Research Guides (LibGuides): Dance: Helpful External Websites

Modern Dance Links

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater
Dance Kaleidoscope
Indiana’s premier professional contemporary dance company since 1972.
Dance Spirit
Doris Humphrey
American modern dance innovator in technique, choreography, and theory of dance movement.
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https://dorishumphreyfoundationuk.co.uk/the-humphrey-legacy-today/
Isadora Duncan Foundation for Contemporary Dance
José Limón Dance Foundation
Mark Morris Dance Group
Martha Graham Dance Company
Merce Cunningham Dance
Paul Taylor Dance Company
Pina Bausch Foundation
Twyla Tharp Dance

Ballet Links

American Ballet Theatre
Website of America's National Ballet Company
American Ballet Theatre--Ballet Dictionary
Andros on Ballet Andros on Ballet is a collection of articles about ballet history and classical ballet technique.
Balletcompanies.com This gateway provides more than 3,000 links toballet and dance companies around the world.
CyberDance: Ballet on the Net
George Balanchine Foundation The George Balanchine Foundation, established in 1983, works to preserve the legacy of George Balanchine and ensure that his monumental contributions to dance serve as inspiration for further development of the art form. We engage in a broad range of activities and programs that includes archival preservation of coaching sessions, focused research, ballet reconstructions, publications, lectures and educational videos. -From the website.
Opera and Ballet Primary Sources Online "A guide to digital scores, libretti, and documents."

Dance Organizations / Publications

American Dance Guild
Australian Dance Council
Competition Central
Locate dance competitions near you!
CriticalDance Critical Dance is an international volunteer community in support of the dance arts. CriticalDance sponsors dance-related events, funds exhibitions that promote dance, and provides a venue for dance coverage.
Dance Heritage Coalition "The DHC is the sole national non-profit alliance of institutions holding significant collections of materials documenting the history of dance. Its mission is to preserve, make accessible, enhance and augment the materials that document the artistic accomplishments in dance of the past, present, and future. The DHC pursues its mission by encouraging, initiating, and developing collaborative projects among the dance communities, library and archival fields, scholarly institutions, and individuals in four essential areas: access to materials, the continuing documentation of dance employing both traditional methods and developing technologies, preservation of existing documentation, and education within and beyond the field of dance. The DHC also serves as a think tank and a convener for the dance heritage field."
Dance Insider Online
DanceMagazine [SCOUT Rept.] The homepage features a rotating series of videos, some of which are rehearsals that exemplify the effort required to flesh out the vision of a choreographer; some are previews of new dances, lectures about dance, and dance competitions. For more dance videos, visitors should click on "More DM Videos" to the right and bottom of the video feature. There are two blogs highlighted on the homepage of the website, one of which, "Daily Dance", focuses on dancer fitness.
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Visitors should check out the "Resources" featured on the homepage, which includes a guide for dancers headed to college. The guide can be searched online, or purchased in print.
The "Magazine Supplements" at the bottom of the homepage are pdf's that cover such topics as "Teacher Training", "Beyond Performance", and "Secrets of a Successful Studio". [KMG]
DanceTeacher Digests a wide array of materials from the print version of the publication, along with web-only features. The site is quite easy to navigate, and most of the primary materials are contained with the sections "Teaching", "Style", "Health", and "Business".
Dance USA
Learn about dance research, resources for building audiences and on music and choreography, archiving, and more.
International Association for Dance Medicine and Science
Jacob's Pillow Dance Interactive Jacob’s Pillow Dance Interactive is an ever-growing collection of dance videos filmed at Jacob’s Pillow from the 1930s to today. Jacob’s Pillow is a National Historic Landmark, a National Medal of Arts recipient, and home to America’s longest running dance festival. Each year thousands of people from across the U.S. and around the globe experience the Festival with more than 50 dance companies and 200 free performances, talks, and events; train at The School at Jacob’s Pillow; explore the rare and extensive dance Archives; take part in numerous Community Programs; and experience the rich history of the Festival online.
National Dance Council of America The National Dance Council of America is the official governing body for dancing in the United States. Its purpose is to provide, on a nationwide basis, a united inter-associated agency to represent the interests of those in the dance profession and other dance related entities and organizations and to act as the agency for cooperation with similar councils in other countries.

Additional Dance and Movement Links

Alexander Technique Center
ARTOTAL -- Dance [in French] This site promotes dance in all its forms in France.
Ballroom Dance Resource Video clips, technical tips, a directory of resourrces, a discussion forum, and more for beginners as well as seasoned ballroom veterans.
The Costumer's Manifesto
Dance Horizons Online book/dvd seller focused on dance materials.
Dance Notation Bureau
Gaylor Minden
Shop online for pointe shoes, shoe accessories, leotards, tights, silks and warmers, bags, training aids and more.
Great Performances Special features, program companions, multimedia presentations, and more from the long-running and award-winning PBS series.
Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies (LIMS) Online
TanzNetz [in German] tanznetz is an exclusively digital German-language resource that covers all elements of dance in the German-speaking world and contains texts, photos, and videos gathered and submitted voluntarily over the last 25+ years.

