Creach, a faculty member at Bennington College in Vermont since 1987, has performed with Jamie Cunningham's Acme Company, Vanaver Caravan, Jane Comfort, Annabelle Gamson, and Rachel Lampert, and he has been a guest choreographer and teacher at the University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee, Ohio State University, New York University, and the Juilliard School, among others. He has most frequently worked with Stephen Koester. The duo began dancing together in 1980 and formed their joint Creach/Koester as an all-male dance company in 1986. With Koester's leavetaking in 1996, the New York-based group has been renamed Creach/Company.

KEY CONTACT PERSON(S)/EXECUTOR OF ESTATE:
Terry Creach
238 West 20th Street, #1D
New York, NY 10011
212-924-5443
tlcreach@aol.com

HUMAN REPOSITORIES OF THE WORK
(name and contact info, relationship to the artist and the work, assessment):
Terry Creach and the original dancers: Aaron Carter, Keith Johnson, Paul Matteson, Lionel Popkin, Peter Schmitz.

VIDEO DOCUMENTATION
(location, format, condition, assessment):
Excellent video documentation was recorded 5 October 1997 by Character Generators Inc., Mark Robison, cameraperson. It is held in VHS format from Creach. Creach holds videotaped copies from rehearsals and works-in-progress performances.

PHOTOGRAPHIC DOCUMENTATION
(location, format, condition, assessment):
Creach holds prints of photographs by Sue Rees, visual arts professor at Bennington College; she holds slides in her collection.

MOVEMENT NOTATION
(location, type [including notes taken by dancers], assessment):
Creach keeps notebooks, mostly illegible by his own accounting.

PRODUCTION MATERIALS
(scores, sound recordings, set/costume designs):
Sue Rees has made drawing/paintings that capture the sense of the set elements, the music stands and furniture. Costumes and fabric are in Creach's possession.

ORAL HISTORY:
None, though Creach was interviewed and appears in Sharon Kinney's film documenting Tina Croll and Jamie Cunningham's From the Horse's Mouth.

PERSONAL PAPERS
(location of newspaper clippings, printed programs, press releases, notes, files, diaries; assessment):
Creach keeps notebooks as works develop.

IMMEDIATE NEEDS
(archival assistance? storage? other?):
None identified.

OTHER RELEVANT INFORMATION:
Study for a Resurrection was performed in June 2001 in Atlanta, Cleveland, Cincinnati, and New York, with local choirs doing the singing.

Excerpts from a brief phone interview on 19 September 2000:

WHERE DID THE IMAGE OF HEAVEN IN STUDY FOR A RESURRECTION COME FROM?

I have a not very great relationship with the Baptist church. I wasn't into the mass. But I liked the quality of that music and that it was traditionally sung by men. It evoked images for me of disciples and cloistered men's groups who support each other or get into difficult relationships with each other, just because they're cloistered. When you think of brotherhoods, they may or may not be toward positive ends, may or may not sustain the people in the groups.

IN THIS PIECE, THE BROTHERHOODS COME OFF AS SUSTAINING.

In my image, they were quite cooperative, except of course that at the end the man has to go on his own journey. The image at the end there is everyone sort of surrounding them, the singers, making this a closed community. But then everyone is ultimately on his own.

There are many other kinds of things I was trying to do inside of that. All that cloth business: every time you see a painting of nude men, the cloth is always perfectly positioned to obscure the genitals. This section was a takeoff on that sort of thing, and it was fun to do. And all this structural play: can you have a certain kind of unison, or symmetry that isn't quite symmetrical, where two sides meet in the middle, two groups on different sides, and things that are the same rhythmically, structural play that had to do with that? In terms of metaphor, different factions may exist within the group, but it's still the same activity.

HOW LARGE DID AIDS LOOM AS YOU WERE MAKING THE PIECE?

It wasn't my first impulse. It was a part of it. Once you get into that kind of music and you have a big group of men, then it's there. You have singers and dancers, it's there, because it's just a part of that scene. There's no getting around that. I was also reading Mark Doty's poems, and they somehow seemed to go with community issues. And being alone even though you're in the community. Doty's poems were preparation, I didn't think of them directly.

In a way it didn't matter what my intentions were. That was going to be there anyway. I didn't set out to do an AIDS piece, but when you get that many men onstage, it's there anyway.

That trio that's sort of in the middle of the piece, that's the material that gets put in again at the end. That particular trio material seemed to be the center of the piece. It seemed to be quite communal. But at the same time they make sharp, quick actions. Once that section was made I felt like I had something cooking. It seemed to be supportive, but at the same time it wasn't easy. They were dealing with each other in a confined situation: and that's an AIDS metaphor right there. You have to deal.

LIST OR OVERVIEW OF WORKS PERTAINING TO HIV/AIDS
(title, premiere date, music, production notes, performers):

Study for a Resurrection (1997)

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

• Anderson, Jack. 1997. "Reverently Naked for Rites in Church." New York Times (7 October).
• Dohse, Chris. 1997. "Consecration." Village Voice (21 October).
• Gere, David. 2002. "Writing an Obituary for AIDS." Dance Research Journal 34 (2): 62-68.
• Kaufman, Sarah. 1997. "To Creach His Own: A Choreographer's Man-Made Success." Washington Post (24 February).