Bring the Performing Arts Home!

Going out these days to see a show is expensive. Maybe you just don't have the time. Have you considered checking out a performance DVD from the library to watch at home in your jammies with your feet up? Most folks know you can borrow blockbusters & fiction movies from the library. Did you know you can also borrow concerts, shows, even ballet?


How about a blast from the past? The Live Aid concerts from July 13, 1985 are available to check out. If you like jazz, I very much enjoyed Icons Among Us: Jazz in the Present Tense, which included performances from contemporary musicians including Anat Cohen, Marco Benevento, Terence Blanchard, Bill Frisell, and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra. Aspiring guitar players, consider It Might Get Loud , featuring The Edge, Jack White, & Jimmy Page. If you're a world music fan, Umm Kulthum: A Voice like Egypt is worth a watch-this informative documentary narrated by Omar Sharif contains clips & background information. Other new music DVD titles in the catalog include: I Can Tell the World: Singing to Heal our Racial Divide; Not the Messiah: He's a Very Naughty Boy (the Monty Python troupe reunites onstage for a one-night-only performance of a musical adaptation of their film Life of Brian); The Clash Live; Neil Young: Heart of Gold; Soul Power, following 1974's most celebrated American R&B acts as they came together with the most renowned musical groups in Southern Africa for a 12-hour, three-night concert held in Kinshasa, Zaire; & When You're Strange: A Film about the Doors.

Prefer dance? See the incomparable Margot Fonteyn in Romeo & Juliet or Mikhail Baryshnikov in The Nutcracker. Check out the tango in Tango Our Dance; enjoy the kids of Mad Hot Ballroom learning dance for the first time; or the inner city youth inventing their own dance in Rize.

The library system can even provide your opera fix when the Santa Fe Opera's season is over! Our catalog includes performances of Gotterdammerung, L'Elisir d'Amore, The Tales of Hoffmann, & more.

Be sure & check our catalog for other concerts, performances, & documentaries about the performing arts!