britain, and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. The company later received an annual revenue grant from West Midlands Arts Association, and when this funding was withdrawn in 1982, Cycles folded.
The archive includes administrative papers, photographs, theatre programmes, and the newsletter, Cycles News. The administrative papers fall into 12 categories:
- Tours - Arts Centres and Theatre
- Tours - Schools, Colleges and Universities
- Company Personnel
- Press
- Funding
- Finance
- Company History
- Company Closure
- Sally Sykes
- Intriplicate Mime Company
- Giselle Enterprises
- Maas Movers.
In addition, the catalogue includes papers and photographs of other dance groups with which administrator Irene Fawkes was involved: Sally Sykes, Intriplicate Mime Company, Giselle Enterprises, Maas Movers, Scaramouche. |
| Arrangement | Material arranged at time of cataloguing according to the format-based classification scheme which was then in use by the National Resource Centre for Dance.
Administrative papers have been arranged according to the categories outlined above. |
| Accruals | No further accruals expected, |
| Copyright | Where copyright in the items was held by Irene Fawkes this has been assigned to the National Resource Centre of Dance, University of Surrey.
In accordance with the deposit agreement, photocopying will only be permitted in exceptional circumstances and of single items. |
| Custodial History | The archive was donated in 1989 by the company's administrator, Irene Fawkes, along with materials concerning ADMA and other dance groups. Before cataloguing, the Cycles Dance Company Archive was known at the NRCD as the ADMA Archive, but upon processing, it was discovered that the majority of materials in the ADMA Archive actually related to Cycles. Thus, the collection was divided: one box formed the ADMA Archive and the remainder of the boxes became the Cycles Dance Company Archive. Four files of papers relating to other small dance companies from the early 1980s were included in the latter. Their link with Cycles is their administrator, Irene Fawkes, who was a freelance dance administrator. In October 2003, Fawkes visited the NRCD to discuss the materials she had donated, and to identify Cycles photographs.
Preservation and cataloguing of the archive were funded by the Dance Data Online project grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Board. |