National Tour Research Articles

Anatomy of a Quilt: The Gee's Bend Freedom Quilting Bee

The incredible quilts of Gee's Bend, Alabama, true masterpieces of American folk art with their jazzy geometry, on national tour following their initial display at Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, are finally receiving recognition they have long deserved. Michael Kimmelman's ebullient review in New York Times captured for all world to read bold, independent spirit of this distinctive art form. (1) Kimmelman said little, however, about artists and community that produced these gorgeous tapestries--especially during quilters' most audacious and productive years between 1930 and 1970--except for noting that quilters are descendants of slaves who worked local Pettway plantation that dominated landscape. I'd like to add my experience to story. In 1967, with my usual sense of poor timing, I left New York City and went south to join tail end of Civil Rights movement, which by that time had moved north--to Chicago, Detroit, and New York. The remnant of the movement in and around Selma, Alabama, had, of necessity, turned to Black Power, making white civil rights workers like myself redundant and anachronistic. But rather than being sent home (where I belonged!) I was assigned to Wilcox County, Alabama, as a field staffworker for Southern Rural Research Project, a SNCC-affiliated legal rights project, to help conduct a large and detailed survey of almost one thousand African American farm households representing five thousand people. My research was part of a larger project detailing working, living, and health conditions of tenant farmers and sharecroppers in eight so-called Black Belt counties of southwest Alabama. We, dozen or so quickly assembled and rapidly trained field staff, combed more remote corners of southwest Alabama, where we went, normally in twos (one white worker, one black), door to door and shack to shack with our sometimes invasive questions. We asked about access to food and healthcare, and about family composition and family illnesses and disabilities, relations with land owners, annual earnings, and access to federal farm subsidies, cotton allotments, and small loans. We uncovered a ravaged population often living on edges of starvation and largely dependent for survival on capricious federal farm programs, families who went hungry during lean winter and early spring months with meals comprised of starch, sugar, and fat--that is, grits, biscuits, cornbread, peanut butter, fried bologna, fatback, Kool-Aid, and coffee. Were it not for seasonal mustard and collard greens, and hunted meat--squirrels and possums--it is hard to imagine how so many of them managed to live at all. With help of two visiting civil rights physicians, late Charlie Wheeler of Charlotte, North Carolina, and Robert Coles of Harvard, we were able to identify signs and symptoms of malnutrition and vitamin deficiencies, including childhood rickets, pellagra, and night blindness. The average African American woman in a farm household in southwest Alabama had experienced seven pregnancies by age of forty and at least one miscarriage, stillbirth, and two infant or early childhood mortalities. It was portrait of an endangered population in a Third World nation. The misery we encountered then was largely result of corrupt land owners whose power was based on debt peonage, forged signatures on government subsidy checks, theft, and forced labor with tacit support of local representatives of U.S. Department of Agriculture. Cotton allotment cheeks for black tenant farmers were in many cases signed over to landlord because of outstanding debts, often for basic food commodities, household materials, seeds, and farm tools sold at hugely inflated prices and documented by fraudulently skewed bookkeeping at landlord's company store. …

An Analysis of Regional Positioning and Its Associated Food Images in French Tourism Regional Brochures

Summary The image of France has often been associated with that of food and wines and images of food products, vineyards and restaurants have traditionally dominated national and regional promotional strategies and tour operators' brochures alike. Indeed, food represents a powerful eye-catcher and a strong symbol of quality of life and authenticity, as a result it has represented an important theme used in advertisements. However, the food theme is in fact multiple and can also be used to portray symbols of cultural identify, communication and status. Therefore, the present study first aims at identifying the different food images that can be used by tourism advertisers in their promotional material. Secondly the study aims at investigating how different food images can be used for specific destinations' positioning strategies. The research uses a content analysis to identify the types of food images used in 19 French regional tourism brochures. Results show that country products/dishes and raw/natural products dominate food images followed by wine and vineyards images. Images of food producers, chefs, restaurants and the presence of people in the pictures on the other side are underrepresented. Parallels between the categories of food images used in brochures and the corresponding positioning strategies chosen by the regions are not very strong. Nevertheless, the study indicates that regions that position themselves on the traditional/rural/authentic theme use mostly images of raw products, country products and market scenes while only a few regions position themselves on the gastronomy dimension. In other terms, the cultural dimension of food as an identity marker for the regions is its principal use, and images of food associated to communicating/sharing or to status/lifestyle statements are rarely used in French regional brochures.

