Dance Audio Archive
Home to more than 4,000 unique and rare audio recordings that capture the voices and ideas of performers, choreographers, composers, designers, and dance scholars from the mid-20th Century to the present. These recordings, mostly acquired through donations, encompass a wide range of original content, including:
Panel Discussions and Public Lectures
Dance Magazine Awards Ceremonies
Moving Image Archive
The moving image archive of the Dance Division began when choreographer Jerome Robbins donated six cans of film — along with a gift of a small percentage of his royalties as author of the musical Fiddler on the Roof — to the Division in 1965. Half a century later, the archive has grown to over 25,000 titles of moving image materials on a variety of film, video and digital formats through donors’ gifts and original documentations. Past projects undertaken by the Moving Image Archive and Dance Original Documentations offer innovative solutions to the recording of performances, the preservation of at-risk recordings, and providing our researchers with broader digital access. Examples include:
The Collaborative Editing Project to Document Dance
The Bhutan Dance Project, in collaboration with Core of Culture, is a project to record and preserve the Kingdom of Bhutan’s disappearing dance traditions.
Dance Original Documentations. Unique to the Dance Division is our commitment to document live dance performances. Through in-house efforts of original documentation since 1967, our Moving Image Archive has created, and added to its collections, footage of over 2,600 dance performances primarily in New York City. Find performances in the catalog by searching under names of choreographers, dancers, or companies, and view them in the Library’s Reading Room.
Dance Oral History Project
A distinct, searchable collection of over 500 in-depth audio interviews that have been initiated and recorded by the Library in an effort to add to the existing primary source material available to researchers in dance. Listen to excerpts of selected Oral History Project interviews on our Oral History Channel.
Digital Collections
Pages: 1 · 2