The Bryson Dance Collection, housed in the John Hay Library and other campus libraries, focuses on the development of dance, primarily ballet. It includes many works tracing ballet's history, illustrations, photographs, and biographies. A smaller portion of the collection covers other types of dance, including modern dance, folk dance, and jazz dance. The geographic scope is worldwide and the time covered ranges from the fifteenth through the twentieth centuries.
The John Hay Library houses a large number of archival collections that may be of interest to those in theater and the performing arts, including the Rites and Reason Theater Collection, the Bryson Dance Collection, the Smith Magic Collection, the Harris Collection, the Trinity Repertory Archives, and many others. Please contact the curator of each collection for more information.
"The Billy Rose Theatre Division of The New York Public Library is one of the largest and most comprehensive archives devoted to the theatrical arts. Encompassing dramatic performance in all its diversity, the division is an indispensable resource for artists, writers, researchers, scholars, students, and the general public. Through conservation and documentation efforts, it preserves and promotes the theatre, playing a dynamic role in the national and international theatrical communities."
"The Jerome Robbins Dance Division of The New York Public Library is the largest and most comprehensive archive in the world devoted to the documentation of dance. Chronicling the art of dance in all its manifestations - ballet, ethnic, modern, social, and folk - the division is much more than a library in the usual sense of the word. It is part museum, part film production center, and part consulting service to the professional dance community. It preserves the history of dance by gathering diverse written, visual, and aural resources, and it works to ensure the art form's continuity through an active documentation program." Please note the digitized collections available at: http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/dancevideo, some of which can be viewed outside of the NYPL's physical locations.
"The Cuban Theater Digital Archive (CTDA) is a resource for research, teaching and learning in Cuban theater and performance as well as in related fields; a community repository for important Cuban theatrical materials; and a forum to foster scholarly communication in this field. The Digital Archive includes materials digitized and filmed in Cuba and outside the island as well as resources and information related to Cuban theater, with a special focus on theater produced by Cuban communities in the United States."
Over 13,000 images of stage and costume designs, photographs, posters and scripts from the Federal Theatre Project, a part of FDR's Works Progress Administration.
The University of Bristol Theater Collection "focuses on British theatre history, with particular strengths of theatre in the South West, Victorian theatre, Post-World War II theatre, Live and Performance Art, scenery and costume design and other related artwork." Over 100 archival collections in theater are held at Bristol.
From the site: "The Bhutan Dance Project Video Archive contains 652 videos that were collected and created by Core Culture." [Please note that you may experience video playback problems in Firefox; if this happens, try another browser.]
"The Music Division is dedicated to continually increasing online access to its unique collection material through its digital collections. Through these digital collections, researchers are able to download scans of an incredible array of materials ranging from Medieval chant manuscripts, to manuscript and first edition scores by the most revered composers of the classical music canon, to tens of thousands of pieces of historic sheet music in the public domain. It should be noted, however, that digital collections represent a small percentage of the Music Division’s complete holdings; contact music reference librarians to learn more about the onsite collection material that relates to these digital collections."
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HathiTrust is a partnership of academic & research institutions, offering a collection of millions of book and ejournal titles digitized from libraries around the world. As members of HathiTrust, Brown users get PDF download access to nearly 3 million public domain or permissioned works that were a part of the Google Books digitization projects, or were contributed to the trust by other member institutions.
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"The Performing Arts posters illustrate the wide range of popular, live entertainment in America from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century. The approximately 2,100 posters in the online Performing Arts Posters category represent the entire contents of three collections: the Magic Poster Collection, the Minstrel Poster Collection, and the Theatrical Poster Collection."