Library for the Performing Arts Programs

Register From the Horse's Mouth combines dance and theater to tell stories of dancers and dancing. This series of productions is a celebratory multi-disciplinary dance and theater production in which 20-25 performers ranging from dancers, choreographers, and dance professionals of all ages and dance traditions share memories and perform their own movement within an environment of projected images and video segments. For its 25th year celebrating the "Heart and History of Dance," From the Horse…

Register Alexei Ratmansky, former director of the Bolshoi, recently choreographer in residence at American Ballet Theatre, and current choreographer in residence at New York City Ballet, is one of the most important ballet choreographers working today. In her recent book The Boy from Kyiv, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Marina Harss traces his trajectory from his early days in Kyiv to his peripatetic dancing career, through his international breakthrough with The Bright Stream to the p…

Register The Library for the Performing Arts presents an afternoon of dance and discovery in partnership with The Royal Ballet, Dance Theatre of Harlem and the Black British Ballet Project. This special program highlights the little-known but extensive history of Black dancers in ballet in the UK and US and features performances by The Royal Ballet and Dance Theatre of Harlem. The live event by Dance Theatre of Harlem will take place in London with the Royal Ballet, and be livestreamed to the N…

Register Experience the New York Classical Players Chamber Music Series featuring two landmark string quartets. New York Classical Players performs Benjamin Britten's String Quartet No. 1, written during Britten's time in New York at the beginning of World War II. The program pairs this with recitations of poetry and correspondence from the New York Public Library's W. H. Auden archive and concludes with a performance of Dimitri Shostakovitch's tragic war memorial, String Quartet No. 8. The Ne…

Register The Marshall Opera Oral History Project's mission is to collect, preserve, and disseminate the stories of seasoned and distinguished living composers as well as introduce these composers to a new generation of performers. For this program, ten young artists interviewed ten participating composers, and the young artists will perform a selection from one of the composer's operas. SEATING POLICY | Programs are free and open to all, but registration is requested. Check-in line forms 45…

Register Hildegard, Reborn, a new show by Rocky Duval, is a unique look at the life and work of the extraordinary personality, Hildegard von Bingen. Despite the immense challenges of life in the 12th century, von Bingen made her mark as a musical composer, writer, spiritual leader, the first German naturalist scientist, and is today considered a pioneer of feminism and holistic healing. Using personal and professional correspondence as a primary source of inspiration, Hildegard, Reborn elevate…

Register Although over 60 ballets by Balanchine remain in repertory, over 40 years after his death, there are many more that either fell out of repertory during his lifetime or have become little-known rarities since his death. The Library for the Performing Arts has films of “lost” or rare Balanchine ballets—some complete with music, some fragmentary filmed without sound. In this panel discussion, Alastair Macaulay, critic and historian of the performing arts, presents some rarities, ranging f…

Register Culminating an intense semester of research and creative experimentation, students from the New School's College of the Performing Arts, led by acclaimed saxophonist and composer Jane Ira Bloom, present new music collaborative works inspired by and incorporating the Library's archives. The concert will be followed by a Q&A with the four composers to discuss their process from research to performance. Photo Credit: Rebecca Littman SEATING POLICY | Programs are free and open to…

Register The magnetic Clara Bow is remembered by her nickname, “The It Girl," but burned brightly on the screen for only 10 years. Get Your Man (1927) teams her with Charles “Buddy” Rogers, and her other hits include Mantrap (1926), It (1927), Red Hair (1928), as well as the blockbuster aviation drama Wings (1927). Unhappy in sound films, she retired at age 28 in 1933. We open this program with the recently rediscovered Charlie Murray two-reeler The Pill Pounder (’23) with Bow in an early appea…

Register In 1951 Circle in the Square Theatre was founded in an abandoned nightclub in Greenwich Village. It would rise to astounding heights as the driver of the pivotal Off-Broadway Movement. This evening of readings, reflection, discussion and relevant performances focuses on the artistry and determination, the challenges, breakthroughs and relationship its two innovators shared through the beginnings, major achievements and the ongoing impact of the Circle's phenomenal first decade. Onstag…

Before his untimely passing, Talib Rasul Hakim (1940-88) was already becoming a widely influential composer, one who suffused his music for chamber and orchestral forces with intense deliberation, considered improvisations, dynamic rhythmic profiles, and purposeful silences. Hakim saw his compositions as more than just music: he saw music performance as the equivalent to an almost religious awakening. In the 1978 book The Black Composer Speaks, Hakim maintained, “It is hoped that whenever [my] m…

Register Third generation Duncan dancer and Artistic Director of the Isadora Duncan Dance Foundation & Company, Lori Belilove makes public for the first time Isadora Duncan’s early manuscript, “Exercizes for the Dance.” Contrary to myth and popular misconception, Belilove says this document reveals that, Duncan had a coherent technique and guiding principles. Belilove expounds, with demonstration, Duncan’s role as the “Mother of Modern Dance” in the context of this early formative handwritt…

Register For this Dance Historian Is In, former Joffrey Ballet dancer Trinette Singleton presents touchstones from the Joffrey Ballet’s history with works from the repertoire and the Joffrey Methodology. Beginning with the early 1960s following the Joffrey Ballet’s split with Rebecca Harkness, Singleton discusses the events of that first year as the company began to establish itself. Singleton highlights various works that went into the repertoire during that period, along with the 1967 additio…

Register For the past three decades, The League of Professional Theatre Women has partnered with the Library for the Performing Arts to present conversations with prominent women in the theater industry. Each conversation is videorecorded by the Theatre on Film and Tape Archive, and added to its collection for posterity and future research. The League of Professional Theatre Women (a not-for-profit 501(c)(3) organization) has been championing women and leading the gender parity conversation in…

Register Three dance artists, Ishmael Houston-Jones, John Kelly, and Richard Move, are beginning the journey of archiving their work. These three nationally recognized performing arts innovators, participating with eight other artists as part of the part of the Pick Up Performance Co.’s LGBTQ+ Artists Archive Project, will discuss art and life and being queer in a 35+ year roller-coaster context of public social agendas. The LGBTQ+ Artists Archive Project is a response to the challenges of pr…

Register Dance educator and former member of the Eleo Pomare Dance Company, Dyane Harvey Salaam presents this month’s The Dance Historian Is In, along with company members Dr. Carl Paris, PhD and Robin Becker. They will venture into the mind and soul of master creative Eleo Pomare—the man, the artist, and the maker of artists. Born in Colombia, Pomare was a dancer and choreographer who trained with renowned choreographers, including José Limón, and established the Eleo Pomare Dance Company in 1…