Smithsonian Folklife Festival 2009

Every year the Smithsonian holds a folklife festival at the mall.  It focuses on three different cultures and is a great opportunity to dabble in these cultures' music and foods.  This year the featured cultures were African-American (with a focus on the oral tradition), Central & South American (with an emphasis on music), and Welsh.

For my husband and me, one of the highlights was the Colombian band pictured above, Grupo Cimarron.  In fact, we are planning on going to their concert on July 3.    Here are a few links to their YouTube videos:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wf4Ao4xHeQM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OsviE6VzNo0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hTsdTPNqjs

For more information about the group, see this page:  http://www.festival.si.edu/2009/las_americas/cimarron.aspx

The other group we saw was a Nuyorican group, Viento de Agua.  They are now based in Puerto Rico although they began in New York.

http://www.festival.si.edu/2009/las_americas/viento.aspx

In this video below, you can see people dancing to the music.  This is a more realistic representation as when we heard the band we could not see them because of all the people dancing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvy7N88WZok

These dancers from Austin TX's Puerto Rican Folkloric Dance and Cultural Center are performing the plena, one of the musical styles that Viento de Agua perform in.  For more information about this style, see this link:  http://www.prfdance.org/brochure/plena.htm



Of course, there was a lot more to the festival.  This is the overall introduction to Latin American music:

http://www.festival.si.edu/2009/las_americas/index.aspx

My husband and I have heard the Puerto Rican group Ecos de Borinquen elsewhere, and they are outstanding!  Here is their page at the festival website, complete with videos.

http://www.festival.si.edu/2009/las_americas/index.aspx

The Texmaniacs are always popular:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1S1UFS3Nuo



Mexico was represented as well.  Here are links to YouTube videos of Arpex, a group that will make you think of the harp very very differently!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-ezEBBSle0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYjpHjyras8

Another Mexican group was Mariachi Los Camperos de Nati Cano:
http://www.festival.si.edu/2009/las_americas/camperos.aspx



Los Camperos de Valles' music is also appealing:

http://www.festival.si.edu/2009/las_americas/valles.aspx



As much as I enjoy the music, the folklife festival was not just about Latin American music!  In fact, this summer in EN 202, you may find the African-American oral tradition more interesting.  The man pictured below is New England storyteller Len Cabral, one of the performers we watched.


Here is a link to a video of one of his performances:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhoYeJPNC88

This link will give you an overview of how the festival portrayed the African-American oral tradition.  We spent most of our time at the storytellers' tent, but there was so much more.  I would have liked to have seen the documentary on radio or listened to WPFW's broadcast from the festival.

http://www.festival.si.edu/2009/giving_voice/index.aspx


Since I began this section with Len Cabral's picture, I will talk about his performance first.  He told a number of stories, mainly about trickster figures like Anansi, Coyote, and Monkey. He also encouraged the audience to participate.   For a little information about the trickster, see this article about this type of character (or archetype) from Professor Michael Webster at Grand Valley State University:
http://faculty.gvsu.edu/websterm/Tricksters.htm
Jennifer Smith's article focuses on American tricksters:
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/14919/african_and_native_american_trickster.html?cat=38
If you don't mind a little coarse language in the opening quote, this article by Jo Beth Brixton is useful:  http://ualr.edu/jxbriton/folk.html

However, if you would just like to focus on Anansi, a West African figure who appears in African-American and Caribbean stories, follow this link:  http://www.pantheon.org/articles/a/anansi.html 
If you would like some stories about Anansi, see these links:
http://anansi-web.com/anansi.html
http://www.afro.com/children/myths/wisdom/page1.html
http://www.africa.mrdonn.org/anansi.html

For more information about Coyote the trickster, see Dr. Kathleen L. Nichols' site:
http://members.cox.net/academia/coyote.html
She also includes some stories that feature him.  Here Coyote is stealing fire.



Brer Rabbit is another trickster who appears in storytellers' tales.  Here he is confronting the tar baby. 

http://www.americanfolklore.net/brer-rabbit.html


We also listened to two DC based performers, Christylez and Holly Bass.  Here is a link to a YouTube video of Christylez performing "Mambo Sauce," an ode to a DC condiment:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ko-SpdmThic
The sound on this video of "Wireless Signal" is better and shows that he encouraged audience participation as well:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5o6w6sBk4M

This video is long, but it has Christylez on his human beatbox:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RiowOzPNW-M

Here is a picture of the artist simply playing his guitar.  I was looking for a picture of him playing a mandolin...oh well!



