Welcome to the Dance Research Guide!
This guide will help your research in dance -- from choreography to dance history to particular dances and dancers -- from beginning to end. Start by exploring in some encyclopedias and dictionaries and then use the tabs to navigate through finding scholarly articles and books, as well as web resources.
There aren't any dance-specific online resources available through Myrin, but we do have one alternative to Wikipedia that will be useful.
Dance-specific print resources are available in the Reference Section of the library, and can be extremely helpful for finding background information that's more reliable than Wikipedia.
The Oxford Dictionary of Dance by
Over the last twenty years the boundaries of dance have been radically redrawn. There has been an explosion of new activity within traditional forms like ballet, a stream of new dance languages invented by fresh generations of choreographers, and there is a growing appreciation in the West ofdance forms from the rest of the world. Fans today are likely to attend performances in classical ballet, Spanish flamenco, Indian Bharata Natyam, Japanese Butoh, jazz, modern and post-modern dance. In classical ballet they may see companies as varied as the New York City Ballet, Bolshoi, or ParisOpera. In modern dance they may see work that stems from the Graham or the Cunningham schools of movement; while in post-modern dance they may be watching choreographers who mix influences as varied as folk dance, T'ai Chi, Balanchine, and Mary Wigman, or who may be practitioners of Eurocrash,minimalism, contact improvisation or release. This new dictionary by two leading and authoritative writers on dance will provide the information necessary for dance fans to navigate the diverse modern dance scene. With an emphasis on performance the dance we see in theatres today - readers will find both fact and analysis on a wide range ofsubjects from dancers and choreographers to dance styles and technical terms.
Citing your sources properly -- yes, even the images you use and the performances you watch, as well as any interviews you might conduct -- is important and required.
Purdue University's Online Writing Lab (OWL) citation resources are the best ones out there on the web. Generally, Dance courses require that you use either MLA or Chicago style. Detailed information on both styles is available here.
Librarians can help with citations, too!