Library for the Performing Arts Programs

Register What do dance legends Mercedes Ellington, Luana Haraguchi, George Faison, Ken Swift, Ranee Ramaswamy, and Virginia Johnson all have in common? They’ve participated in the Dance Oral History Project! This project by the Jerome Robbins Dance Division captures the vibrant stories of dancers and choreographers of all types of dance! Join us as we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the project, which has documented the voices and legacies of over 700 dance artists. The evening will feature…

Register In this evening performance, Ensemble Π continues their series of newly commissioned works by banned authors and will perform new music based on text from books that were banned in the U.S., including Jacqueline Woodson, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Amanda Gorman, Nikole Hannah-Jones, and Kyle Lukoff and other banned music by Luigi Nono, Arvo Pärt, and Hans Eisler. Ensemble Π is a socially conscious new music group founded in 2002. For the last 20 years, Ensemble Π has presented a Peace Project—…

Register The Library for the Performing Arts hosts the opening for the Pacific Island Film Festival: A Celebration of Dances From the Pacific Islands, a series taking place around the city. In this screening, two short films showcase Pacific Island dance and culture along with a live performance by Dancers Unlimited principal dancer Keala Fung and a panel discussion about the importance of dance, film and art in the indigenous environmental activists space . Screenings include the short films…

For over 50 years, the Theatre Library Association (TLA) has honored significant accomplishments in performing arts research and scholarship with its annual book awards. The Theatre Library Association invites all to the annual presentation of the TLA Book Awards, honoring English-language works of scholarship on live and recorded performance published in 2023. The virtual TLA Book Awards Ceremony will include remarks from this year's winning authors, presentation of the TLA Louis Rachow Distin…

Register Thrills and chills mixed with comedy has been a cinematic staple since movies began – even before with optical toys and magic lantern shows. In the mid-1920’s Hollywood embraced the horror comedy with films about mysterious doings in haunted houses. Features such as The Bat (1926), and The Cat and the Canary (1927) followed, and for this program, we present the recently rediscovered and restored The Gorilla (1927). One of the most popular of the genre, the bravura camerawork and feelin…

Register Celebrating Broadway stories involving Asian, Asian American, or Pacific Islander artists, this event features conversations with Baayork Lee, Lori Tan Chinn, and others and a peek at archival footage from the Billy Rose Theatre Division at the Library for the Performing Arts. SEATING POLICY | Programs are free and open to all, but registration is requested. Check-in line forms 45 minutes before the advertised start time. Registered guests are given priority check-in 15 to 30 minut…

Regsiter An iconic figure in 20th-century dance, Talley Beatty developed a dance style, grounded in the blues aesthetic, that integrated ballet, vernacular, modern, jazz, and African diasporic movement. Through his monumental dance art as a choreographer Talley Beatty helped shape American life. His sense of humor resonated in his choreography, in which his approaches to using movement vocabulary of these different forms was often surprising and amusing. His work also focused on his own life of…

Register The Zodiac Trio celebrates the rich tapestry of human expression through two fundamental forms of music: songs and dances. At its heart, this program pays homage to the timeless allure of these two primal forms of musical expression by compiling works inspired by songs and dances. From George Gershwin's iconic "Porgy and Bess" to the spirited music of the late Peter Schickele, each piece is inspired by one of these basic expressions. Among the highlights of the program is Bela Barto…

Register Choreographer, educator, and curator Sekou McMiller, one of today’s most influential Afro Latin dance artists, takes a look at the Palladium Ballroom and its impact on the creation and proliferation of the Afro Latin dance the “Mambo” aka “Salsa on2.” Joined by elders from the Palladium Era, he revisits the famed ballroom which opened 1946–1966, known for its dancers as well as its music, fueled by weekly dance competitions and band battles. It was New York’s first integrated music…

Register The long-running Off-Broadway musical, Mama, I Want To Sing! and the associated Mama Foundation has introduced many young performers to the New York stage. This panel discussion will look at the 40-year history of the company in New York. SEATING POLICY | Programs are free and open to all, but registration is requested. Check-in line forms 45 minutes before the advertised start time. Registered guests are given priority check-in 15 to 30 minutes before start time. Five minutes b…

Register From the 1950s through the 1970s, the studio of Friedman-Abeles was among the most prolific photographers of Broadway theater. Over the last two decades, the Library has digitized many of their photographs, including, in the past three years, almost all of their color slides. Fans familiar with cast recordings and movie versions can now see (or remember) what the original productions of the so-called golden age of Broadway musical theater looked like on stage. In this panel, long-tim…

Register In this event, decades of tradition, creation, preservation, innovation, and transference of knowledge are on view with West African dance cultural icon Marie Basse-Wiles and her son, Ballroom legend Omari Wiles. A principal with the National Ballet of Senegal from 1973 to 1980, Wiles, after immigrating to America in 1982, founded the Maimouna Keita School of African Dance (MKSAD) in Brooklyn. For 32 years MKSAD has brought together the African diaspora in an annual conference and…

