This site investigates what the American Dream has meant over the years to poets, politicians, comedians, musicians, photographers, lawyers, reporters, and others. Students may contribute to the Student Gallery and post their dreams on a Wall of Dreams.
Dance and drumming company The Art of Black Dance and Music, under the guidance of Artistic Director DiAma Battle, performs harvest dances from Guinea, Gambia, Nigeria, and Senegal, and explain the seven principles of Kwanzaa (one for each day of celebration).
This is a collection of 900 boldly colored and graphically diverse posters produced as part of FDR's New Deal. These striking silkscreens, lithographs, and woodcuts were created to publicize health and safety programs; cultural programs including art exhibitions, theatrical, and musical performances; travel and tourism; educational programs; and community activities.
The Carl Van Vechten Photographs Collection at the Library of Congress consists of 1,395 photographs taken by American photographer Carl Van Vechten (1880-1964) between 1932 and 1964. The bulk of the collection consists of portrait photographs of celebrities, including many figures from the Harlem Renaissance. A much smaller portion of the collection is an assortment of American landscapes.
Musical theater book writers, lyricists, and composers have long looked to literature for their inspiration and subject material. In this lesson, students will compare and contrast literary works and the musicals they inspired. Utilizing video clips and Web sites, students will compare specific passages from original texts to moments in Broadway musicals on which they were based, and analyze similarities and differences between the two. As a culminating activity, students will try their hand at adapting and performing a nondramatic narrative, either as a straight play or as a musical number. Designed for immediate use in middle and high school classrooms, these lessons -- which adhere to national learning standards -- contain comprehensive instructions for classroom implementation, downloadable student handouts, links to relevant and dynamic online resources, and suggestions for cross-curricular extensions. Feel free to adapt the lesson plans to meet your students' needs and your own curricular goals.
Introducing students to "the competitive art of performance poetry" builds enthusiasm for literature among even reluctant readers. This article explains how a high school in Cleveland County, North Carolina, held its first poetry slam.
This improv activity introduces the goals and tenets of improv, as well as instructions for facilitating the Vacations Activity where partners practice the "Yes, And" concept while discussing a vacation they took together.
A study of the history of theater art and practice from its origins to the modern period, including its roles in non-Western cultures. Special attention to the relationship between the literary and performative dimensions of drama, and the relationship between drama and its cultural context. Drama combines the literary arts of storytelling and poetry with the world of live performance. As a form of ritual as well as entertainment, drama has served to unite communities and challenge social norms, to vitalize and disturb its audiences. In order to understand this rich art form more fully, we will study and discuss a sampling of plays that exemplify different kinds of dramatic structure; class members will also participate in, attend, and review dramatic performances.
" Drama might be described as a game played with something sacred. It tells stories that go right to the heart of what people believe about themselves. And it is enacted in the moment, which means it has an added layer of interpretive mystery and playfulness, or "theatricality." This course will explore theater and theatricality across periods and cultures, through intensive engagement with texts and with our own readings."
This site presents thousands of images of items selected from the Federal Theatre Project, established during the first term of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt under the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Featured here are stage and costume designs, still photographs, posters, scripts and administrative documents.
This site offers a sampling of traditional Omaha Indian music. The sound recordings include wax cylinder recordings made in the 1890s, as well as songs and spoken-word segments from the 1983 Omaha harvest celebration pow-wow, segments from an interview with an Omaha elder in 1983, songs and speeches from a performance by members of the Hethu'shka Society in 1985, and portions of an interview with an Omaha musician in 1999. Photos, fieldnotes, and more from the 1983 pow-wow are included.
In this lesson, students will discover the meaning of "rhythm," "patterns," "color," and "texture" through the performance and modeled analysis of a class "symphony." Students will also evaluate the impact of each element on the whole work and note personal reactions and connections to this art form. Students will then work in small groups to apply the same elements and personal evaluation and connections to a historical work of visual art. At the end of the lesson, students will reflect on ways these two experiences are similar.
" Unlike film, theater in America does not have a ratings board that censors content. So plays have had more freedom to explore and to transgress normative culture. Yet censorship of the theater has been part of American culture from the beginning, and continues today. How and why does this happen, and who decides whether a play is too dangerous to see or to teach? Are plays dangerous? Sinful? Even demonic? In our seminar, we will study plays that have been censored, either legally or extra-legally (i.e. refused production, closed down during production, denied funding, or taken off school reading lists). We'll look at laws, both national and local, relating to the "obscene", as well as unofficial practices, and think about the way censorship operates in American life now. And of course we will study the offending texts, themselves, to find what is really dangerous about them, for ourselves."
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