“Hello, my name is Carol Cunningham-Sigman. I am the Chair of the Dance Division in the Visual and Performing Arts School at Purdue. Welcome to our digital dance history from 1931-2011. The website features dance education, interdisciplinary collaboration, and faculty research. I hope that you enjoy the experience of browsing our history and continue to follow our evolution into the future.”
Curiosity + Collaboration = Choreographic Expression is a digital humanities collaboration between the Purdue University Libraries and the Visual and Performing Arts School (VPAS) within the College of Liberal Arts at Purdue University. It was initiated through a conversation between the Libraries’ Research Department and the VPAS’ Division of Dance with the intent of showcasing the concert dance education, artistic, and research output over time. This project has included collaborators such as the Archives and Special Collections, the Libraries’ Information Technology Department, the Humanities, Social Science, and Business Libraries, and a number of other specialists within the Libraries.
The content itself is very unique in that it shows how concert dance at Purdue has always been avant garde and generally more innovative in comparison to many dance programs across the nation. Some of the technology collaborations were the first of its kind at the time and have been showcased at prestigious events such as SIG GRAPH, which is hosted by the Association for Computing Machinery. Furthermore, the images and video all reflect the cultural environment at Purdue over time beyond just the Division of Dance as well as highlighting how well-rounded the multi-talented students are.
As you browse the images and videos of the website, we hope that you will find yourself immersed into a retrospective of a very unique organization that strives to broaden the mainstream conceptions of concert dance.
