"Between The Devil And The Deep Blue Sea" PREP KIT

Item #1: Visit 1927's website
http://www.19-27.co.uk/
This is a fantastic website. Packed full of innovative graphics, video clips, and silly historical facts this site is a great primer for helping one understand the quirky surrealistic mindset of this theater troop.



Highlights of 1927's Website


"Listen and Hear" section: Features audio recordings of Suzanne Andrade's quirky poems. My favorite was "The Lodger". It features the creepy synchronized monotone voices of the sinster sisters describing the strange smells emanating from their lodger's room as they peep through the keyhole of his door.

"1927 Live section: Watch an extended promotional video featuring some of the best effects from the show.

"Meat The Devil" section: Features three animated shorts focusing on the devil. Watch "The Devil's Children Have the Devil's Luck". I never thought that paper cut outs of children could creep me out as much as the ones in this clip did.

Visit 1927's website: http://www.19-27.co.uk/

Item #2: British 80's culture mini crash course
I often wonder how much funner Monty Python would be if I had grown up in Britain and been familiar with British culture. In this play there are also many allusions to British culture that are unfamiliar to American audiences. One example of this is a skit in the scene "Between" where the sinster twins play an adaptation of "Mallet's Mallet" a game popularized on the 80's children's TV show "Wacaday". Below is a clip from the show featuring the "Mallet's Mallet" game.

Classroom connection lesson:
The juxtaposition of past and present in Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea inspired a multi media lesson for the language arts classroom. This lesson is also an adaptation of an online graphic design contest. The premise is simple. Challenge students to create an advertisement for a modern product that uses the tone, diction, and imagery from a period in history. Here is an example of an image created for the online contest:


see more images from this contest at: http://www.worth1000.com/contest.asp?contest_id=18731&display=photoshop

Who is Laurie Anderson?

On June 6th a group of my literature students from the Academic Magnet High School will have the privilege to meet with Laurie Anderson in a round table discussion about the creative process. After sharing this news with my students their first question to me was, "Who is Laurie Anderson?" My response was to have them carefully study one of Anderson's most popular work, "O, Superman". Instead of immediately showing them the video and asking them to analyze what they saw I instead helped them slowly discover her work by walking them through the following steps:



1. Read and Mark-up Students read and used literary tools to analyze and mark up the text of "O Superman" with interpretive notes.


Student sample of mark up.








2. Listen
Students listened to an audio recording of Anderson's performance of "O Superman". They used their lyric handouts to note where and how Anderson used music and sounds to communicate concepts in the performance.


3. Origins
Exploring the origins of "O Superman" Anderson constructed the song as a cover of the aria "O Souverain, o juge, o père" (O Sovereign, O Judge, O Father) from Jules Massenet's 1885 opera Le Cid. She was moved by the opera's powerful refrain "O Sovereign, O Judge, O Father!" and identified with the huge emotions at its center. She says, "O Souverain' is basically a prayer for help. All is over, finished! My beautiful dreams of glory, my dreams of happiness, have flown away forever!" Students watched the aria and discussed its connections to "O Superman".


4. Watch
Watch a video recording of Anderson's performance of "O Superman"




5. Discuss Students shared their interpretations of the central theme of "O Superman" and explained how the textual, auditory, and visual elements in the work helped present the theme they identified.

Click on the banner below to see a full explanation of this lesson.

The Amistad performance: Two arias identified for the classroom

Last night I saw the dress rehearsal of Amistad. There were two arias from the performance that I believe would work well as pieces for students to analyze in my Language Arts classes.

Aria #1: "I could tell"

The first aria came in the third scene of the first act. The scene is titled "Ankle and Wrist" and it begins with the perimeter of the stage encircled by armed men chanting "Ankle and Wrist". It is in the middle of this that Margru, an African female, sings the aria "I could tell". Her song laments the loss of her babies when she was forced into captivity.

Aria #2: "Skin of Clouds"

This aria is sung by the Goddess of the Waters. It recalls the horrors of the Middle Passage from the point of view of this traditional African Goddess. In an exasperated tone she describes how the humans sweet offerings of "sweets and flowers" have been replaced by the "blood and sinew" of bodies falling through her body of water. The aria ends with the following disturbingly written images of horror and injustice:

I tell the heavens,
I tell the earth,
gods of all the living
and the dead,
the waters will rise up
with the moon
and crush the rims of the earth.
This howling is not of the seas.
This death defiles my body,
dares to take my children,
rip them from the land.
This howling is not of the seas.
It is a madness,
not of nature,
not of the gods,
but of men.

This aria would be an especially powerful addition to a social studies unit on the Middle Passage.

Click the link below to view the opera unit I created for my Honors European Literature students this year.

My Amistad Opera Prep Kit

Pre viewing activities

1. A Crash Course Video Guide To Opera: With the expert help of Barry Goldsmith (affectionately called "Opera Man" by my literature students) I compiled a selection of video clips introducing the five major singing roles in an opera.

http://www.readingart.com/operaorientation.htm

2. Programme Notes: A list of the singing roles and Anthony Davis' statements about the origins of his creation, the Amistad opera. Click here to view the posting.

