Performing Arts

This behind-the-scenes documentary chronicles the collaborative efforts of young composer Peter Lieberson, pianist Peter Serkin, and conductor Seiji Ozawa as they shape Lieberson's first orchestral piece for debut by the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

This contemporary portrait of folkloric traditions in Cuba, focusing on the everyday life of musicians and dancers.

This concert, performed at the elegant 18th-century Dublin residence of the American Ambassador to Ireland, Jean Kennedy Smith, features tenor James W. Flannery, accompanied by pianist William Ransom and harpist Cormac DeBarra, who perform a wide range of Irish favorites, including traditional melodies.

This video follows the world-famous Chicago Children's Choir on their 1996 tour of South Africa and shows how music can convey a message of peace.

This video, which documents one of the oldest cultural festivals in the Western Hemisphere, celebrates the vitality of calypso music today on the island of Barbados.

This video portrays the big-band era in American entertainment, profiling the Lee Williams Band which, from 1938 to 1952, barnstormed throughout the Midwest, bringing Swing music to rural America.

Under the stage name "Le Petomane," Joseph Pujol was the toast of turn-of-the-century Paris. Audiences at the Moulin Rouge where first shocked, then won over, by this tall, mustachioed man in a red velvet suit...a suite with a hole cut in the derriere to release his remarkable talent.

A high school teacher and one of his students don Elizabethan garb and travel back in time to London in 1609 to have lunch with William Shakespeare at the Mermaid Tavern.

Celebrates the traditional art of storytelling through profiles of three storytellers--Judith Black, whose stories explore the Jewish immigrant experience; Michael Cotter, a Minnesota farmer whose stories focus on the extraordinary qualities of ordinary people; and Rex Ellis, whose stories deal with the historical period of enslavement of Afro- Americans.

This video profiles five contemporary American performance poets who have taken their poetry and its celebration of language and creative expression into new public venues.

Scandalize My Name examines the way Red Scare politics were used to impede the emergence of African-Americans as full participants in the political, social, and cultural aspects of postwar American life. Because television was born into this era and adopted the political attitudes of the time, the story is told through the confrontations of African-American performers with blacklists, loyalty oaths, and discrimination in casting.

Featuring poetry performances that often resemble contemporary rap, this film examines an important aspect of Afro-Caribbean cultural heritage.