Holding Court in the Telling of Tales

Lipman, Doug
Improving Your Storytelling: Beyond the Basics for All Who Tell Stories in Work or Play
Atlanta: August House, 1999

I wonder about the first story told on earth. Did it convey a dire need, an imminent danger, or was it intended to make another tribesman laugh? One of the most skilled storytellers I know is my Uncle Raymond. He conveys family history in a way that keeps all the nieces and nephews on edges of their seats. I would like to believe that every family has an elder who holds court at family gatherings. As I read Doug Lipman’s Improving Your Storytelling: Beyond the Basics for All Who Tell Stories in Work or Play, I found myself reflecting on the best experiences I have had with solo artists, comedians, puppeteers, politicians, class clowns, mimes, dancers, collage artists, and relatives raising a glass to family misadventures at gatherings and celebrations. Storytelling is an ancient art that will never be lost. But Lipman, who has been telling stories for over 25 years, focuses in on various formulas and techniques that create a good story.

The Workings of the Imagination: Full of Contradictions

Egan, Kieran, Maureen Stout, and Keiichi Takaya, eds.
Teaching and Learning Outside the Box: Inspiring Imagination Across the Curriculum
New York: Teachers College Press, 2007

Much to the vexation of my friends and family, I love to play devil’s advocate, arguing an opposing side just for the sake of considering it and as a way to expand the dialogue around a topic. (One downside of this is that it can convey false information about my beliefs to those who don’t understand my compulsion.) In Teaching and Learning Outside the Box, a team of editors satisfyingly lays out multiple sides of the conversation on imagination and education from nine voices, while contradicting some of my previous reading and thoughts. For me, it provided a thought provoking and supremely rewarding journey.

LCI’s Professional Development Articles Collection

Photo by Jane Hoffer

Are you curious about how LCI’s practice is related to the ideas of Maxine Greene, John Dewey, Elliot Eisner, and others? Check out the 22 articles that make up the Professional Development Articles Collection of LCI’s Electronic Library.

The PDA Collection is a collection of articles that are key to the Institute’s philosophy. They are available to LCI active participants, when logged in, at www.lcinsitute.org > Resource Center Online > LCI’s Electronic Library > Professional Development Articles Collection. These articles may be downloaded by LCI active participants for personal reference, or photocopied for use in LCI courses and workshops.

The articles included in the PDA Collection should be available to individuals who are not active LCI participants through the services of local public or academic libraries. You can print out a list of these articles.

Trans-Atlantic Music

Wynn, Neil A., ed.
Cross the Water Blues: African American Music in Europe
Mississippi: The University Press, 2007

A unique collection of essays, Cross the Water Blues is a volume of conference proceedings that examine the influence of African American music on European audiences from the late 19th century to the present. Although the contributors range vastly across disciplines, together they offer interpretations of this music from an historical, analytical, social, and philosophical perspective. While the essays focus primarily on the blues, other genres, such as jazz, orchestral music, and the British blues-rock movement are also explored. This book provides an impressive, unique, and at times fascinating examination of cross-cultural relationships in music authored by scholars who are both knowledgeable and engaging.

Getting to Know the Dancer Within

Eichenbaum, Rose.
The Dancer Within: Intimate Conversations with Great Dancers
Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2008

In every performance talk-back I’ve witnessed, participated in, or facilitated, any audience of any age wants to know the same things: (1) How old were you when you started to dance? (2) How old are you now? (3) Are any of you married to each other? While there are infinite variations on these questions, the audience seems to need to get them out of the way before they can move on to deeper aesthetic inquiry.

I used to find it astonishing—“all those workshops on points in space and this is what they want to know,” I’d find myself thinking—and then I found that I, too, wanted to know if Dancer A of Sean Curren’s company learned to flip like that at her mother’s dance studio in Topeka. I began to relax into the dancer’s role as interpreter of the choreographic vision, with personal history past and present a worthy starting point for discussion. Then I started to learn the names of the dancers in the company as faithfully as I learned the choreographer’s and composer’s. It seemed disrespectful not too.

Recent Acquisitions to the Heckscher Foundation Resource Center @ Lincoln Center Institute

More than 10,000 and growing! Click here to see a list of resources added to our collection during June.

