Tobias, Tobi, 1938-2020

Tobi Tobias, who conceived and implemented this project, is an American dance writer who specializes in classical ballet. She was the dance critic for New York magazine from 1980 to 2002. Associated with Dance magazine from 1971 to 1998, she wrote criticism, profiles, and feature stories, editing the journal's criticism from 1976 to 1983. She has written extensively on the Royal Danish Ballet and its Bournonville heritage. The centenary Bournonville Festival in Copenhagen in 1979 catalyzed her desire to record, through the creation of oral memoirs, significant aspects of Danish ballet history that were likely to remain unwritten and thus eventually lost. Her earlier work in oral history includes participation in the Oral History Project of the Dance Collection of the New York Public Library at Lincoln Center for its entire six-year duration. For a decade, Ms. Tobias taught dance criticism in the Dance Department of Barnard College, Columbia University. She is also the author of numerous books for children. In 1992, she was knighted by Queen Margrethe II of Denmark.

To create the oral memoirs, Ms. Tobias first conducted exhaustive preliminary investigative research, drawing on both Danish- and English-language sources, to trace the influence of August Bournonville, who led the company and its school from 1829 to 1877. He choreographed the repertory and shaped a style of dancing that has given the Danish ballet its unique profile and heritage. She then selected the oral authors (dancers, stagers, teachers, coaches, and administrators of the Royal Danish Ballet), defined the areas to be explored with them, and finally conducted a series of audiotaped interviews with each person. The interviews took place in three stages between 1983 and 1986, for the most part in Copenhagen and New York. To give the oral memoirs the widest possible audience, the interviews were conducted in English; in a single case, at the request of the oral author, both oral author and oral historian speak their mother tongues, Danish and English respectively.