Strategic Collecting Direction

Performance and Entertainment

The Hay’s Performance and Entertainment strategic direction documents the history and creative process of performing arts and provides a window into public life and popular entertainment in the Americas through plays, dance, film, music, photography, and pornography. Key to this strategic direction is the Harris Collection of American Poetry and Plays, which contains more than 250,000 volumes from North America (Canada, U.S., Mexico) and the Caribbean. The Harris Collection includes plays, folk music, songsters, hymnals, and poetry from the 18th to 21st centuries, and is complemented by archival collections like the papers of Puerto Rican playwright and screenwriter José Rivera, the records of the Providence Black Repertory Theater (Providence, RI), the papers of theater artist Kate Bornstein ’69, and the papers of Argentine filmmaker Fernando Birri, a founder of the aesthetic and political project Third Cinema.

Dance is another genre that is richly documented in existing holdings, principally by the Bryson Dance Collection. Containing more than 2,000 illustrated works from the 15th to 20th centuries, the Bryson Collection includes limited editions on costume and stage sets and depictions of performances and the development of dance — primarily ballet, but also modern, folk, and jazz. This collection is of particular value to practitioners because choreography is a movement-based, oral tradition that often lacks accessible, written documentation.

Popular diversions is another existing strength: the H. Adrian Smith Collection of Conjuring and Magicana includes 16th century titles on natural magic, alchemy, astrology, religious rites, and witchcraft and later holdings on conjuring, card tricks, games, and other works intended for practicing magicians; while the Miller Collection of Wit and Humor, at over 40,000 volumes, is one of the largest collections of U.S. humor, ranging from topical humor to vaudeville routines and political cartoons.

Strategic Growth

Future collecting for this direction will include:

• Native and Indigenous theater
• Latinx theater
• 20th and 21st century music
• Agitprop theater
• Drag and camp performance

Performance and Entertainment Anchor Collections

Bryson Dance collection: The collection focuses on the development of ballet from the time of Nijinsky, Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes. It includes biographies, memoirs, histories of ballet companies, and the stories of individual ballets. There are many illustrated works and limited editions on costume and stage sets, as well as depictions of the ballets themselves. Photographs included in the works are often by highly respected photographers such as Richard Avedon and George Platt Lynes.

H. Adrian Smith Collection of Conjuring and Magic: The H. Adrian Smith Collection of Conjuring and Magicana, long considered one of the finest private libraries on conjuring and magic, includes 16th century titles on natural magic, alchemy, astrology, religious rites, and witchcraft. Later holdings include sections on conjuring, card tricks and games, magicians as performers, magic periodicals and other works intended for practicing magicians, posters, ephemera, and realia. The Collection is the gift and bequest of the collector, class of 1930, who as an undergraduate put himself through Brown by giving magic performances.

Damon Collection of Occult and Visionary Literature: The collection deals primarily with alchemy, the interpretation of dreams, mysticism, black magic and the Kabbalah plus visionary testaments and manifestations of all kinds. Includes rare editions of early occult books and numerous chronicles of demonology, secret societies, theosophical orders, and ancient mystery religions. Among the works on sorcery and supernatural events are several on American witchcraft and the Salem trials. The collection reflects Damon’s fascination with alchemy, mysticism, symbolism and theosophy.

Dupee Fireworks Collection: Through the generosity of Paul Dupee, the library acquired the premier collection of books and manuscripts devoted to the history of recreational fireworks. The collection was assembled by Chris A. Philip, one of Great Britain’s foremost pyrotechnists and author of the standard reference work on the subject — A Bibliography of Firework Books (Winchester, 1985). John Babington’s Pyrotechnia, or a discourse of Artificiall Fire-works: In which the true Grounds of that Art are plainly and perspicuously laid downe (London, 1635) was chosen from among the wealth of material in the Dupee Collection to be the Brown University Library’s ceremonial Three Millionth Volume.

Rudolph Fisher papers: Rudolph Fisher (Class of 1919) was a Providence native, a medical doctor specializing in radiology and a leading figure in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s. His papers primarily contain various drafts and published copies of twenty-six of his short stories and novels, as well as book reviews and essays. The collection also contains correspondence, publicity materials, personal papers, family papers and news clippings. Materials cover Fisher’s life from 1919 to his death in 1934, as well as the work on behalf of Fisher done by his sister, Pearl, until 1983.

Rites & Reason Theatre records: The dates for the Africana Studies / Rites and Reason Theatre collection ranges from 1970 to 2006. This collection consists of nine series which focus on the growth and development of not only the Department of Africana Studies, but on the growth of the Rites and Reason Theatre.