Digital Resources from other Libraries and Archives

500 Years of Italian Dance:Treasures from the Cia Fornaroli Collection This New York Public Library collection of Italian dance materials covers the Renaissance to the early 20th century and includes includes designs, lithographs, ephemera, and more.
An American Ballroom Companion: Dance Instruction Manuals, ca. 1490 to 1920 A collection of over two hundred social dance manuals at the Library of Congress. The list begins with a rare late fifteenth-century source, Les basses danses de Marguerite d'Autriche (c.1490) and ends with Ella Gardner's 1929 Public dance halls, their regulation and place in the recreation of adolescents. Along with dance instruction manuals, this online presentation also includes a significant number of antidance manuals, histories, treatises on etiquette, and items from other conceptual categories. Many of the manuals also provide historical information on theatrical dance. All illuminate the manner in which people have joyfully expressed themselves as they dance for and with one another.
Circulating Dance Collection at the New York Public Library
Copyright of Choreographic Works This article from 1994 provides an overview of the legal history of dance copyright up to the end of the analog age in terms understandable to non-lawyers. It also identifies and discusses many philosophical issues presented by the copyright of choreographic works.
What copyright protections to choreographers have over their work? Published in 2021, this article from "Dance Magazine" discusses the difficulties in copyrighting dance in the 21st century.
Copyright Registration of Choreography and Pantomime This .pdf circular was published by the U.S. Copyright Office as an introduction to the practices and procedures for registering choreographies and pantomimes.
Dance History Video Archive (DHVA) collection Formerly known as the Dance Preservation and Digitization Project and viewable at archive.danceheritage.org, has been donated to the University of Southern California. The collection preserves culturally significant recordings that document global and U.S. dance traditions, creative work by outstanding choreographers and performers, and performances that helped to advance the art form. See also https://www.danceusa.org/dhc-integration
Dance Research at the Library of Congress This guide helps users navigate the wide variety of resources related to dance at the Library, including reference materials, special collections, music scores, and databases.
History of Social Dance in America Exhibit by American Antiquarian Society.
Jerome Robbins Dance: Moving Image Archive This website is a portal providing online access to the content of this video archive, which includes the Bhutan Dance Project, interviews with current dance professional dancers, critics, choreographers, etc., and some productions.
Jerome Robbins Dance Division, New York Public Library
Music & Dance Reference (MusRef) This attractive, welcoming site collects a wide range of music and dance reference tools in one place. The core of the site is an extensive list of traditional reference tools of these types, including over 10,000 entries (1,800-plus annotated) for bibliographies, discographies, specialized dictionaries, catalogs, and other indexes. The listings also include many Internet resources, e.g., composer websites, portals for particular subjects, and musical instrument online collections.
New York Public Library Catalog Use this link to search for materials in the NYPL dance collection! In the drop-down box (below the search term(s)) that says "Collection" - click the down arrow. Select: "Performing Arts"
Performing Arts in America, 1875-1923 (NYPL)
Works & Process (YouTube collection) Described by The New York Times as “forward thinking” and “an exceptional opportunity to understand something of the creative process,” since 1984 Works & Process has illuminated the creative process of artists from both the world’s largest organizations and underrecognized performing arts cultures by providing rare, longitudinal studio-to-stage creative residency, commissioning, and presenting support. This season Works & Process celebrates New York artists and street and social dance, expanding beyond the Guggenheim Museum to also present at Gibney Center, Lincoln Center, and The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, with the Jerome Robbins Dance Division. www.worksandprocess.org

Digital Libraries

Google Books
"Book Search works just like web search. Try a search on Google Books or on Google.com. When we find a book with content that contains a match for your search terms, we'll link to it in your search results ... If the book is out of copyright, or the publisher has given us permission, you'll be able to see a preview of the book, and in some cases the entire text. If it's in the public domain, you're free to download a PDF copy ... If you find a book you like, click on the "Buy this book" and "Borrow this book" links to see where you can buy or borrow the print book. " (from "About Google Books")
Hathi Trust Digital Library
The HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) enables computational access for nonprofit and educational users to published works in the public domain and, in the future, on limited terms to works in-copyright from the HathiTrust.
The HTRC is a collaborative research center launched jointly by Indiana University and the University of Illinois, along with the HathiTrust Digital Library, to help meet the technical challenges of dealing with massive amounts of digital text that researchers face by developing cutting-edge software tools and cyberinfrastructure to enable advanced computational access to the growing digital record of human knowledge.
Internet Archive
"The Internet Archive is a 501(c)(3) non-profit that was founded to build an Internet library. Its purposes include offering permanent access for researchers, historians, scholars, people with disabilities, and the general public to historical collections that exist in digital format. Founded in 1996 and located in San Francisco, the Archive has been receiving data donations from Alexa Internet and others. In late 1999, the organization started to grow to include more well-rounded collections. Now the Internet Archive includes texts, audio, moving images, and software as well as archived web pages in our collections, and provides specialized services for adaptive reading and information access for the blind and other persons with disabilities. " (From "About the Internet Archive" page)

Dance

Modern Dance Links

Ballet Links

Dance Organizations / Publications

Additional Dance and Movement Links

Digital Resources from other Libraries and Archives

Digital Libraries

CONTACT

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