A Musical Education: Lee Morgan and the Philadelphia Jazz Scene of the 1950s

When Michael LaVoe observed Lee Morgan, a fellow freshman at Philadelphia's Mastbaum Vocational Technical High School, playing trumpet with members of the school's dance band in the first days of school in September 1953, he could not believe his ears. Morgan, who had just turned fifteen years old the previous July, had remarkable facility on his instrument and displayed a sophisticated understanding of music for someone so young. Other members of the ensemble, some of whom al­ ready had three years of musical training and performing experience in the school's vocational music program, experienced similar feelings of dis­ belief when they heard the newcomer's precocious ability. Lee Morgan had successfully auditioned into Mastbaum's music program, the strongest of its kind in Philadelphia from the 1930s through the 1960s, and demon­ strated a rare ability that begged the title prodigy. Almost exactly three years later, in November of 1956, Lee Morgan, now a member of the Dizzy Gillespie orchestra, elicited a similar response at the professional level after the band's New York opening at Birdland. Word spread, and as the Gillespie band embarked on its national tour, au­ diences and critics nationwide took notice of the young soloist featured on what was often the leader's showcase number: A in Tunisia. Nat Hentoff caught the band on their return to New York from the Midwest in 1957. My back was to the bandstand as the band started Night in Tunisia. Suddenly, a trumpet soared out of the band into a break that was so vividly brilliant and electrifying that all conversation in the room stopped and those of us who were gesturing were frozen with hands outstretched. After the first thunderclap impact, I turned and saw that the trumpeter was the very young sideman from Philadelphia, Lee Morgan. (Hentoff 1965)

Josh White: Society Blues

A gifted and charismatic entertainer, Josh White (1914-1969) was one of the best-known folk-blues artists of his day. In the early 1960s, one survey ranked him as America's third most popular male folksinger, surpassed only by Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan. He appeared on national television, performed at numerous college concerts and club dates, and released several dozen albums - all featuring his distinctive guitar style, supple voice and unique showmanship. In this biography, Elijah Wald traces White's journey from the coloured side of Greenville, South Carolina, to the heights of Manhattan cafe society. He explores the complexities of White's music, his struggles with discrimination and stereotypes, his political involvements, and his sometimes raucous personal life. White was always drawn to music and by the age of ten was leading blind blues and gospel singers around the South. By the 1930s he had become a blues recording star himself, and in the 1940s he was discovered by a white audience and regularly appeared in New York cabarets alongside such artists as Billie Holiday. He also became an outspoken proponent of civil rights and frequently appeared at rallies and benefits, singing songs against segregation. He was one of the few black figures to star on Broadway and appear in Hollywood films, the only black solo performer to have his own national tour, and a daring sex symbol with adoring fans on both sides of the colour line. In the 1950s, White won acclaim in Europe, then saw his achievements collapse in the polarized political ferment of the McCarthy era. Attempting to strike a balance that would keep his career afloat, he instead succeeded in alienating both political camps. Although still a star in England, he became the forgotten man at home until his resurrection in the folk revival.

Role of Temporal Lobe in Autism

Regional cerebral blood flow was measured with positron emission tomography (PET) in 21 school-aged children with primary autism and in 10 nonautistic children with idiopathic mental retardation, at the Institut National de la Sante, Tours, and Hopital La Salpetriere, Paris, France.

Don DeLillo and the Myth of the Author–Recluse

The subtly entrapping nature of celebrity has been a common theme of Don DeLillo's work since his third novel, Great Jones Street (1973), narrated by a twenty-six-year-old rock star, Bucky Wunderlick, who tires of fame in the middle of a national tour and goes to ground in a seedy New York bedsitter. This theme, however, finds its fullest expression in DeLillo's 1991 novel Mao II, where it is linked to a specific concern which may be closer to home for him – the paradoxical fascination with author–recluses in American celebrity culture. DeLillo, who came to reluctant terms with major league celebrity from the mid-1980s onwards after a long period of respectful reviews and polite notices, has praised reclusive authors for “refusing to become part of the all-incorporating treadmill of consumption and disposal,” in spite of the “automatic mechanism” of the media which tries “to absorb certain such reluctant entities into the weave.” Mao II is about what happens when this absorption takes place, and whether or not this wholly devalues the author's own tactics of silence and renunciation.

