![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldThe Globe and Mail's Martha Schabas points her readers towards Dance Collection Danse, Canada's only dedicated dance museum on lower Church Street.
Nestled between a nail salon and a strip of shabby pawn shops, Canada’s only dance museum sits on the third floor of a tawny-brick building on Toronto’s Church Street. There’s no sign out front to mark its existence. Passersby are likely to find their eye drawn elsewhere, toward the hulking neo-Gothic Metropolitan United Church that claims the entire opposite block, the ad for blue iridescent fingernails in the adjacent window, or the bustle of commotion just south on Queen Street East.
“We had a sandwich board out front for a bit and that brought in a few curious people,” says Dance Collection Danse co-founder and director Miriam Adams. “But we had to take it down.” She smiles with a touch of irony.
“A bylaw restriction.”
Despite its low profile, Dance Collection Danse, which celebrates its 30th anniversary this year, is a remarkable repository of the country’s dance history. The museum’s tiny Church Street home consists of three bright and modest rooms – a gallery space, a work space and an office – all open to the public five days a week, with admission by donation. Its collection is as impressive as its housing is humble. In addition to a special exhibition that changes biannually, the museum has closets lined floor-to-ceiling with hundreds of written documents, 1,100 hours worth of oral history on cassettes, cupboards stuffed with aging costumes and quirky artifacts, more than 2,000 video recordings of performances dating back several decades and a vast off-site holding of backdrops and historic Canadian set pieces.
Visiting the museum for the first time last week, I had the sense that I’d happened upon the kind of hidden cultural gem you seek out and fetishize as a tourist. Amy Bowring, a dance historian and DCD’s director of research, dangled all kinds of fascinating ephemera and collectibles in front of me: Early 20th-century pointe shoes with metal toes for tapping, a purple chevron tutu from the 1960s, the red blazer worn by the dance contingent of the Canadian Olympic team in Berlin in 1936.