Mustn't forget about Wales!

As you can see from the map above, Wales is a part of Great Britain or the U.K..  The picture above the map shows that Wales can be a very picturesque and rural area.  Of course, some of it is quite urban or suburban.  We also learned from a member of the Centre for Alternative Technology that the Welsh have been very active in the environmental movement, keeping his organization going throughout the 1980s and 1990s to today.

Here is the Smithsonian's overview of Wales:

http://www.festival.si.edu/2009/wales/index.aspx

Although Wales is part of the UK, many people living there speak Welsh as their first language.  Here is some information about this language:

http://www.omniglot.com/writing/welsh.htm

http://www.omniglot.com/language/phrases/welsh.php

http://www.omniglot.com/songs/welsh/index.php

We went to a performance of Welsh singers...and the first performer sang in Welsh!

This singer Cerys Matthews was not at the festival, but I think that her video will give you an idea of what a song in Welsh might sound like:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIKnNJyLFDA

OK, this is the singer we heard, Gareth Bonello.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPJYD1LpkA0

Later on Gai Toms played:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNGundye6RQ

Sian James is more traditional, singing and playing the harp.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DfCA0aP7yQ

Wales is also known for its choral music.  Here is a link to Only Men Aloud, a choir that won the BBC's Last Choir Standing:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4xYIGH-pI8

I didn't get to experience either, but I was told that the Welsh storytelling and cooking demonstrations were fantastic. 

Here are links to videos of storytellers and poets.  The first is Hugh Lupton:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qozzHxn8q9U

The next is David Ponkey retelling part of the Welsh epic, The Tale of Taliesan.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2vyDsWqCM4

Mab Jones is a performance poet.  This video is "Wales in Pictures."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qszEbwULJ7M

Unfortunately, Gillian Clarke is not reading her own poem, but here it is:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0zlUQEWrRE

Below is a picture of Cader Idris, the mountain she mentions in her poem.


We'll finish with some links to Dylan Thomas' poetry since we may read him at the end of our summer session.  He was famous for his readings, so I am going to look for recordings of *him* reading his poems!

The first poem is "In My Craft or Sullen Art."
http://www.naic.edu/~gibson/poems/dthomas1.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIoXV-HXobo

The next is "Do Not Go Gentle Into that Good Night," which we may read.
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15377

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PyWiE1vNSxU

"Fern Hill" is also wonderful, but it is not read by Thomas. 
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15378

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xg-_ah0JfhU

Study Guide for Final (Spring 2008) -- part 5 (folktales)

As much as I love this picture, I need to put up some text. 

We began this unit with the French writer Charles Perrault's "Donkey Skin," an eighteenth-century adaptation of a folktale about a beautiful princess who has to flee her incestuous father and win the heart of a young prince...despite her necessary disguise.  Her fairy godmother, however, helps her do both.  Perrault was a "Modern."  In other words, he believed that people could improve on what the  Greeks and Romans had done.  "Ancients," on the other hand, believed that we could not.  Perrault, by the way, wrote the original Mother Goose tales.  This story is an interesting blend of magic and the mundane, clothing the heroine in radiant dresses and ending with the "moral" that "clear water and brown bread are sufficient nourishment for all young woman provided that they have beautiful clothes" and the "observation"  that "there is not a damsel under the skies who does not imagine herself beautiful and somehow carrying off the honors in the famous beauty contest between Hera, Aphrodite, and Athena" (37). 

The Brothers Grimm, folklorists from 19th century Germany,  collected and edited another version of this story.  It was called "All Kinds of Fur."  It does not have the classical references or the "moral" that Perrault added to his story.  Indeed, the Brothers Grimm's version (that again they collected and edited) spends less time at the father's fabulous palace and at the mother's deathbed and more time on the princess' escape and her efforts to attract the young prince's attention.  (However, as our anthology's editors noted, most of the people whom the brothers interviewed were NOT peasants, and the brothers later edited the stories so that they would be more appropriate for children.  Ah, the 19th century...the age of Bowdler who censored Shakespeare so that his plays could be read aloud in Victorian homes...the age of nationalism.)

