Posts from the Jerome Robbins Dance Division

The Dance Division has over forty-five original costume designs by artist and designer Boris Anisfeld. We are thrilled to now include them in our Digital Collections.

We deposit into our archives a transcript of every interview conducted as part of the Oral History Project. These are nearly all available for use on-site at the library.

The plot thickened in 2012, when I began an inventory of the Dance Division's unprocessed materials. A separate section of unprocessed material turned out to be a treasure trove of photographs and albums that had been separated from the collection upon acquisition.

It is almost time for the Library’s fabulous Anti-Prom. On Friday, June 17, New York teens will assemble on the steps of the Schwarzman Building and reveal to each other and the staff volunteers their prom wear.

Irina Baronova—Tennant's mother—and what it means to have your collection be acquired by the Library.

The intersection of dance and architecture and his own site-specific work.

Representations of Asian dance forms in the visual arts as researched from reading Gods Who Dance, written by American dancer Ted Shawn (1891-1972).

How professional dancers can use the Library's collection to prepare for a season's dances and comparing two ballet masters, George Balanchine and August Bournonville.

Personal thoughts on Edwin Denby, modern dance and criticism, and documentation.

A narrative outline of African and American contributions to culture and dance from the autobiographical point-of-view of a black female student/practitioner of dance in the twenty-first century.

Meet the six fellows chosen by the Committee for the Jerome Robbins Dance Division, each granted an honorarium to support their research and writing during six months of immersion in the collections.

Isadora Duncan received a huge ovation for La Marseillaise. She was to repeat the performance again several weeks later, and a reviewer in the French theater journal La Rampe exclaimed breathlessly that "she lifted souls to the sublime and left them trembling with excitement."

As a dancer for the New York City Ballet and a self-described "nerd" for ballet history, Silas has made the dance collection at LPA an integral part of his life and career.

Florence Mills was famed for her birdlike voice as well as her spontaneous dancing during her numbers. She was one of the most popular entertainers of the early 1920s in New York, London, and Paris, and yet, perhaps because she died at age 32, her fame has not survived.

The 1915-1916 tour, which included the Palace Theatre run, was the first to feature dancers from the Ruth St. Denis School of Dancing and its Related Arts, which was founded in the summer of 1915 and which became known, in a mingling of the two founders’ names, as Denishawn.

The Dance Broadside Collection was recently processed and made available to the public. A new exhibit showcasing a few pieces from this collection is now located in the Library for Performing Arts third floor reading room.

The Dance Division collects "prints depicting dance," covering a wide range of subjects, including portraits of dancers, dance performances and rehearsals, spectacle and horse ballet, advertisements showing dance, and satire. Here are a few favorites from the public domain.

Happy New Year! Rather than look back at 2015, we’re going back 100 years for the first in a series of blog  posts featuring events in dance history from (about) 100 years ago. And I’m starting with something that is personally meaningful to me, as a ballroom dancer: Vernon and Irene Castle in the silent film, The Whirl of Life.

The Jerome Robbins Dance Division is proud to announce that the Merce Cunningham Dance Foundation Inc, records, Additions is now open. This collection is 141.44 linear feet comprising 315 boxes, 41 tubes and 116.1 gigabytes of electronic records and digitized content.