St. George and the Data Dragon: A Digital Assets Mumming Performed by American Folklife Center Staff with Guests Script drawn from multiple plays in the James Madison Carpenter Collection. Compiled by Stephen Winick, with additional material by Stephen Winick, Jennifer Cutting, Theadocia Austen, Hope O’Keeffe, and the company. Digital assets jargon courtesy of Bertram Lyons. …
This post gives general background to our mumming tradition. For more posts with play texts, videos, audio, and scholarship on the background, please visit this link. Every year, in the week before Christmas, staff members of the American Folklife Center put our research and performance skills into play, bringing collections to life in a dramatic …
There are many examples of songs of the winter season available among the online presentations from the American Folklife Center’s archive, but the largest group of these is found in California Gold: Northern California Folk Music from the Thirties, a documentary project of the California Work Projects Administration headed by Sidney Robertson Cowell from 1938 …
In the weeks since The American Folklife Center hosted the Cultural Heritage Archives Symposium at the Library of Congress, we have learned about several collaborations that developed at the event. Fellow panelists are now co-authoring an article, others are creating a consortial grant application, and attendees from the same city who first met at the symposium …
As November is Native American Heritage Month, it seems a good opportunity to talk about some of the services the American Folklife Center provides for American Indians, Alaska Natives, and Native Hawaiians, and for those who wish to learn more about them. The archival collections of the Library of Congress include the largest body of …
Over the years since its founding in 1928 as the Archive of American Folk Song, the American Folklife Center archive has been explored by a wide range of artists seeking inspiration for their own works. Through their creations, AFC archival materials have often found their way into popular culture. From time to time on Folklife …
This time of year in the northern hemisphere, agricultural communities celebrate the last harvest of the growing season. A great deal of work goes into the raising of food for our tables. Before electric refrigerators and local grocery stores, people also needed to work throughout the growing season to preserve food. The completion of that …