For the past 40 years, has engaged with communities across the state to document and share everyday expressions of culture, tradition, and innovation. The organization's new audio series, The Arts That Shape Us, explores traditional arts and the ways they shape culture and communities.
Hosted by Vermont Folklife's Mary Wesley, each episode in this series introduces an art form and explores its relationship to the communities and places where it's rooted. You'll meet people who are teaching and sustaining these arts, learn what these practices mean to them, and look at the ways that tradition is actually a dynamic process happening in the present while also maintaining ties to the past.
The Arts that Shape Us was produced with support from 开云体育's Made Here Fund.
#1: Barre Stone Carvers
Since at least the 1870s, people in central Vermont have cut, chiseled, hoisted, polished, and carved local granite, creating monuments, statues, and especially memorial grave markers. The granite industry brought Italian, French, Canadian, Scots, Scandinavian, Irish, Greek, and Spanish workers to the city of Barre, each bringing their own stone carving traditions.
Over time, these artisans and the manufacturers they worked for shaped an enduring identity: The Barre stone carver.
Among those upholding Barre's granite carving tradition are Heather Milne Ritchie, whose early experiences working in the city's granite sheds informed how she charted the course of her own career. Ritchie learned from the carver George Kurjanowicz and now mentors apprentices of her own, including Becky Lovely. All three discuss their craft in this episode.
#2: Tibetan Music and Dance
For Tibetan-American artist Migmar Tsering, music and dance are inextricably linked to being Tibetan.
Migmar first learned traditional dance in the village of Langkor in the county of Tingri. He was born there almost 3 decades after the invasion of Tibet by communist China in 1950.
Since the 1950s, the Tibetan diaspora has expanded, with multiple groups of Tibetans relocating to India and later the U.S., Canada, Australia, and some European countries. Under the United States 1990 Immigration Act, 1,000 Tibetans living in exile in India, Nepal, and Bhutan were chosen via lottery to receive U.S. visas.
In 1993, Vermont became one of 25 resettlement sites in the U.S. Migmar arrived to Vermont in 2011 and soon began teaching traditional music and dance to kids in Vermont's Tibetan American community.
