CELEBRATING A LIFE AND ARCHIVES: Alma Concepción, whose career has encompassed classical ballet and Spanish dance as well as years of teaching, has donated her papers to Princeton University. A celebration in honor of the collection is on November 2. (Photo by Jennifer Cabral)

By Anne Levin

The papers of Puerto Rican dancer, choreographer, scholar, and popular dance teacher Alma Concepción are now part of Latin American Collections at Princeton University’s Firestone Library.

A Princeton resident since the 1980s, Concepción is familiar to alumni of Princeton Ballet School for her classes in Spanish dance and ballet from 1983 to 2011. She has also taught at the Arts Council of Princeton, at Rutgers and Princeton universities, and at Taller de Danza, a children’s and dance community organization in Trenton. A two-part event celebrating the opening of the Alma Concepción Collection, “Dance, Literature, and Comunidad,” is on Thursday, November 2 at two campus locations.

“As a dancer, perhaps most significant was her role as dancer in Ballets de San Juan, one of the preeminent dance companies in Puerto Rico and the region founded in 1954 and active to this day, as well as her role in Taller de Histriones, an experimental and pathbreaking dance company active in the 1970s,” said Fernando Acosta-Rodriguez, librarian for Latin American, Iberian, and Latino Studies at Princeton University Library. “As an educator, she helped to train generations of new and experienced dancers from Puerto Rico, New York City, Trenton, and Princeton. As a scholar, she has helped to shed light on the history and meaning of dance in Puerto Rico and among Latino communities in the United States.”

The bulk of the collection consists of 42 albums documenting Concepción’s life from her childhood in New York and Puerto Rico to her career as an artist and independent scholar. Clippings, photographs, programs, posters, and letters tell the story of the performing arts in Puerto Rico from 1950 to the early 1980s. They also “shed light into other cultural aspects of contemporary Puerto Rican life in the island and the diaspora in the United States,” reads a release on the collection.

A screen print of Concepción by Puerto Rican printmaker Lorenzo Homar, a photograph of her titled Erzuli from 1979, programs from Ballets de San Juan, and references to numerous dancers and choreographers including Alicia Alonso, Frederick Franklin, George Balanchine, Maria Tallchief, Jacques d’Amboise, and Antonio Ruiz are part of the collection.

Acosta-Rodriguez said he is thrilled “by early childhood photographs portraying Concepción’s father, Gilberto Concepción de Gracia, founder of the Puerto Rican Independence Party,” as well as documentation about a trip to Cuba in the 1970s where she met Alicia Alonso’s Ballet Nacional de Cuba, as well as members of dance companies from other parts of the Americas and the world attending an international congress.

But his favorite parts of the archive are “the photographs and ephemera related to the Taller de Histriones dance company, and the many items found throughout the archive that evidence the close collaboration of Puerto Rican performing artists with prominent visual artists such as Lorenzo Homar, Rafael Tufiño, and Antonio Martorell, who are also well represented among Princeton University Library’s Special Collections.”

The event on November 2 begins with a book talk about Inhabiting the Impossible: Dance and Experimentation in Puerto Rico by Susan Homar and Nibia Patrana Santiago, in the Chancellor Green Rotunda from 12 to 1:20 p.m. From 5 to 6:30 p.m., a reception will be held at Firestone Library’s Special Collections, with performances by choreographer Alicia Diaz and percussionist Sebastian Guerrero.

For more information, visit latinamericana.princeton.edu.