About Carina Ari

Carina Ari (1897–1970) began dancing as a child at the Royal Opera school of ballet in Stockholm. In the late 1910s, she resigned from her post there and embarked on a freelance career as a dance instructor, choreographer and film worker in Sweden and internationally. Among her assignments, she danced in Mauritz Stiller’s silent movie “Erotikon” and in Rolf De Maré’s Les Ballets Suèdois, and worked as a choreographer for the opera houses in Stockholm and Paris. Carina married Jan Moltzer, a Dutchman who was an heir to the alcohol company Bols. With her husband’s fortune, she established her first foundation 1960 and later a memorial fund and a research library which began activities after her death. The first foundation is now defunct and its funds were transferred to the memorial fund.

Scholarships

Young dancers aged between 15 and 29 are eligible to apply for the Carina Ari Scholarship. Applicants must be Swedish citizens. Foreign nationals may be considered if they have been working in Sweden for at least one year and plan to continue their dance activities in Sweden.

Teachers and choreographers may apply for grants for further studies that the Memorial Fund believes will benefit young dancers.

Carina Ari research grants are awarded to promote scientific and artistic research in the field of dance. The Fund gives priority to the dissemination of research results.

Scholarship holders can also apply for free lodging at the Carina Ari Studio Residence during their studies or research in Paris.

The Carina Ari Library

Founded in 1969, the Carina Ari Library is an extensive reference and research library for dance. Visitors are welcome by appointment. The library has literature on dance from all over the world, in many languages: some 14,000 books, 15,000 periodicals and other archive material. The books in the Carina Ari Library Publications series are available in the library. The collection also comprises Swedish and international dance on film. The catalogue of books, periodicals, images and films is searchable online.

The museum director Bengt Häger was its first librarian and it was he who began organising the collections. The library boasts European original publications dating from the 16th century to 1850, including unique hand-written documents and ballet librettos from that period, along with a large number of bound volumes of programmes for the repertoire of the Ballets Russes in the early 1900s.

The film collection includes famous classical ballets but also non-Western dance and contemporary choreography. Personal interviews and comments on choreographies also feature in the collection. The library owns some of the German dance filmmaker Ulrich Tegeder’s documentation of Indian dance, German dance pioneers such as Harald Kreutzberg, Kurt Jooss and Mary Wigman, and modern choreographers such as Pina Bausch, Johann Kresnik and Reinhild Hoffman.

The Carina Ari Library has received several donations, including some major ones from the writer and dance pedagogue Lilian Karina, and the dance critic Anna Greta Ståhle, or comprising material relating to the choreographer Ivo Cramér, his wife Tyyne Talvo and the Cramér Ballet. Lilian Karina’s donation consists mainly of texts on dance and politics, and on anatomy for dancers.

The Library’s activities are funded by the Carina Ari Memorial Fund in accordance with its objective to support dance research.