Finding a place for Hanya Holm

Standard histories of modern dance have tended to regard Hanya Holm as an extraneous figure, crediting her with having adapted German methods of dance training for American educational consumption and for influencing an array of students who became famous. History texts, which group Holm with other artists who taught at the Bennington School of the Dance (1934-1942), marginalize her for the fluid scenario of her career after Bennington. Holm's complex career is intriguing for what it suggests about issues of nationalism, regionalism, elitism, and popular culture in modern dance historical orthodoxy. Holm can be seen as having had four choreographic careers. From 1935 to 1944, while she maintained a company, first under Mary Wigman's name and then her own, she presented seasons in New York and undertook five national tours, winning the New York Times Award for best Group Choreography in 1937 with Trend and the Dance Magazine Award for Best Group Choreography in 1939 with Tragic Exodus. In Holm's second choreographic career, which began in 1941, she made

Hair in African Art and Culture

“Hair in African Art and Culture” is a traveling exhibition organized by the Museum for African Art, New York, with support from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Rockefeller Foundation. Guest curator Roy Sieber and the museum's Director of Exhibitions, Frank Herreman, have brought together more than 170 objects from collections around the world to illustrate the significance of hair in African society. After its initial presentation in New York (February 9-May 28, 2000), the exhibition began a national tour, whose venues include the Apex Museum, Atlanta (June 25-August 20, 2000); the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Stanford University (October 4-December 31, 2000); the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, Detroit (February 8-April 15, 2001); and the California African-American Museum, Los Angeles (May 26-August 15, 2001). The tour is sponsored by the Colgate-Palmolive Company. The exhibition catalogue, edited by Sieber and Herreman, includes essays by eleven a...

Westray: The Long Way Home

There are times when a confluence of circumstance and personality come together to make a hitherto unthought of partnership possible. In 1994, such a confluence led to a unique collaboration between the United Steelworkers of America and Two Planks and a Passion Theatre that lasted for the next two years and led to a national tour of a Canadian work developed by the artistic directors of the company.

Life Beyond the Premiere: Process and Purpose at Tapestry Music Theatre

When Elsewhereless, the new opera by Atom Egoyan and Rodney Sharman (originally presented at Toronto’s Buddies in Bad Times Theatre in April-May 1998), reopened at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa in July, it was said to be the first Canadian opera to be performed in the Centre since the 1960s. The same production of Elsewhereless will also be presented in Vancouver in early 1999 and is scheduled for several European festivals. At a time when new operas and music theatre works all too easily disappear from view after their premieres, the already assured life of this work is salutary. While Elsewhereless undoubtedly owes much to the renown of its librettist and director (Egoyan) and its composer (Sharman), its continuing stage-life is very much part of the avowed strategy of Tapestry Music Theatre, which nurtured its development along with Vancouver New Music. Since its founding in 1985 (as a transformation of Tapestry Singers), Tapestry Music Theatre has committed itself not only to the development of new Canadian music theatre and opera, but also to its continued performance life beyond the premiere. Thus its day-to-day focus is divided between work in development, new work in current production, and continuing production of earlier work. One of its outstanding successes, Nigredo Hotel by Nic Gotham and Ann-Marie MacDonald, was first presented by Tapestry and Tarragon in Toronto in 1992 and subsequently toured to Britain in 1993, and then to Victoria and Vancouver, before returning to Toronto in 1995. Tapestry premiered Theresa Tova’s Still the Night in Toronto in 1996, launched its first national tour in Calgary in 1997 and has plans for a further tour in 1999. In May 1998, during the final week of the Toronto run of Elsewhereless, with the phone ringing incessantly, Harry Lane talked to Tapestry’s general manager and producer, Claire Hopkinson, and its artistic director, Wayne Strongman, about their mandate and their process. The interview was transcribed by Christopher Tracy.

The "Ozification" of American Children's Fantasy Films: The Blue Bird, Alice in Wonderland , and Jumanji

