As part of her Black Dance at the Schomburg series, Communications Intern Kiani Ned takes a look inside the Schomburg Center's Digital Collections to uncover some of our most fascinating gems.
Dance has been used by black people as a means to communicate celebration, mourning, anger, resistance, pain, and healing. In the same way that a person may communicate their ideas with words, it is possible to communicate those same ideas with movement and action. Like any verbal language, dance continues to evolve, expand, and transform as the people who use it do. Located in the Digital Collections of the New York Public Library, one can find over a hundred digitized archival materials alluding to the language of dance as told by black people.
Interested in exploring more black dance at the Schomburg? Check out Black Dance at the Schomburg: The Black Iris Project
Find newspaper clippings about black dance in the U.S. and abroad in the Jean Blackwell Huston Research and Reference Division:
- Ballet Dancing : Clippings
- Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater: clippings
- Dance companies: clippings.
- Choreographers : clippings.
And books about black dance and dancers in the Jean Blackwell Huston Research and Reference Division:
- The Eclectic Approach of Black Dance by Peter Anthony Fields, Jr.
- Black Danceby Edward Thorpe
- Black Dance in America: A History Through Its Peopleby James Haskins
- Black Dance: An Annotated Bibliography by Alice J. Adamczyk