I want to give you a link to the Brothers Grimm's "Godfather Death":

http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm044.html

Would you read this story about the poor man who chooses Death (rather than God or the Devil) to be his thirteenth child's godfather and about the young doctor, Death's godchild, who tries to trick his godfather, to your neice or nephew?  What do you find interesting about this story?  What do you think that the German peasants who originally listened to this story found interesting about it?

Orality & Literacy . . . Cross-Posting from EN 201 Blog

Do you remember a time when you could not read? Can you imagine living in a society where most people (or all people) could not read? What would that society's literature be like? And did you know that most languages are oral only, without a written "dialect"?

Walter J. Ong's truly groundbreaking Orality & Literary examines the ways in which society, literature, and knowledge have changed with the rise of literacy and, ultimately, print. This examination is especially pertinent to EN 201 because a number of our readings (Gilgamesh, the Iliad, the Odyssey, Beowulf) began as tales told by storytellers. In fact, Homer, the author of the Iliad & the Odyssey, may have been more than one person, and we do not have a specific author for Beowulf. Up until almost the end of the period that EN 201 covers, works were available in manuscripts; that is, they were individual, handwritten copies, often with abbreviations (to save the scribe's time) and variations from the original. Orality & Literacy is also pertinent to EN 202 as we move onto the unit on tales & folktales, for many of our readings were tales told and then transcribed once folk literature became interesting to the elite.  orWe will not be reading Plato's work in this class, but Father Ong (he was a Jesuit priest) points out that this philosopher was very much a product of the rise of literacy in his precise approach to philosophy and his banning of the poets from his Republic.

These poets, on the other hand, epitomized oral culture with their reliance on performance, set phrases, and copia [fullness of expression]. Performance is more than simply reciting a poem aloud, though. Instead, it involves responding to one's audience and relying on set phrases instead of repeating a set text word for word, for, despite, what we are often told, storytellers and ancient bards did *not* remember their works word for word. In fact, as Orality & Literacy discloses, memory in an oral culture is remarkably pragmatic, changing to suit the needs of the present time. (Father Ong includes an anecdote of an African performing an oral epic for transcription and, in the voice of the epic's hero, spurring the scribe on to "march.") Later poets such as the Romantics are very much products of print culture, for they are concerned with interiority [individual consciousness]. By contrast, characters from oral literature are what Father Ong calls "heavy," individuals who do great deeds but do not have a true interior life. Hmm...I wonder what Christa Wolf would make of this as she has argued that heroic characters are a product of patriarchal society.

Orality & Literacy is also important for what it tells us about genre. As you can imagine, epic is grounded in orality. Even when a highly literature individual like Virgil, Edmund Spenser, or John Milton sat down to write an epic, their work followed conventions that reflected orality (the work's beginning "in media res" or in the middle of things, heroic characters, a reliance on episodes rather than plot). Father Ong notes that Sir Philip Sidney may have revised his Arcadia so that it would flow more smoothly when it was read aloud. And then, with the rise of literacy and print culture, the epic became harder and harder to write. (Hmmm...what did Father Ong make of a modern-day epic like the original Star Wars trilogy? And he *might* have seen it as he lived from 1912 to 2003. In fact, he later wrote on the impact of the internet.) In place of the epic came the novel, a genre whose tighter plotting and "rounder," more individual characters were supported by print and the reader's ability to reread text. Novels written by and for women also reflected the differences between upper-class men's classical education and middle-class individuals' vernacular education. As I have noted, poetry changed as well, becoming more specific and more concerned with individual experience as well. The ballad with its characters and storyline was more of a transitional form. Interestingly, the drama may have always been grounded in literacy as, even in ancient Greece, plays were written down before they were performed. (I'm not sure about Greek actors, but later actors in England were *not* literate, so this topic may bear investigating.)

Orality & Literacy is a difficult book, in part because it touches on so many different aspects of culture and language. It is not limited to English-language or even Western culture as Father Ong brings in examples from South America and Africa, but I found his discussion of Homer's epics to be especially useful. It may be too soon for you to read Orality & Literacy, but I would recommend your reading it if you plan to continue your literary studies or to become a teacher. I wish that I had read this book *before* finishing my dissertation!!