Who could resist, particularly at a time when the Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival (ditch the apostrophe when calling up that category in Dance on Disc) is celebrating its 70th anniversary with exhibitions, talks and symposiums at three spaces around Manhattan?
The procedure is a series of double clicks on the screen, first on the large E superimposed on the New York Public Library logo, then on "Click to Access" on the Electronic Resources page, and finally on "Dance on Disc".
In the midst of that huge open space there is a surprising sense of privacy and calm as, seated at one of 35 new work stations, one absorbs the riches promised in the Dance on Disc database, looking up occasionally to watch a ballet, an Isadora Duncan dance or a samba play out in silence on distant video screens.
The lineups usually include a slate of dance music disc jockeys along with current hitmaking bands, like the histrionic hard-rock band the Darkness, and rarities like the reunion of the Pixies, the influential 1980's alternative-rock band, which is showing up on festival bills across Europe.
It brings together leading British hitmakers of the moment with hopeful new bands in numerous genres, dance-music disc jockeys, comedy, cabaret and children's activities.
Women are still a small minority among dance-club disc jockeys and hip-hop producers and performers, but this marathon program intends to change the situation.
As hundreds of people milled past in the lobby of the Radisson Deauville Resort Hotel here, Kenny Bobien, a dance-music disc jockey and producer, assessed a homemade CD through the silvery headphones attached to his portable player.
Furthermore, EDM recordings are produced primarily to be played in dance clubs by disc jockeys (DJs), in a mix with other recordings of the same type, rather than by home listeners though many tracks have crossed over to the pop audience.
In the mid-1960s, he was hired to host, still as Zacherley, an afternoon teenage dance show called "Disc-O-Teen" that was broadcast for three years.
SKRILLEX danced around the disc jockey table like a crazed, hard-rock elf, his long black hair flying, his eyes intense behind oversize, nerdy glasses, his hands flying over his laptop and a MIDI controller.
