Heard about StoryCorps?
This week in New York City, award-winning radio producer David Isay has launched his ambitious and literally history-making project smack-dab in the middle of Grand Central Station--with a cozy trademarked recording booth, legendary oral historian Studs Terkel, a generous Today Show segment, and major funding from all over: The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Corporation for Public Broadcasting; The Rockefeller Foundation; The Carnegie Corporation; and Hebrew National. In the spirit of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) of the 1930s, the "extraordinary stories from ordinary lives" recorded at the StoryBooth will be added to the StoryCorps Archive, housed at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. The archive is sure to become a national treasure.
Here's another one: Tell About the Time...
In a program fetchingly titled Tell About the Time..., professional soprano and music educator Kristina Martin has been getting kids to "ask the questions that never get asked" for years, with only local arts budgets, and little fanfare--unless you count by the young lives and extended families all over Cape Ann and the North Shore (MA) which are inspired and changed by Tell About the Time....
Martin's multidisciplinary program sends whole classfulls of grade schoolers into the field (i.e., home) with tape recorders and notepads, to interview grandparents or other interesting family members, beginning as we all usually do, by asking them to 'tell about the time' that something wonderful/horrible/hilarious happened. Martin's theory is that we all "make" history all the time, telling and retelling favorite family stories--and that this is the stuff of Art, though we may not be aware of it. Becoming aware is the creative part.
Martin's program goes far beyond simple story-telling. Once the "histories" have been gathered, the young artists put their heads together with Martin, their arts teachers and each other. Together they discover ways to illustrate, hone, craft, and formalize their very personal source material, in a genuine artist's process, which produces, at program's end, a work of art -- usually a music drama or "opera"-- that most exalted agglomeration of all the arts into one multi-tiered whole.
In the school districts where Martin's projects are synonymous with creative energy, the first generation of "Timers" is now graduating from college, and they're still wearing their Tell About the Time T-shirts. For more information on how you can bring Tell About the Time... to your school, or community organization, send email with inquiries to InIn, Inc.
In an age when not only funding but energy for the arts has slowed to a grudging trickle, Kristina Martin's Tell About the Time...is a renewable reservoir of fresh ideas and vigorous artistic activity. Check it out.
Ciao for nao!
10/24/2003 02:47:37 PM