Register Remembered as the “third genius” of silent comedy, Harold Lloyd was first at the box-office in the 1920s. Speedy (1928) is not as well known as Safety Last (1923) or The Freshman (1925), but is equally funny and shows Lloyd at the peak of his cinematic skills. Set in Manhattan, the films boast some still recognizable New York City locations, as well as vanished icons like old Yankee Stadium and Babe Ruth. This was Lloyd’s last silent film, and, along with the previous year’s The Kid Br…

Register Dr. William Schimmel, a classically-trained accordionist, returns classic repertoire he learned in conservatory with an inflection of tango influence. He has performed with virtually every ensemble in New York, including the New York Philharmonic, the Metropolitan Opera, and Jazz at Lincoln Center. Master accordionist Dr. Schimmel returns to our stage, this time in a solo concert of classical favorites played as tangos. Dr. Schimmel’s accomplishments in the tango genre were made famous…

Register Spanish dancer Carmen Dauset "Carmencita" arrived in New York in 1889 and quickly became a sensation in New York society. She was painted by both William Merritt Chase and John Singer Sargeant, and in 1894, she became the first woman and the first dancer to be filmed by Thomas Edison. By the early decades of the 20th century great Spanish and flamenco dancers were performing in the U.S., and some, such as the Cansinos and Aurora Arriaza, settled in the U.S. as teachers and performers.…

Register The Reserve Film and Video Collection hosts the premiere screening of the documentary film You Think You Grown? Dismantling Adultification, which dissects the ways in which this seemingly innocuous rhetorical question has been imposed on Black girls throughout history to control their behavior and diminish their sense of self-worth. Following the film, director Chanel Dupree sits down with Reserve Film and Video Collection specialist Elena Rossi-Snook to discuss the film and the implic…

Register Clarinet and piano musical duo David Gresham and Momoko Gresham present a varied program of music, including a virtuosic work by the Chinese-American composer Roger Zare and sonatas by Gabriel Faure, and Francis Poulenc. The program includes a Sonata for Clarinet and Piano from New York-based composer Amanda Harberg, as well as sheet music preserved in the Johanna Beyer archive at the Library for the Performing Arts. Photo Credit: Photo of Clarinetist David Gresham by Momoko Gresham…

Register After years in vaudeville, Harry Langdon made his movie debut in 1924, and his career blazed brightly until 1928. Forgotten for many years, today’s he’s considered one of the era’s greatest and most original film clowns. The Strong Man (1926) was the second for his own production company, and is his best-known and most successful starring comedy. It’s also the first feature for director Frank Capra, and is the best example of their close collaboration, featuring some of Langdon’s most…

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 composers to discuss their process from research to performance. Photo Credit: Rebecca Littman SEATING POLICY | Programs are free and open to all,…

Register This year, Jerome Robbins Dance Division turns 80 years old! One shining jewel in our crown is our Original Documentations program. Original Documentations is our phrase for the creation of archival film documentation of live dance with multiple cameras for inclusion in our moving image repository. The process requires collaboration between the videographers and the choreographers to create an accurate and professional record of dance history. We have produced thousands of films and v…

Register The Natural History of the American Dancer collective has been largely forgotten, but this improvisational ensemble of women, founded in 1971 by Barbara (Lloyd) Dilley and others, were the first performers at Danspace Project in 1974. Poet Larry Fagin told the New Yorker in 1999, that their performance birthed St. Mark’s Danspace Project in 1974. On the 50th anniversary of Danspace Project, the Library for the Performing Arts celebrates the seminal and iconic dance presenting organiz…

Register Premiering in 1987, Robert Joffrey’s The Nutcracker adopted elements of the classical 19th-century original by Lev Ivanov and Marius Petipa and made it distinctly American, setting the narrative in an American household, complete with vintage toys from Joffrey’s own collection. For this month’s The Dance Historian Is In, former Joffrey Ballet dancer Nicole Duffy speaks about Joffrey’s take on the holiday classic The Nutcracker. Having danced in Robert Joffrey’s production for many year…

Register In this evening event, William Parker, composer, bassist, multi-instrumentalist, and bandleader, performs his compositions with his jazz group. Parker’s large ensemble project involves the collective creative forces of the Little Huey Creative Music Orchestra, which is featured in this program. In the words of Parker, “Huey's Pocket Watch was created for all those who wanted to be poets and were told they needed to get a real job. The H in Huey stands for Hope.  Huey's Pocket Watch is…

Register In this month’s Dance Historian Is In, Nancy Dalva explores Gus Solomons Jr.’s life in dance with photos and video from the Jerome Robbins Dance Division archive. Solomons began his training in modern dance and ballet while studying architecture at MIT. Upon graduating he moved to New York City to dance, including an early stint with Martha Graham’s company, which he left to dance for Merce Cunningham from 1965 to 1968. Cunningham left a lasting influence on Solomons’ life-long choreog…