Dance 231: Fundamentals of Choreography and Improvisation
LibKey Nomad
Research and Instruction Librarian for Music & Fine Arts
Citation Styles for Dance
Always check with your instructor to be sure you are using the correct citation style.
Most dance research uses either MLA style or Notes-Bibliography Chicago style. Here are links to the official guides for these styles.
In addition to consulting the official style guides linked above, you might also find the guides at Purdue OWL (Online Writing Lab) helpful:
Some dance-specific citation scenarios are demonstrated below.
Citing Dance Performances
The citation links given above cover most citation situations (articles in journals, YouTube videos, etc.), but they do not offer many examples of how to cite dance performances.
Dance performances can be tricky. Is the dance choreographed or is it a social dance? Are you citing a live performance or a video recording? You may find yourself combining aspects of "live performance" formats with "recording" formats to build a complete citation.
Here are some examples using MLA style. For more examples, consult Appendix 2 of the 9th edition of the MLA Handbook.
Basic format for a live performance:
Choreographer Last, Choreographer First. Title of Dance. Performers, date, location of performance.
Basic format for a social dance viewed online (here I basically follow the format for citing any online video):
Performer Last, Performer First. "Title of Video." Website, Uploader, upload date, url.
Basic format for a recorded choreographed performance viewed online (this combines aspects of the format for choreographed live dance with the format for an online video):
Note that in the above example, I left out the performance date because that information was not provided; all I had was the upload date for the video.
Basic format for a recorded choreographed performance viewed through a library database:
Always double-check any citation generated by a database's "cite" button against the approved format in the official style guide!
This one is tricky because we have information about the film studio that recorded the work, too; we'll put that after the performance infomration.