The "Ozification" of American Children's Fantasy Films:The Blue Bird, Alice in Wonderland, and Jumanji Joel D. Chaston (bio) Recently a national touring company presented a stage version of L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) at the Juanita K. Hammons Center for the Performing Arts in Springfield, Missouri, where I live, a surprising event since the town's major community theater had performed the same play a few months before. Despite a long-standing interest in Baum's novel, however, I did not go to either production. I had already attended the play a couple of years before in Toronto. More to the point, since all of these productions were based on the script of the 1939 MGM film version of The Wizard of Oz, I had seen it done better on television virtually every year since I was a child.1 That new dramatizations of The Wizard of Oz should be inspired by the MGM film instead of Baum's book will not surprise anyone who has ever tried to teach the latter. Students often mistakenly refer to the film as the "original" text and think of the novel as the "adaptation." The popularity of the film, which Jonathan Fricke suggests is "the most widely seen and most familiar film in history," has, for many viewers, eclipsed the work that inspired it (241). Indeed, Carol Billman's article on The Wizard of Oz, "I've Seen the Movie," argues that the film "transcends its original in American popular culture," producing a vision that "overlays and conditions readers' responses to L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" (100). As a result, many subsequent literary sequels and film adaptations draw on the 1939 film. While The Wonderful Wizard of Oz has inspired a multitude of sequels, several recent novels about Oz, including Geoff Ryman's Was (1992), Thomas L. Tedrow's Dorothy: Return to Oz (1993), and Gregory Maguire's Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (1995), incorporate elements of the MGM film into their vision of Oz.2 Filmation's Journey Back to Oz (1971), ABC's television series The Wizard of Oz (1990-91, recently rebroadcast on cable by Home Box Office), and Disney's Return to Oz (1985) are, in reality, sequels to the MGM film and not the novel.3 On 22 November 1995, the movie script and its songs were reincarnated as Turner Network Television's The Wizard of Oz in Concert: Dreams Can Come True (directed by Louis J. Horvitz and featuring Jewel as Dorothy, Joel Grey as the Wizard, and Natalie Cole as Glinda), and in 1996 the film metamorphosed into CBS's The Wizard of Oz on Ice, with Olympic gold medalists Oksana Baiul as Dorothy and Victor Petrenko as the Scarecrow.4 Perhaps the greatest influence of the film version of The Wizard of Oz has been on other non-Oz motion pictures. In Over the Rainbow: The Wizard of Oz as a Secular Myth of America (1991), Paul Nathanson notes some of the many allusions to MGM's Oz in films as diverse as Labyrinth (1986), Good Morning, Vietnam (1987), and Made in Heaven (1987), to which one could add more recent references in Wild at Heart (1990), Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991), My Own Private Idaho (1991), Children of the Corn II: The Final Sacrifice (1993), Rockadoodle (1994), and Twister (1996). As Alan C. Elms has noted in a 1983 article in The Baum Bugle, a number of science fiction films, in particular, seem to have borrowed their plots from MGM's Oz, including Star Wars (1977), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Time Bandits (1981), and E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982).5 The overpowering impact of The Wizard of Oz on film adaptations of other children's fantasy novels, however, has only been treated superficially. Since the 1939 release of the MGM film, a number of filmmakers have attempted to recreate its popularity (and eventual monetary success) when adapting other works of fantasy to the screen. In creating these adaptations, Hollywood has recast sometimes very different literary fantasies as new versions of...

The Queer Pleasures of Mary Martin and Broadway: The Sound of Music as a Lesbian Musical

By the late 1950s, Mary Martin was a famous, powerful Broadway star. After stealing the show singing and doing a "striptease" to "My Heart Belongs to Daddy" in Leave It to Me in 1938, she solidified her stardom as the goddess come-to-life in One Touch of Venus (1943), charmed audiences all over the country in the national tour of Annie Get Your Gun (1947), and brought the house down for a record-setting 1,925 performances in South Pacific (1949). She played a brief but memorable run in Peter Pan (1954), and later filmed the performance for television, permanently laminating her star identity onto the role of the boy who wouldn't grow up. Martin also turned down some notable parts, including the leads in Funny Girl, My Fair Lady, Kiss Me Kate, and Oklahoma. But Martin actively pursued, financially backed, and created another role which to this day is associated with her - Maria in The Sound of Music.

Meetings and Courses

Helping to Heal — A National Touring Exhibition about Arts for Health 14 April – 14 May, 1995 London Further details: Sheeran Lock Fine Art Consultants. Tel. 01422 844642

Impertinent Women and Powerful Men: A Long View of Burlesque

HORRIBLE PRETTINESS BEGINS WITH THE ARRIVAL IN NEW YORK IN i868 OF Lydia Thompson and her company British blondes. women were of the purest type, saucy, blue-eyed, golden-haired girls in breeches roles and pink tights (14). They brought from the London Music Hall a scripted satire called Ixion about divorce among the British upper class, and they added mix flimflam, songs, cheeky jokes, the Parisian can can, a fashion called the grecian bend, and enough tongue-in-cheek double entendres to entertain war-weary audiences. On opening night, all 2,265 seats in Wood's theater sold out. blondes performed in Sinbad the Sailor, The Ungenial Genii, The Cabin Boy, and Dion Boucicault's The Octaroon, in which Lydia Thompson herself delivered a speech about the new woman. company brought in $372,500 in New York, and then Thompson took the show on national tour where the spectacle naked legs brought thundering encores and huge box office receipts. Nude drama sorts had been introduced to the New York stage at least twenty-five years earlier in tableaux vivant, what audiences called living statues. Adah Isaacs Menken electrified audiences in 1863 with a version

