Theater, Musical Theater, & Dance

Spanning a wide range of historical eras, geography, and media, NYPL Digital Collections offers drawings, illuminated manuscripts, maps, photographs, posters, prints, rare illustrated books, videos, audio, and more. Encompassing the subject strengths of the vast collections of The Library, these materials represent the applied sciences, fine and decorative arts, history, performing arts, and social sciences.

This digital collection currently consists of images of the Martha Graham Dance Company, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, the American Ballet Theatre, and the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. Other companies will be added as digitization is completed.

The PAE provides information about the Library's unsurpassed collections of scores, sheet music, audio recordings, films, photographs, and other materials. Users can find digitized items from the collections; special Web presentations on topics and collections; articles and biographical essays; finding aids to collections; databases for performing arts resources; information on concerts at the Library; and a special Performing Arts Resource Guide which contains entries for hundreds of Library collections, Web sites, databases and exhibits.

Costumes and accessories spanning five continents and as many centuries.

Images from Historic collections in the Detroit Area, including the Henry Ford Costume Collection.

Numeridanse.tv is a free online dance video library, bringing together thousands of hours of videos, the collections of national and international artists, teaching aids and thousands of written resources to promote an understanding of dance and its history.

The Opera Platform offers an average of one showcase complete opera per month, subtitled in 6 languages. Each showcase is available for 6 months on the site. They also offer highlights from European productions and documentary material about opera.

Shakespeare Uncovered combines history, biography, iconic performances, new analysis, and the personal passions of its celebrated hosts — Ethan Hawke, Jeremy Irons, Derek Jacobi, Trevor Nunn, Joely Richardson, and David Tennant — to tell the stories behind the stories of Shakespeare’s greatest plays. HD-quality streaming versions of the six “Uncovered” episodes can be found, along with character quizzes, two colorful infographics that lay out key plot points from Hamlet, Macbeth and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, as well as links to full broadcast versions of plays from the PBS archive, and lesson plans for teachers who use Shakespeare in the classroom.

This site is devoted to monologues written by Eric Bogosian featured in theatrical productions between 1980 and 2006. Eric Bogosian originally performed these monologues as segments of Off-Broadway solos directed by Jo Bonney. In 2013, he asked friends if they would each take on a monologue to video. A new monologue from the collection “100 (monologues)” published by Theater Communications Group will be posted weekly.