Dance in Video

Hundreds of dance performances, documentaries, interviews, and training videos online.

Dance as an art form is ephemeral—there are rarely scripts to study, no commonly used notation to analyze—making a live performance vital for study and research. Dance in Video provides the visual element necessary for appreciation and analysis, capturing dance performances from the stage and bringing them directly to your computer screen. Dance in Video includes hundreds of dance productions from the most influential performers and companies of the twentieth century together with dozens of documentaries, interviews, and dance instruction videos.

From the ballets of Stravinsky to documentaries on William Forsythe and Merce Cunningham, and spanning the 1950s to today, Dance in Video includes hundreds of hours of streaming video available electronically for the first time. The collection covers ballet, tap, jazz, contemporary, experimental, and improvisational dance, as well as forerunners of the forms and the pioneers of modern concert dance.

Dance in Video is one of the first releases in the Alexander Street series of Critical Video Editions™, which makes video more useful and functional for scholarship than ever before. You can browse, search, and cite the videos to the exact moment. New tools let you make custom clips of the performances and assemble them into class-specific playlists that can include links to anywhere on the Web. For the first time, students, instructors, and researchers can bookmark specific dance styles and staging examples—even a single motion—with permanent, per-second URLs, and then annotate them, share them, email them, include them in papers and course reserves, use them with course management applications, and see playlists created by other users around the world.

Performances in Dance in Video include Points in Space (Merce Cunningham Dance Company); highlights from Dance Theatre of Harlem; an Evening with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre; Strange Fish (DV8 Physical Theatre); Silence is the End of our Song (Royal Danish Ballet); Intimate Pages (Rambert Dance Company); Swansong (English National Ballet); Peter and the Wolf (The Royal Ballet School); Rainbow Round My Shoulder (Donald McKayle); and hundreds more choreographed or performed by dancers and groups including Agnes de Mille, Mark Morris, Lestor Horton, Anna Sokolow, Norman Walker Dance Company, Anthony Tudor, Jose Limon, Paul Draper, Chuck Green, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre, The Kirov Ballet, the Bolshoi Ballet, National Ballet of Canada, Nederlands Dans Theater, and others. New and forthcoming content includes performances from the BBC, the George Balanchine Foundation, and other leading video providers.

Dance in Video brings a new dimension to nearly all aspects of performance studies and production history. You can watch multiple productions of select dances, showing various interpretations, for comparative analysis; cross-search the stage works of legendary figures; see interviews integrated with excerpts of live performances; and explore documentary histories. Browse by genre, performer, choreographer, company, and other combinable fields. Identify a video, and then a click delivers selected sections or the entire work for viewing online. Move back and forth within the video, replay favorite segments, bookmark and annotate playlists, and include links to your selections in papers, emails, class Web site or syllabus with permanent URLs.

Dance in Video is available online, either through one-time purchase of perpetual rights or annual subscription. The service works on PCs or Macs and requires no setup or special software—all you need is an Internet browser. All necessary permissions for educational in-library, in-class, and remote access are included in the terms of your license agreement.

The collection is part of Alexander Street’s growing suite of online collections in music and the performing arts, and is completely cross-searchable together with all of the other Music Online listening, score, video, and full-text reference collections, including Classical Music Library, Classical Scores Library, and Opera in Video.