Digital Media Reviews

Introduction & Content

Dance in Video: Volume I has been presented by Alexander Street Press as containing 500 hours of video footage providing an “overview of 20th Century concert dance, including the forerunners and pioneers of modern dance, covering ballet, tap, jazz, contemporary, experimental, and improvisation”¹ but the actual content seems to be heavily focused on traditional ballet, while only providing in-depth coverage of a few particular choreographers in more modern dance form, and only a smattering of videos having to do with dance styles of particular regions and cultures. It contains videos dating between 1960 and 2012, with the bulk of the content from 1980–2012. Some of the footage is readily available on DVD, but in comparison to the institutional prices for DVDs, the Dance in Video database is a bargain (for example, the videos from Charles Dennis’s Alive and Kicking series alone would cost more than $11,000 if purchased on DVD.)²

Within Dance in Video, there are more than seven hundred individual videos faceted into many categories, the broadest being Performance (443), Choreography and Composition (326), History and Philosophy of Dance (195), Instruction (121), and Dance Theory (88). The collection includes performances by companies such as Merce Cunningham Dance Company, The Royal Ballet, Pilobolus, The American Ballet Company, Doug Varone and Dancers, and Eiko and Komo. One of the more interesting collections of videos included are a series of thirty-six Master-classes provided by the George Balanchine Foundation, in which ballet greats such as Allegra Kent and Maria Tallchief can be observed teaching Balanchine’s choreography of particular roles to younger dancers.

Interface Design

Alexander Street Press has been in the process of rolling out a new interface for its collections since fall 2013.³ The initial release has both simple and advanced searching capabilities, with robust faceted searching which appears on the left-hand sidebar of search results to further refine results. The ability to create custom video clips and playlists has been retained in the new platform, which allows one to bookmark and share custom playlists of videos, but as of the time of this review, this feature was only working for onsite users. In a personal communication Alexander Street Press let the author know they were looking into this issue, and they suspect it involves a proxy issue for remote users. There is an extensive list of “known issues” with the new Alexander Street Platform posted on their website.⁴

The video controls provided are intuitive, including play/pause, fast forward, and rewind buttons, as well as a volume control slider. There is also a button that allows the user to jump back in thirty second increments. The layout of the screen can toggle between three views: default, thumbnails, and full-screen.

The default viewing mode provides more than a dozen metadata elements on the right-hand side of the page next to the video, including the title of the video, choreographer, date recorded, content type (e.g., Instructional material, Masterclass, etc.), duration (length of the video), among several other fields, all of which are searchable using the Advanced Search feature. Some videos include a transcript that scrolls along with the video itself, which is helpful for both the non-hearing and the hearing, in that it allows one to scan for a sought-after section of the video. This is particularly helpful for navigating segments where an individual is speaking for extended periods of time. There are some transcription errors but they are minimal, and the transcriptions (as well as the...