Primary Sources: Arts & Theatre

The International Music Scores Library Project (IMSLP) was created in 2006 by Edward W. Guo.

Based in Canada, the project seeks to make public domain musical scores freely available on the internet through the Petrucci Library. The digital library holds 350,000 scores, from works by well-known masters such as Sibelius and Verdi, to exciting new compositions shared by the IMSLP community; the library also holds 40,000 recordings that stream on the site.

IMSLP follows Canadian copyright laws because the two main IMSLP servers are physically hosted in Canada.

Contains five hundred hours of the most important opera performances, captured on video through staged productions, interviews, and documentaries. Selections represent the world’s best performers, conductors, and opera houses and are based on a work’s importance to the operatic canon.

*brings together more than 250 plays, along with related biographical, production, and theatrical information

*begins with the works of Sadakichi Hartmann in the late nineteenth century and progresses to the writings of contemporary playwrights

*collection includes plays by writers of Hawaiian, Indian, Thai, Korean, Persian, and Malaysian ancestry

*streaming video for 37 Shakespeare plays from the BBC
*includes performances by Britain's most distinguished theatrical talent, John Gielgud,Ben Kingsley,Claire Bloom, Anthony Hopkins, Michael York and Derek Jacobi\
*Closed Captioned available

Black Drama, now in its expanded third edition, contains the full text of more than 1,700 plays written from the mid-1800s to the present by more than 200 playwrights from North America, English-speaking Africa, the Caribbean, and other African diaspora countries. Many of the works are rare, hard to find, or out of print. More than 40 percent of the collection consists of previously unpublished plays by writers such as Langston Hughes, Ed Bullins, Willis Richardson, Amiri Baraka, Randolph Edmonds, Zora Neale Hurston, and many others.

*Many of the works are rare, hard to find, or out of print and each play is extensively indexed

Contains five hundred hours of dance productions and documentaries by the most influential performers and companies of the 20th century

Selections cover ballet, tap, jazz, contemporary, experimental, and improvisational dance, as well as forerunners of the forms and the pioneers of modern concert dance.

Browse by composer, choreographer, genre, performer, ensemble, and role.

*Brings together the full text of 200 plays representing the stories and creative energies of American Indian and First Nation playwrights of the twentieth century

*Many of the plays are previously unpublished or hard to find, and they represent a wealth of dramatic material that is often overlooked or inaccessible.

*Together, the plays demonstrate Native theater’s diversity of tribal traditions and approaches to drama—melding conventional dramatic form with ancient storytelling and ritual performance elements, experimenting with traditional ideas of time and narrative, or challenging Western dramatic structure.

*Begins in the early 1930s and progresses through the 20th century

*The collection represents groups across the United States and Canada

Formerly titled North American Theatre Online.

Experience the history of the theatre through 40,000 pages of monumental reference works, encyclopedias, images, flyers, playbills, postcards, scrapbooks, and other resources that offer a glimpse into the productions of the past.

Theatre in Context Collection helps students of theatre, literature, and history draw connections between the people who brought key productions and dramatic stories to life—from the director, to the actor, to the design team. With Theatre in Context Collection, students can understand the historical significance of certain plays, their popularity, and their role in shaping dialogue outside of the world of theatre—creating a complete picture of life on the historical stage.

The collection includes 40,000 pages of monumental reference works, encyclopedias, images, flyers, playbills, postcards, scrapbooks, and other resources, including:

*Essential reference works that catalogue historic performances from the Broadway stage
*Archival playbills that document the major players of the day
*Original designs that allow you to reimagine the set
*Decades worth of periodicals that provide contemporary reactions to performances

*Provides the full text of 1,500 plays written from colonial times to the present by more than 100 women from the United States and Canada

*Almost a quarter of the collection consists of previously unpublished plays

*The database covers the campaign for voting rights, including propaganda plays, as well as the growing crusade for women’s access to higher education and inclusion in various professions

*Search over 30,000 plays written from antiquity to the present and published from 1949 to the present

*Includes mysteries, pageants, plays in verse, puppet performances, radio and television plays, and classic drama

*Search for plays by title; author; subject, style, genre and cast type

*Includes more than 500 hours of streaming video

*Contains more than 250 of the world’s most important plays, together with more than 100 video documentaries

*Users may browse by genre, artist, time period, place, and other fields

*Contains 2,000 full-text plays from the United States and Canada

*At least 550 of the works have never been published before, in any format – including unpublished plays by major writers and Pulitzer Prize winners

*It contains not only the texts themselves, but also hundreds of playbills, posters, and other ephemera