Philadelphia Dance Collection graphic Talley Beatty Preserving the Talley Beatty/PHILADANCO Legacy

Established in 2001, the Philadelphia Dance Collection, functions as a collaborative initiative of the University Libraries, the Esther Boyer College of Music and Dance at Temple University, and the greater Philadelphia dance communities. The three-pronged mission of the Philadelphia Dance Collection is to preserve the richly diverse dance legacy of the Philadelphia region, to actively document local dance phenomena, and to educate the local artistic communities as to the inherent value of dance heritage preservation. The Philadelphia Dance Collection exists to support the collaboration and exchange of ideas among those individuals and groups that create, perform, write about, research, document and preserve, teach and view dance. It aims to enhance the status of dance in the perception of the local and greater public. The scope and content of the Philadelphia Dance Collection is directed by the dance art created in the greater Philadelphia region.

Major Collections

Community and University dance companies and organizations, as well as individual performing artists comprise the holdings in the Philadelphia Dance Collection. Represented in the Collection are the archives of the Pennsylvania Ballet, Philadanco, the Philadelphia Fringe Festival, Group Motion Multimedia Dance Theater, South Street Dance Company, Philadelphia City Paper dance photographs, Dance Advance, Dance Critics Association, DanceBoom! performance series, Temple University Department of Dance, and the Institute for African Dance Research and Performance, among others. The Philadelphia Dance Collection is a living archive that accepts materials from artists and organizations during any stage of their performance history.

The Philadelphia Dance Collection's active documentation programs have generated a large collection of audiovisual materials, recording and preserving the multicultural dance history of the Philadelphia region through performance and performance reconstruction footage, and oral history interview recordings. The Collection houses multi-format archival materials such as programs, posters and other printed materials; manuscripts and business records; photographs and other still images; films, videos, DVDs and other moving images; sound recordings; digital media; set materials and props; realia and ephemera; and other materials that document movement phenomena.

Location, Hours, Services

The Philadelphia Dance Collection is administered through the Special Collections Department and is located on Temple University's Main Campus, in the Paley Library.

Monday through Friday: 9:00 am to 5:00 pm

Contact:

Margery Sly

Temple University Libraries
Philadelphia Dance Collection
Paley Library 017-00
1210 Polett Walk
Philadelphia, PA 19122-6088