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Just Don't Panic
Audiences in Morgantown, Charleston, and the Martinsburg area
enjoyed a rare theatrical experience in October when the
E.T.A. Hoffman Theater company
of Bamberg, Germany, presented Just Don't Panic: A Century
is Over Before You Know It as part of a cultural
exchange with the WVU Division of Theatre and Dance and the
WVU Foreign Languages Department.
The multimedia theatrical presentation featured 12 German performers singing and dancing their way through important eras in 20th century German history, while newsreel and television images on a screen above them showed the faces of the Weimar Republic, the Nazi Party, the Holocaust and World War II, the building of the Berlin Wall, and reunification of West and East Germany.
Written by the performers themselves and their director, Rainer Lewandowski, the presentation was a provocative lesson to Americans on how deeply our popular culture has intermingled with the ancient cultures of Europe, and how great the influence of Germany and other European nations has been on American history during the 20th century.
The show was enhanced by the performers' extra effort to present much of it in English. While this aided the comprehension of dialogue and song lyrics—which were well crafted and performed—the emotional impact of the presentation was achieved mainly by its multimedia staging. Such images as a Charlie Chaplin-Hitler hybrid dancing with a huge globe-shaped balloon while Nazis murder the Jews of Europe, and of a wonderfully accurate late-1950s Elvis Presley gyrating before nightmarish scenes of Cold War-era totalitarianism and human misery, are not soon forgotten.
—Tony Cook
Mannette is NEA National Heritage Fellow
WVU Artist-in-Residence Elliott "Ellie"
Mannette, considered the father of the modern steel drum, has
been awarded a $10,000 National Heritage Fellowship by the National
Endowment for the Arts. The Fellowship is the nation's most prestigious
honor in folk and traditional arts.
The award recognizes Mannette's
groundbreaking work in creating the steel drum, developing many
of the instrument's innovations, and revolutionizing the tuning
process.
Mannette crafted his first steel drum from a 55-gallon container when he was a teenager in Trinidad and since then has created seven of the ten drums in the steel drum family. He came to the United States in 1963, where he developed a U.S. Navy Steel Band and worked with inner-city youths in New York City while beginning about a dozen other steel bands.
Today, Mannette leads the University Tuning Project at WVU, which creates instruments for college and high school steel drum programs across the nation. Mannette is one of only 13 people to win the prestigious NEA award in 1999. Other current honorees include Shirley Caesar, an African-American gospel singer from Durham, N.C.; Ralph Stanley, a master boat builder from Southwest Harbor, Me.; and Lila Greengrass Blackdeer, a Native American craftswoman from Black River Falls, Wis.
The NEA has awarded more than 220 National Heritage Fellowships since 1932. Previous winners include bluesman B.B. King, Irish stepdancer Michael Flatley, and acclaimed musicians Bessie Jones, Doc Watson, and Bill Monroe.
Bill Ivey, chairman of the NEA, noted that the "National
Heritage Fellows are outstanding artists and individuals who
have dedicated their lives to preserving, reviving, and celebrating
this country's living cultural heritage. By proudly honoring
their many contributions to music, dance, storytelling, and the
creation of functional items of beauty, we also pay homage to
the communities that have inspired and nurtured their work."
—Charlene Lattea
Harms is Professor of the Year
Jim Harms not only writes and publishes poetry, he
lives and breathes it.
The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the
Council for Advancement and Support of Education have recognized
his literary gifts and devotion to his profession by naming the
WVU associate professor of English as the 1999 Professor of the
Year for West Virginia.
A native of Pasadena, Calif.,
Harms began teaching at WVU in 1994. He says he believes that
poetry as an applied art is best taught by an artist fully engaged
in the profession of art. For that reason, he has made the writing
and publishing of poetry central to his identity as a teacher.
"If I bring to the classroom my absolute conviction that
poetry is vitally important to the culture, and do so in the
form of a passionate, ongoing, and evident relationship to the
craft and profession, my students will benefit," Harms explains.
"To this end, I make it clear to my students that my identity
as a poet is crucial to my role as their teacher . . . that I
am practicing what I profess."
Harms encourages students to attend readings, participate in
residency programs and conferences, submit work to literary magazines,
enter writing contests and scholarly competitions, and join the
community of writers on campus.
As one of his students said, "One cannot help but be infectiously
swept along by Professor Harms's passion for writing and poetry
and with him engage in a love affair with language."
Harms is director of the Creative Writing Program in the WVU
English Department. He is also director of the West Virginia
Writer's Workshop, held at WVU each summer. The four-day conference
attracts more than 60 aspiring writers from all over the country
for a program of readings, workshops, panel discussions, and
lectures.
Harms earned a master of fine arts degree in creative writing
from Indiana University. His first book of poetry, Modern Ocean,
was published by Carnegie Mellon University Press in 1992. The
Joy Addict, a second collection, appeared in 1998, and received
the PEN/Revson Fellowship. A third book of poems, Quarters, is
due out in 2001.
To learn more about the WVU Creative Writing Program, see "A Place Where Your
Life Still Matters," West Virginia University Alumni
Magazine, Fall 1999, pp. 30-31.
—Becky Lofstead
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