Dance

DHC is a national alliance of institutions holding significant collections of materials documenting the history of dance. Search for dance-related collections through their portal, which centralizes finding aids available from institutions across the country.

The Dance Notation Bureau records and archives dance using a symbol system called Labanotation. DNB has produced and houses scores by artists such as George Balanchine, Paul Taylor, Antony Tudor, Bill T. Jones, Doris Humphrey, William Forsythe, José Limón, Laura Dean, and about 270 others. Each year DNB assists in staging around 150-200 performances from scores.

DDA gives public access, via one web platform, to multiple collections from the National Resource Centre for Dance (NRCD), as well as Siobhan Davies RePlay (SDR). These collections represent over 100 years of British dance performance, creation and research and include photographs, films, drawings and other ephemera.

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. Jacob’s Pillow Dance Interactive is an ever-growing collection of dance videos filmed at Jacob’s Pillow from the 1930s to today.

The Jerome Robbins Dance Division of The New York Public Library is the largest and most comprehensive archive in the world devoted to the documentation of dance.

The Pioneers of Chinese Dance Digital Archive is a digital photograph collection designed to make the history of twentieth-century Chinese dance accessible to international researchers. The project was started at the University of Michigan Asia Library in 2014. The collection is focused on private donations from individual dancers who started their careers in the 1940s and 1950s and had a major impact on the history of Chinese dance.