3. Literary analysis of a key aria in the opera: "Skin of Clouds" (Act II, Scene 7)
I marked up a copy of text for this aria as if it were a poem by using the "literary superpower tools" of diction, symbolism, tone, and allusion.

4. Review background materials:

Poem: "Middle Passage" by Robert Hayden
http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/middle-passage/
Anthony Davis stated that it was this poem by Hayden that first drew his attention to working on the Amistad opera.

During and after the performance
The Critic's Notebook: This is a piece of paper folded into quarters to create a mini notebook where one can scribble notes during and after the performance.

The 2008 Festival Poster, A Literary Analysis

Painting With Verticals Cadence 3
by Bridget Riley

The 2008 festival poster was unveiled on Friday. To be honest my first thought was, "oh no, not an abstract!" As a Language Arts teacher I immediately look for a narrative and this can be difficult if not impossible to see in abstract works. Then, I remembered that I had similar thoughts last year when I saw Chuck Close's portrait of Philip Glass. But my opinion changed when I discovered that a discussion of Chuck Close's "minimalist" process of using just his fingerprints to create a large portrait was an ideal way to introduce students to the concept of Philip Glass' minimalist music. My second pass at the work, however, resulted in a flashback to some 70's wallpaper that I saw as a child. It took the words of my 9 year old daughter, Zoe, to get me to reconsider this work. She looked at it, squinched her face, and proclaimed, "Cool! That looks like woven water in a pond of fishes". Note to self: When an interpretation turns cynical seek a child's opinion.


A Literary Analysis of Art: "How to read a work of art in eight steps"
Over the years I have integrated many works of art into my classroom as tools to teach concepts from my Language Arts curriculum. In that time I have developed a method called "reading a work of art in eight steps" (click here for the handout).

In order to give readers an idea of how this works I have provided my responses to these eight steps when used to analyze this year's festival poster. Keep in mind that this method uses literary tools to analyze a work of art. After I have my interpretation I will see what the experts have to say.

1. Sketch and label the main elements in the work (this slows students down and helps them see more elements in the work). Here's my quick mark up of this work:


2. Analyze the diction of the title:
Students create word webs that examine the connotative and denotative meanings of the words in the title. Just take a look at the image below of a word map for "cadence" created by using the visual thesaurus (http://www.visualthesaurus.com/):

Many of these associated meanings gave movement to the painting and helped me build my interpretation of the work (or at least build on the original interpretation of my daughter's "woven water" interpretation).

Meanings associated with the number 3. I would tell my students that I don't care that the artist probably used the number three in the title because this was the third in a series. Instead I prefer to explore how I can deepen my own analysis of the work.
Three is very important to human beings: three strikes, three pigs, three gods, three bears, three branches of government. Why is this? My answer comes from my hero, the famous mythologist Joseph Cambell who argued that 3 is the solution to the creation of life:
male + female = offspring.
This primal factor hearkens back to the early days when we first crawled out of the "woven water" and crawled around on land.

3. Subject: What is the subject being depicted in this work?
My quick answer: Grass and light woven by water.
(note to self: the water is my protagonist)

4. Characterization: Use the elements of indirect characterization (Speech, Thoughts, Effect on others, Actions, and Looks) to analyze characters and elements in the work.
I have to heavily rely on personification here.
Actions: The water is the protagonist whose flow is being disrupted by the growing grass and intruding light.
The grass and light keep cadence (of three beats perhaps?).
Looks: blue water is hidden behind the other elements.

5. What is the symbolic meaning of elements in the work?
WATER: necessary for life and growth. Commonly appears as a birth or rebirth symbol. Water is used in baptismal services, which solemnizes spiritual births. Similarly, the appearance of rain in a work can suggest a character's spiritual rebirth.
GRASS: food, shelter for fish?

6. Imagery: How do specific elements in the painting appeal to each of the five senses?
blue=water, green=grass, white=light, gray=gray matter of the brain

7. Tone: Identify an adjective that describes the artist's attitude towards the subject of the work.
apathetic / straightforward

8. Plot and theme
Water's flow is disrupted by the elements of earth and sky causing it to weave itself into the fabric of a new diffusion. (I will be working on this as the festival progresses)

Welcome to the Spoleto Teacher Blog

Welcome to the Spoleto Teacher Blog. It is here that I will share with you my exploration of the performances, artists, and creative energy that makes the Spoleto Festival the best comprehensive arts festival in the world. What makes this blog different from others written during the festival is that it is written from the point of view of a classroom teacher searching for new ideas and methods that can be integrated into the classroom curriculum.

The primary purpose of this blog will be a place for me to share with you my experiences as I help pilot the Spoleto Teacher Program for the festival. The goal of the Spoleto Teacher Program is to offer master teachers the unique opportunity to develop classroom lessons through the comprehensive study, attendance, and interpretation of multiple performances at the Spoleto festival. As a teacher with over a decade of experience in public education, I am honored to help launch this program. It will give me the opportunity to feed my undying hunger for knowledge as a lifelong learner. I am also excited because this program is an example of a more genuine method of professional development for classroom teachers. Finally I am honored to be part of a program that encourages educators to integrate what many researchers consider to be the fourth "R" in education. The Arts!

Please return, read, and post your feedback.