Dance 231: Fundamentals of Choreography and Improvisation
Research & Writing Tutors
Research and Instruction Librarian for Music & Fine Arts
Evaluate Your Web Sources
Remember to critically evaluate web resources before using them in your research. Use the criteria in the Evaluating Source Credibility tab!
Useful Dance Sites
American Ballet Theatre
Consult the "repertory archives" section for excellent information on choreographers, composers, and individual ballets (including premieres and plot synopses). The online dictionary includes definitions for 170 ballet terms, taken from the Technical Manual and Dictionary of Classical Ballet
ArtsAlive.ca Dance
Website of the Canadian National Arts Centre. A wide-ranging array of resources put together with education in mind. Well worth your time!
Dance Heritage Coalition
A nonprofit cooperative group of institutions with significant collections of historical dance materials.
Dance Treasures
A web exhibit of American dance from the Dance Heritage Coalition, now archived at the Library of Congress. Includes images, videos, essays, and bibliographies of important figures in American dance.
Note: if the embedded videos do not play, CTRL+click (Mac) or right click (Windows) on the video display and select "View Frame Source" from the pop-up menu. Look for the line of code that says href=https://vimeo.com... as shown in the image below. The vimeo link is the direct link to the video. Click it or copy-and-paste it into your browser.
George Balanchine Foundation
Includes an index to the Balanchine video archives at the New York Public Library.
Jacob's Pillow
Website for the festival first started by Ted Shawn and Ruth St. Denis, with both historical and contemporary video excerpts.
Library of Congress Digital Collections
In addition to the American Memory collections, the Library of Congress has a rich variety of digitized materials on dance.
Merce Cunningham Trust
Information about current activities as well as links to Cunningham's digital archives at the New York Public Library.
New York Public Library - Libguide for Systemic Racism, Protests, and Dance
A guide focusing on conducting research on racism and protests through a dance lens.
Sapphire Swan Dance Directory
This list of dance web sites offers suggestions to begin browsing the Internet for information on your topic. Be careful, however: many of the links are out of date. Look under “Dance Styles" to find specific topics.