September Highlight
Aliki
My Five Senses
New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2000

My Five Senses introduces children to sound, taste, smell, sight, and touch and explores the ways the senses often work together to discover something new. “Sometimes I use more of one sense and less of another. But each sense is very important to me, because it makes me aware. To be aware is to see all there is to see…” (26). My Five Senses is perfect for the early classroom speaking directly to a child’s curiosity about how the world works.

Interested in learning more about the human senses? Access the BBC’s interactive module on the Human Body and the Mind.

Click here to purchase this book.

Click here to find a library near you that owns this book.

Authorized to borrow resources from LCI’s Resource Center? Click here to send an e-mail request (please include your name, address, relationship to the Institute, and title of the resource you would like to borrow).

Creative Courage and Imaginative Learning: New Perspectives on How Psychology and Philosophy Intersect in My Work at LCI

May, Rollo
The Courage to Create
New York: W.W. Norton, 1994

“Creativity is the encounter of the intensively conscious human being with his or her world,” (54). Rollo May holds that creativity’s central importance is it’s bringing something new into being. I like this definition, and finding it in May’s text showed me an example of where May’s musings on “the courage to create” may intersect with my own work as a teaching artist thinking about imaginative teaching and learning at Lincoln Center Institute. However, as an artist reading this book I feel conflicted about some of what May is stating and don’t agree with his generalizations. Ultimately, this book will be less useful to me as a “how to” for viewing and studying my own practice of aesthetic education and will be most useful to me as an interesting study of the possible intersection between May’s approach to psychoanalysis and imagination as we think about it at LCI.

The “Other” Art at Lincoln Center

Riley, Charles A.
Art at Lincoln Center: The Public Art and List Print and Poster Collections
Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2009

We all know of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, but have you ever experienced Lincoln Center for the Visual Arts? If not, I recommend a tour of the campus, where to the surprise and delight of many, master works of sculptors and painters have become part of the aesthetic identity of this world renowned cultural center. As Charles A. Riley, author of Art at Lincoln Center, so aptly points out, “Most Lincoln Center patrons are probably so used to dashing by these sculptures and paintings on the way to an eight o’clock curtain that they are barely aware of the gems around them” (7). I sheepishly admit that I am one of these aforementioned patrons who, minutes after rushing by the magnificent Chagalls in the grand foyer at the Metropolitan Opera, is admiring the inspired visual aspects of the opera that I am viewing.

Certainly, we all experience the wonders of costumes and sets that are integrated into theater, ballet, and opera. Even the lighting during a concert may add a layer of meaning to the music. But the inventive collaborative aesthetic of the performances that are presented year round in the Lincoln Center theaters is also present in the non-performing works of art that we can view before or after the event. This art is as integral to the campus at Lincoln Center as are the sets, costumes, and lighting to the performances. Art at Lincoln Center reveals the vision and history of the collaboration between the artists and the curators as it takes readers on a tour of the major artworks.

Advice to Young Black Actors in the Time of Obama

Ward, Douglas Turner, with Gus Edwards
Advice to a Young Black Actor
Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2004

“How can I get started in theater?” As a theater educator, this question always finds me somewhat unprepared. I never thought about art as something that happens because of good planning; for me it is more of a spontaneous happening. But people come to embrace the craft in a number of ways. Some come with determination and a lot of training, some happen into a rehearsal hall one day. Sometimes it is as simple as who you know. The amazing Douglas Turner Ward provides counsel on this and other matters in the book Advice to a Young Black Actor, breaking down complex issues into the simplest of terms.

Utopian Education: A Glimpse of What It Might Look Like

Whitin, Phyllis, and David J. Whitin
Inquiry at the Window: Pursuing the Wonders of Learners
Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1997

I have a head full of images of the perfect classroom and they all have a central theme: students wanting to know more. The aim of stimulating curiosity has driven much of my teaching and growth as an educator. The art of developing and framing questions, and the centrality of this practice to encouragement for further learning and facilitation of deeper connections has also been a focus of the evolving practice at Lincoln Center Institute. Curiosity and questioning, no doubt, drive both learning and teaching. Inquiry at the Window offers some great insights into the role of inquiry through its narrative description of magical moments in education in a fourth grade classroom.