Arenapal is a UK company which specialises in the licensing of performing arts images, both in the UK and throughout the world.

Its collection falls under the main categories of opera

Opera

Opera is an art form in which singers and musicians perform a dramatic work combining text and musical score, usually in a theatrical setting. Opera incorporates many of the elements of spoken theatre, such as acting, scenery, and costumes and sometimes includes dance...

, theatre

Theatre

Theatre is a collaborative form of fine art that uses live performers to present the experience of a real or imagined event before a live audience in a specific place. The performers may communicate this experience to the audience through combinations of gesture, speech, song, music or dance...

, classical

Classical music

Classical music is the art music produced in, or rooted in, the traditions of Western liturgical and secular music, encompassing a broad period from roughly the 11th century to present times...

 and contemporary music, classical and contemporary dance

Contemporary dance

Contemporary dance is a genre of concert dance that employs compositional philosophy, rather than choreography, to guide unchoreographed movement...

, as well as educational imagery covering all categories. It has a library of 2 million images with over 250,000 currently online. Arenapal also hold thousands of unscanned prints, negatives and transparencies which are continually digitised as part of its on-site archival scanning project.
The company are based in Central London, near to the heart of the city's famous West End

West End theatre

West End theatre is a popular term for mainstream professional theatre staged in the large theatres of London's 'Theatreland', the West End. Along with New York's Broadway theatre, West End theatre is usually considered to represent the highest level of commercial theatre in the English speaking...

 entertainment district.

History

Arenapal was founded in 1998 as the first fully digitised performing arts archive. Unlike most specialist photographic agencies it was not founded on the back of one individual's photographic collection, but has worked with a wide range of contributors from its inception. The company continues to expand its extensive archive as well as taking in regular submissions of contemporary performance, including theatre, ballet, dance and opera productions, plus classical music, rock, pop and jazz events. Arenapal are also a photographic agency with a rosta of respected arts photographers including Richard Cannon, Eric Richmond and Hilary Shedel.

Arenapal is a member of BAPLA British Association of Picture Libraries and Agencies

British Association of Picture Libraries and Agencies

BAPLA is the trade association of UK based photographic image suppliers, commercial picture libraries and agencies.-History:The association was formed in 1975 with founding members: Getty Images, Robert Harding World Imagery, Aspect Picture Library, FLPA - Images of Nature, Camera Press, BBC Photo...

 with Mike Markiewicz, Archive Manager serving as a member of the board.

Collections

Notable archives and collections represented by Arenapal include Royal Academy of Dance

Royal Academy of Dance

The Royal Academy of Dance is an international dance education and training organization, and examination board that specialises in the teaching and technique of Ballet. The RAD was established in London, England in 1920 as the Association of Operatic Dancing of Great Britain, and received its...

, Royal Academy of Music

Royal Academy of Music

The Royal Academy of Music in London, England, is a conservatoire, Britain's oldest degree-granting music school and a constituent college of the University of London since 1999. The Academy was founded by Lord Burghersh in 1822 with the help and ideas of the French harpist and composer Nicolas...

, Garsington Opera

Garsington Opera

Garsington Opera is an annual open air summer opera festival founded in 1989 by Leonard Ingrams. For twenty one years it was held in the gardens of Leonard Ingrams' home at Garsington Manor in Oxfordshire. Since 2011 the festival is now held in Wormsley Park, the home of the Getty family near High...

, and Glyndebourne Festival Opera

Glyndebourne Festival Opera

Glyndebourne Festival Opera is an English opera festival held at Glyndebourne, an English country house near Lewes, in East Sussex, England.-History:...

 including the Guy Gravett Collection and Mike Hoban Collection, Boosey and Hawkes, The Mander & Mitchenson Theatre Archive and the original Performing Arts Library (PAL).

Photographers

Arenapal represent the archives of many photographers of the performing arts, including:

• Nobby Clark
  Nobby Clark (photographer)
  Nobby Clark is an English photographer of theatre, opera, dance and live classical and contemporary music performance.- Background :Nobby Clark has worked for many UK broadsheets including The Guardian, The Observer, The Times and The Sunday Times...
  
  
• Mark Douet
• Clive Barda
• Guy Gravett
• Johan Persson
• Eric Richmond
• Sasha Gusov
• John Timbers
• Sheila Burnett
• Ivan Kyncl
• Hanya Chlala
• Hilary Shedel
• Sisi Burn
• Alan Bergman (dancer)
  Alan Bergman (dancer)
  Alan Bergman was an American ballet dancer, photographer and businessman.He was the product of two generations of Russian/Polish Yiddish actors: Glicka and Morris Balavsky, co-founders of Nordska Films, the Actors Studio and his mother, Miriam, a child star in the Yiddish theater.- Dance career...
  
  

External links

• www.arenapal.com
• Arenapal at the British Association of Picture Libraries and Agencies (BAPLA)
• "F2 Freelance Photographer: Licence To Sell - Arenapal managing director Biddy Hayward talks to Sue Harper about its specialist service and the close relationship maintained with its photographers" (June / July 2009 Issue)