Blog Posts by Subject: Dance

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.

Suzanne Farrell is the creative director of her eponymous dance company and has danced over 150 roles with the New York City Ballet. As a dancer, she is best known for her work with the great choreographer George Balanchine, who considered Farrell a muse. Together, they created some of the most formally innovative and also intimate performances of twentieth century ballet.

Lana Dukovskaya is a ballerina in the Bolshoi company. She is thrilled to get a chance to go to NYC and dance in The Rite of Spring... but only because star soloist Nina is unwell. And there is speculation as to what caused her injury.

Dance in unexpected places... walking through literary New York... New York's incredible abandoned spaces... photographing fashion's trendsetters... recipes in literature... unusual hiking destinations... coming of age in postwar America... the art and science of what we eat... southern Italy's most celebrated gardens... urban transformation in Chelsea... the influence of our infrastructure...

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.

There is so much history wound up in these open reels that would not exist in any other form. The medium became available at a rich time in Dance history.

The Jerome Robbins Dance Division is pleased to announce that the five interviews documented with the Mertz Gilmore Foundation grant to record African choreographers and teachers are now online at The New York Public Library’s website.

The footage of Juana Vargas "La Macarrona" (1870-1947), filmed in 1917 by Léonide Massine and held in the Jerome Robbins Dance Division at the Library for the Performing Arts, is one of the Library's most important, and little-known, flamenco treasures. As a member of the Wertheim study, I was honored to be invited to write a blog post about the Library's significant holdings related to flamenco.

The Dance Division has continued its work, assuring its place in the world, as a global, international archive, the world's largest of its kind dedicated to dance, by collecting, preserving and making accessible materials about the many varieties of dance in the world.

Dressed in black with his homemade blackened blimp, his pockets are stuffed with exposed and unexposed film; he is in constant fear of discovery.

Summer is almost formally over and our fall work is already in full swing. There are a plethora of events at the New York Public Library revolving around dance to take you through the end of the year, including a conversation with choreographer and MacArthur Foundation Fellow Alexei Ratmansky and new Saturday brunch events at the Library for the Performing Arts! Get them on your calendar now!

The photographs of MEXICO PROFUNDO “LIGHT AND SHADOWS” are a new acquisition of the Jerome Robbins Dance Division of the New York Public Library. A selection of the photographs are currently on view in the third floor reading room of the Library for Performing Arts.

The life and career of Fosse, the only director to win the triple crown of show business awards in one year (an Oscar for Cabaret, a Tony Award for Pippin, and an Emmy Award for Liza With a Z—all in 1973) is well-documented through the holdings of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts (LPA) and elsewhere. Clippings, reviews, posters and lobby cards, Playbills and programs—all the standard theatrical ephemera—on Fosse's shows and films are easily available in the Billy Rose Theatre Division and Jerome Robbins Dance Division.

The Jerome Robbins Dance Division’s latest Annual Report FY 2013 is now online on the Library’s website documenting another full and active year for the Dance Division. The number of public programs produced by the Dance Division this year was exceptional and included three Flamenco programs, three African programs with Robert Farris Thompson, Ronald K. Brown/Evidence and Djoniba Mouflet, and the program with Princess Norodom Buppha Devi in conversation with Peter Sellars.

The representation of the professional and artistic career of Florence Vandamm has a major gap, which we are doing our best to fill in. Her London scrapbook goes from 1908–1915. The Vandamm Theatrical Photographs collection documents her work in New York City, from 1924 on. We have filled in some of the gap with the Sybil Thorndike material (see earlier posts) and discoveries of images printed in magazines, such as British and New York Vogue, Vanity Fair and The Spur.