Barzel collections are a bonanza for dance scholars.

CHICAGO--Throughout her extensive career as a dance critic, teacher, and historian, one of Ann Barzel's passions has been keeping the memory of dance alive. "Soon after I discovered dance, I knew it was elusive. I wanted to prolong it, to preserve it," Barzel said in a 19-65 Dance Magazine article. As critic for the Chicago American and Dance Magazine and staff writer for numerous other publications, she held on to every press release and photo that came across her desk. She saved books, magazines, posters, programs, and calendars. But, as she said, "The essence of dance was still not there." So in 1937, when few others had the idea, Barzel bought a used movie camera and began filming.

Barzel's films capture numerous performances by Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, and early works by Katherine Dunham and Jerome Robbins, as well as Martha Graham and company performing Appalachian Spring and American Document and Doris Humphrey and Charles Weidman in Race of Life. Shot in three-and-a-half-minute segments, then hand-spliced by Barzel, these films are a priceless window on the world of dance from 1937 to the mid-1960s. They are now being transferred to videotape at Chicago's Harold Washington Library Center for public viewing. Currently, the library offers eight (out of a potential eighty-five) hour-long videotapes.

Barzel's print collection, numbering some three hundred boxes and still growing, now forms the cornerstone of the Midwest Dance Archives at Chicago's Newberry Library. It is by far the largest and most important addition to the collection, says dance librarian Diana Haskell. According to Haskell, "The Barzel Collection gives a context for the other collections, like a glue that holds them all together."

Barzel's collection offers an enormous range of original source material from the early 1920s to the present. The majority of documents records the history of dance in Chicago and includes writings on national and international companies that have graced Chicago stages. Her extensive periodicals collection includes, among others, Basllet Annual, Ballet Review, Dance Encyclopedia, Dance News, Les Saisons de la Danse, London Dancing Times, the complete run of Dance Index, and forty years of Dance Magazine. Duplicates have been donated to the Harold Washington Library Center, where Barzel has set up a browsing section.

Though there are some thin patches in Barzel's collection, a researcher will almost always find something useful, and then some, says Haskell.