Dance Collection Danse started as a reconstruction project between 1983 and 1986, and during the research that led to the reconstruction project in 1986—I'm talking about the reconstruction of dances from the pre-Canada Council era—the researchers kept coming back to Toronto from all across the country with shopping bags full of films, scrapbooks, photos, and clippings—everything.
When the research project and the reconstruction was finished, our founders went to provincial archives, national archives, and even the city archives, and all of them said, “It's not in our mandate to collect this, we cannot take it” and so they said, “Okay, we'll do it” and they created Dance Collection Danse to do exactly that.