Rill Erosion of a Vertisol with Extended Time Since Tillage

Reduced tillage and no-tillage cropping systems have periods of time lasting several months or years between tillage operations. If erosion is to be predicted for these systems, then there is a need to characterize the effects of such extended time since tillage on rill erodibility. Most erosion studies have been conducted on freshly tilled or disturbed soils which may respond differently to erosive forces than undisturbed soils. The objective of this study was to evaluate the effects of extended time since tillage on critical shear stress and rill erodibility for a Heiden vertisol under corn production. Rainfall simulation studies were conducted in March and August, before corn planting and after corn harvest, over a period of two years with time since tillage ranging from 7 to 624 days. Tests were replicated four times across a slope of 4 to 6%. The resulting data expands erosion information on one site included in the 1987 national tour under the Water Erosion Prediction Project (WEPP) studies. As time since tillage increased, the flow width in rills increased, and the hydraulic radius and hydraulic shear converged to more stable values. Three soil strength measurements, cumulative rainfall, or cumulative rainfall energy were not consistently correlated to rill erosion parameters and did not seem to be potentially useful for future predictions. Different approaches may be needed to relate repetitive wetting and drying cycles to measured soil properties and erodibility. Critical shear stress ranged from 0.3 to 2.47 Pa which indicated that rill erosion started at lower flow velocities or shallower flow depths than characterized by the 1987 WEPP data. Rill erodibility was found to be highly variable (0.73 – 16.31 ¥ 103 s/m) on freshly tilled treatments, but variability decreased significantly for 89 days or more time since tillage, stabilizing in the range of 2 – 5 ¥ 103 s/m. Erosion should be more accurately predictable on sites with extended time since tillage, for the soil in this study.

News from the Great Wide World: Duke Ellington, Count Basie, and Black Popular Music, 1927–1943

In numerous essays Ralph Ellison highlighted the special role that musicians and big swing bands played in defining a new future for black America from the late 1920s through World War II. Led by sophisticated and glamorous Dukes and Counts, big swing bands represented a flowering of black folk culture in the new urban centers of the black migration. With New York City acting as their national capital, moreover, these bands acted as traveling representatives of the modern city as they conducted national tours, produced endless recordings, and performed live on radio for a new mass audience for jazz music. While their travels took them through the indignities of a segregated society, black bands offered release from the Depression and expressed heightened expectations for people whose lives were still bound by racial restraints. As Ellison recognized, they provided ecstasy and communion to their many followers, performed in secular rituals on the dance floor. As such, the most famous bands of the 1930s and 1940s held out an urban model of freedom that climaxed with the renewed mass migrations to Northern cities during World War II. In the big band form, folk culture and modern life were united in new ways to offer optimism tinged by hard reality in the middle of the Depression. In the process, black entertainers stood as heroes.

The Group Tour Industry:

Information in the National Tour Association (NTA) member directory was analyzed to describe the business activities of NTA members. Results showed that the senior citizen market accounted for over 50% of the business using the motorcoach as the mode of transportations. Tour operators relied heavily on three-star hotels to accommodate their clients (52.7% of usage) but four-star hotels also had a surprisingly strong usage rate of 31.5%. The emergence of tour products to serve a variety of markets in addition to senior citizens was discussed along with the implications of the aging U.S. population on the motorcoach industry.

1992-93 NTA Tour Supplier/ DMO Member Directory. National Tour Association, P.O. Box 3071, Lexington, KY 40596-3071. June 1992. 707p

1992-93 NTA Tour Supplier/ DMO Member Directory. National Tour Association, P.O. Box 3071, Lexington, KY 40596-3071. June 1992. 707p

Jeremy Bentham and Enoch Wines Discuss the Privatization of Corrections

Editor's note: Jeremy Bentham wrote the letters which constitute the Panopticon Papers while in Russia in 1787. The penitentiary model described in these letters provided the basis of a proposal for which he vigorously lobbied in England. He committed significant amounts of his own effort and money to the panopticon plan, although ultimately without success in his native country. The material reproduced below comes from letters 9, 10, and 12, and addresses a number of issues that are at the heart of the modern privatization debate. Enoch Wines was appointed secretary of the New York Prison Associa tion in 1862. Although initially not as experienced as many of his co-workers in the Association, he soon became an important figure in American penal reform. His national prison tour with Theodore Dwight in the 1860s produced the most important correctional assessment since John Howard's E uropean survey in the 1770s. The observations included in this article thus derived from his wide-ranging examination of the nation's prison system.

The Group Tour Operator: An Analysis of NTA Membership

The National Tour Association (NTA) is the largest trade association in the escorted group tour industry. Members of this association represent a major share of the group motorcoach travel business...