In this post, the American Folklife Center (AFC) highlights a May 2024 concert performance and oral history interview with the Somapa Thai Dance Company and Orchestra--an ensemble performing traditional music from Thailand, whose members now predominately live in the Washington, DC metropolitan region. The AFC organized Somapa's performance in celebration of Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month and as part of the 2024 Homegrown Concert Series.
This week our Homegrown Plus Premiere series continues with Wuza Wuza, a music and dance performance company featuring Ghanaian artists deeply invested in the expression of African traditions and cultures. Following the standard for this series, this blog post includes an embedded concert video, an interview video, and a set of related links to explore!
Music and dance have such prevalence in American Folklife Center collections that, appropriately, we announce guides to these cultural expressions in the same Folklife Today post. The resource guides “Music in the United States” and “Dance” provide descriptive access to more than 1000 AFC collections. Music and dance are intangible cultural expressions that lend themselves …
We're continuing the Homegrown Plus series with a very special presentation of Samoan dance. In addition to the dance video, the blog features an interview with Eti Eti, one of the members of the dance group. The dance video was created by the Student Association For Fa'asamoa, a program of the Samoan Studies Institute at American Samoa Community College. The Samoan Studies Institute’s mission is to ensure and promote the continuity of Samoan culture, traditions, language, and heritage. Since its inception, SAFF has been active in performing the Siva Samoa (traditional Samoan dance), and in teaching and practicing old Samoan customs. For their Homegrown video, the SAFF dancers performed a 30-minute program of traditional dances in several locales at the college, under the direction of Molitogi Lemana. See the video right here in the blog!
Many divisions of the Library of Congress have fascinating collections that are closely related to folklife and that complement collections in the American Folklife Center. The Recorded Sound Section is a part of the Library that works closely with the American Folklife Center in a variety of important ways. Among their holdings are recordings related …
In this guest post one of our archivists, Valda Morris, discusses the work she’s been doing behind the scenes to process an important collection and help create a finding aid that will assist researchers in discovering the richness of the materials. The American Folklife Center is proud to announce the availability of an online finding …
In the Homegrown Plus series, we present Homegrown concerts that also had accompanying oral history interviews, placing both together in an easy-to-find blog post. (Find the whole series here!) We’re continuing the series with a concert and oral history with the Cambodian-American Heritage Dancers with Chum Ngek Ensemble. Update: in September, 2020, Chum Ngek did …
In the Homegrown Plus series, we present Homegrown concerts that also had accompanying oral history interviews, placing both together in an easy-to-find blog post. (Find the whole series here!) We’re continuing the series with the Sattriya Dance Company with the Dancing Monks of Assam Traditional Dance from Assam, India. This is one of two related …
In the Homegrown Plus series, we present Homegrown concerts that also had accompanying oral history interviews, placing both together in an easy-to-find blog post. (Find the whole series here!) We’re continuing the series with a performance of Kuchipudi dance by the Kalanidhi Dance Company from Maryland and an oral history with their director, Anuradha Nehru. This is …
