The German Dance Archives Cologne (DTK) was founded by the Culturre Foundation of Stadtsparkasse Cologne in cooperation with the City of Cologne, after the aquisition of the dance collection started in 1948 by Kurt Peters and, after being expanded to include a documentation and research centre for dance and an anexing museum, was opened to the public.
The items of the DTK include over 350 lifetime and posthumousbequests, numerous collections belonging to institutions as well as over 160,000 photographs and 117,000 original negatives and slides. An art collection, a costume and poster collection, and a critics collection of over 600,000 newspaper extracts, about 25,000 programmes also belong to the archive. The library has a reference collection of 13,000 titles, 85 current subject-specific journals as well as 19,000 magazines in the journals and magazine collection. The presence library includes over 3500 films from various dance film categories (dance films, musicals, documentations, studio and stage recordings).
Exemplary for the bequests and collections of the DTK are the archives of Fritz and Elisabeth Böhme, Valeska Gert, Yvonne Georgi, Krisztina Horváth, Dore Hoyer, Kurt Jooss, Harald Kreutzberg, Vera Skoronel, Daniel Goldin und Mary Wigman.
The artefacts of the DTK are being entered into a FAUST database with currently 46,906 entries (general collection inventory/film inventory) as well as into an Allegro database with currently 12,114 entries (book inventory) and 1,101 entries (journal and magazine inventory – only the titles).