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Dance: Books, Audio & Video Recordings

Library Catalog

Library holdings—including audio and video resources as well as e-books—are found online using UC Library Search

Video Collections

Individual video titles in the UC Berkeley Library can be found using UC Library Search. Most items will be housed at the Media Resources Center (MRC), 150 Moffitt Library.

In addition, the UCB Library subscribes to a number of online streaming video databases with significant dance content:

  • Alexander Street Press provides access to over 8,000 videos, including seminal ethnographic, performance and disabilities studies works, as well as counseling and therapy videos, "60 Minutes" and individually licensed Ethnic Studies videos.   image of key; requires UCB IP address

Key resources include:

Jacob's Pillow Dance Interactive Video clips of performances at the festival from 1937-2010.

Numeridanse is a multimedia dance platform with thousands of videos, headed and coordinated by the Maison de la Danse, Lyon, and imagined by the director Charles Picq.  It was created and developed hand-in-hand with the French National Centre for Dance (CND) and supported by the BNP Paribas Foundation and the French Ministry for Culture.

New York Public Library Digital Collections links to multiple dance related resources including Treasures from the Cia Fornaroli Collection, the Claire Holt Collection of Indonesian Dance and Related Arts, and Dance in Photographs and Prints.

Fred Fehl Dance Collection, Harry Ransome Center, University of Texas, consists of images of the Martha Graham Dance Company, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, the American Ballet Theatre, and the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. Other companies will be added as digitization is completed.

Digital Dance Archives. Public access, via a single web platform, to five distinct collections of modern, postmodern, and contemporary works from the National Resource Centre for Dance (NRCD), as well as Siobhan Davies RePlay. These collections represent over one hundred years of British dance performance, creation, and research and include photographs, films, drawings, and other ephemera.

Pioneers of Chinese Dance. A digital photograph collection at the University of Michigan designed to make the history of twentieth-century Chinese dance accessible to international researchers.

 

Archives

NYPL Jerome Robbins Dance Division.  Information about the New York Public Library's dance division. The Dance Division had a separate catalog, but now their collection must be searched through the NYPL catalog, though one can use the drop down menu to limit searches to the Dance Collection (near the bottom of options).

Performing Arts Reading Room Library of Congress. Online portal to the vast and diverse collections in the custody of the Music Division at the Library of Congress that includes close to 500 special collections in music, theater, and dance. Information about resources for the study of dance can be found at Invitation to the Dance.

National Resources Centre for Dance. NRCD is a non-profit national archive and resource provider for dance and movement in the UK. Founded in 1981, the Centre is based at the University of Surrey Library, in Guildford, Surrey.

Association of German Dance Archives. A consortium of five dance archives and collecting institutions dedicated to documenting and preserving the legacy of dance, movement and choreography in Germany and to the restoration and digitization of outstanding parts of the collections and to inquiry into the existence of further important collections in private hand or in public institutions such as TV broadcasting stations, theaters, or municipal archives.

Dance Canada Danse. Created by Canadian dance artists working in the 1940s and 1950s for the purposes of preserving their works through reconstruction, notation, videotape and photography, this group is devoted to building and preserving unique collections in theatrical dance and to sharing these materials with the public through exhibitions, publications, and educational programming. The archive includes over 800 hours of oral history interviews with Canadian dance artists.

Dance Heritage Coalition. DHC is a national 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.

Dance Notation Bureau. The DNB mission is to advance the art of dance through the use of a system of notation. DNB does this by creating dance scores using the symbol system called Labanotation.