Step dance, also known as stepping, is a style of percussive dance where a dancer uses their entire body as an instrument to make rhythms and sounds through a mixture of footsteps, spoken words,and hand claps. Traditionally stepping was rooted and developed after the...
Pamela Badila is a folkteller artist and co-founder, along with her late husband Elombe Badila, of the Diata Diata International Folkloric Theatre. Pamela Badila is a visual and performing artist with a background in education. As part of of Diata Diata...
Maxwell Kofi Donkor is an internationally recognized artist and master cultural educator who is most known for his performances and teaching of African Drumming and Dance, through the Sankofa African Drum and Dance Ensemble. For many decades, he has focused on...
Lalita Ramnauth was born and raised in Guyana where, at a young age, she and her family discovered her natural talent for singing. Having moved to the United States from Guyana in 1992, she eventually relocated to Schenectady. Lalita possesses a large repertoire of...
Musicians Mateo Cano and Maria Puentes Flores are founders of the musical ensemble, Pulso de Barro, or "pulse of the clay," that performs the Son Jarocho music from the Mexican state of Veracruz. Son Jarocho is a highly rhythmic musical style that came about through...
Today, I exited off the Michigan Avenue Exit ramp of Schenectady's I-890, and smiled. Looming in front of me was the mural that was created at the end of June 2024 by Raè Frasier of Art Money, three students enrolled in the Schenectady Job Training Agency's after...
In July 2012, the
New York Folklore
Society was asked to
help document the
second reunion of Camp Woodland
campers—a gathering
of people from
all over the US who
shared the childhood experience of once attending
a children’s camp which had existed
in Phoenicia, New York, from 1939–1962.
As folklorists and educators, we believe the qualitative experiences of individual students are at least as significant as the quantitative data. Working in classrooms with new immigrants, we often work with students who refuse to speak at school—they’re often called “selective mutes.” Arts education is a way to change those behaviors. In the arts, teaching artists like George [Zavala] use words and attach them to something the students are doing—when you say the word “red,” you paint with red. We often see kids start to speak very quickly.
On any week in the 2023-2024 academic year, one can encounter a New York Folklore-sponsored folk arts program within any of the nineteen schools which make up the Schenectady School District. Through grants from the Our Town program of the National Endowment for the...
Established in 1913, YMCA Camp
Chingachgook is one of the oldest
children’s camps in America and is presently
celebrating 100 years of operation.
Over 350,000 children have participated
in Camp Chingachgook programs in the
last century….Today, Chingachgook serves over
10,000 children and adults annually in
year-round programs on Lake George in
the Adirondack Mountains.
On March 2, 2013, New York Folklore Society
hosted its annual conference at ArtsWestchester
in White Plains, NY. The theme centered
on occupational folklore. While the current
economic crisis has drawn much attention to
the need for strategic and sustainable economic
development, this conference was a great opportunity
to highlight folkloric aspects integral
to the economic machine in New York State.
A new musical venture for the Capital District has begun, with support from the New York State Council on the Arts and the Schenectady County Initiative Program (CIP). This innovative musical project is the creation of a Pan-African Orchestra, modeled after a...
DEVESH CHANDRA has been learning the Tabla since the age of 3. He learned Indian Classical Music by accompanying his mother, renowned Sitar exponent Veena Chandra and he continues to perform with her. Their mother and son duo has received national and international...
Urban Explorers is a youth development program by City Lore in New York City that uses the skills of documentation and fieldwork.
This is the transcript from a panel discussion with Indigenous artists about community based teaching and learning that took place during the 2018 Annual Meeting of the American Folklore Society (AFS).