Summer Events 2005

During the summer months, the Center discontinues publication of The Belles Lettres and The Figure in the Carpet. The literary calendar will continue to be updated online, and starting in September of 2005 we will resume our regular mailings.

 

NEH Sponsored Summer Jazz Institute Teaching Jazz as American Culture

The Center for the Humanities, supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, will offer a 2005 summer institute for public high school teachers. The theme of the institute is Teaching Jazz as American Culture and will feature an examination of the impact of jazz on literature, on dance, on film (as a subject and on film scoring), and on American social history. The institute will also look at jazz and gender (Why we often think women can't play saxophones, trombones, trumpets, and drums as well as men?) and jazz and race. It is hoped that the institute will offer teachers new and engaging ways to teach popular music as a humanities subject, and it is hoped that this endeavor will lead to new ways to teach the humanities, to new ways to see the humanities as cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary. A number of very good scholars will participate in the institute as instructors and the participating teachers will have the chance to listen to live jazz music every week.

 

Billie Holiday, Downbeat, New York, NY, ca. Feb. 1947. Gottlieb.	Jellyroll Morton, one of the first Southern jazz musicians to land in Chicago.	Local St. Louis jazz musician, Grant Green, 1961.

In addition to studying several scholarly essays, texts, and books, participating teachers will have the opportunity to read several children's stories on the topic of jazz and music. All of the books are available through the rapidly growing Children's Studies section of the Center's library. Beginning in the fall of 2005, the Center will help to sponsor a minor in Children's Studies, and will offer the Children's Studies Library as a major resource for students. Come explore our library downstairs in 101S Old McMillan and check out our online catalog .

Chris Raschka. Charlie Parker Played Be Bop. New York: Orchard Books, 1992.	Roxane Orgill. If I Only Had a Horn: Young Louis Armstrong. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.	Alan Schroeder. Il by Floyd Cooper. Satchmo's Blues. New York: Dell Dragonfly Books, 1996.

Ongoing Institute Happenings:

The Center for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Humanities is now in the third week of the Summer Jazz Institute Teaching Jazz as American Culture. The Institute consists of a mix of classroom lectures and discussions, curriculum planning sessions, film screenings, live music performances, as well as live dance performances. Thirty select high school teachers and several leading professors from various University's have traveled from all over the country to participate in the Summer Jazz Institute. The participants, instructors, and staff have all been working very hard this month to create a successful institute. For more information on the visiting instructors click here.

In conjuction with the NEH Institute, Jazz at the Bistro in St. Louis has arranged for several special summer performances. Every Friday, the participants have a private screening and discussion period with the Bistro's featured performers, then have the option of attending either Friday or Saturday night's performances. The musicians have including jazz guitar greats Bucky Pizzarelli and Pat Martino, followed by the accaimed organ trio OGD in a tribute to Jimmy Smith. Thanks to all at Jazz at the Bistro for being so accomodating!

To further explore the connections between movements in jazz and movements in dance, the participants attended two dance performances by local St. Louis dance companies. The first session featured the tap dance company That Tap Group from Leaping Lizards Performing Arts Studio led by Artistic Director Robin M. Berger. That Tap Group was started in 2001 and teaches the history of tap through dancing, demonstration and dialogue. The group’s main philosophy is to explore rhythm through collaboration and improvisation.

The second dance performance featured dancers from The Slaughter Project, a dance company in residence at COCA directed by Cecil Slaughter. Slaughter is also an artistic director in the Performing Arts Department at Washington University. The Slaughter Project performance explained the influence of jazz music and culture on modern dance choreographers and movement. The session included bibliographical information on leading modern dance choreographers as well as illustrations of the modern dance vocabulary and exerpts of dance from past work.

Dancers from the Slaughter Project perform exerpts from several modern dance pieces.

The dancers introduce themselves, answer questions from the audience, and explain their work.	Director Cecil Slaughter discusses the affects of jazz on modern dance.	Dr. Early, Jian Leng, Cecil Slaughter and several participants talk about the performance.

 

Summer Literary Events

Check out our online literary calendars for events in the St. Louis area.

The Center for the Humanities has a strong commitment to children’s literature and children’s culture; indeed, we aim to serve as a resource for the study of children’s culture in all its forms. Our library collection of children’s literature and books on the practice of writing for children is open to the public. Our comic book collection, numbering over 3,000 items, is available for study and research, and includes extensive children’s as well as adult and non-age specific comics. From this fall, we offer Washington University undergraduates an interdisciplinary Children’s Studies Minor, involving the departments of English, African and Afro-American Studies, Education, History and Psychology. Our writers’ series features a children’s writer annually, and we are exploring the possibility of a children’s film festival next year.

Please send entries for the Young Readers’ Literary Calendar to the same address as the adult calendar, litcalartsci.wustl.edu, or call Amanda Beresford, Calendar editor, at 314-935-5576.

 

What to Expect at our Receptions

All events are free, open to the public, and followed by receptions with refreshments. Copies of the visiting authors' work are available for purchase through the Campus Bookstore. For more information, please call the Center at (314) 935-5576. These are just a few of the spreads from past events. Please join us next time, and enjoy!

 

Toy Exhibition: Fictions of Power: Women in Comics

Our display beginning in March, International Women’s month, looks at the representation of women and power through toys and comic books.

In the pre-feminist era, powerful women were not a noticeable feature of American society. However, they existed in fictionalized form as comic-book heroines. Wonder Woman, Catwoman and their super-sisters fought for truth, justice and the American way alongside, and often better than their male equivalents, without sacrificing glamour. In many ways, they were just guys with breasts and bikinis; fantasy wish-fulfillment's for male readers who got a kick out of images of scantily-clad, strong women – so long as they weren't real.

Post-feminism, some things changed but not others. The comic book super-heroines looked much the same, but the old style glamour girls were joined by a new breed, including Lara Croft and Martha Washington, who were less concerned with maintaining a veneer of femininity than with realistic action in formerly male contexts.

Barbie, the all-American all-purpose female, soon got in on the act, taking on identities of the old super-heroines. Sometimes she was cast as a female version of the men: Super-Woman, Batwoman.

In the real world, role models of powerful women now proliferated, and Barbie dolls took on professional personas to encourage young girls that their dreams of power and agency could one day be reality. Dolls of real personalities serve a similar function. Figures of pornographic actresses, however, are ambiguous: are they in control of their own sexual power, or, like the early comic heroines they so resemble, are they just projections of male fantasies?

The 60s and 70s saw the appearance of “Wimmin’s” comics, a feminist alternative to the traditionally male-dominated comic industry, where women used the medium to voice a demand for power equal to men’s.

 

 

 

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