Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Summer 2000
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 20, No. 3, Summer 2000, pp. 179-81.
Abstract
During the second week of April 1999, the Center for Great Plains Studies hosted The Great Plains Music & Dance Festival and Symposium. This undertaking, three years in the planning, co-chaired by Ron Bowlin and myself with suggestions of various committees of local advocates, resulted in a multidisciplinary event which showcased the diversity of our music and dance heritage in the Great Plains. Performances of Plains music and dance ranging from Northern and Southern Native Drums to Jazz, Folk, Gospel and Classical were featured at a variety of venues in Lincoln. This phase of the symposium culminated in a premier of a specially commissioned work celebrating the music of Charlie Parker, Chasing Bird, by Danny Grossman and his Toronto based modern dance company.
In addition to these diverse performances, the symposium consisted of twenty-nine scholarly presentations. The topics focused on music and dance in the geographical region of the Canadian and American Plains, and included demonstrations, panel discussions and papers, all subjected to peer review by our committees. Of the papers presented at the conference, four have been selected for this special symposium issue of the Great Plains Quarterly.
In "This Week At The Opera House: Popular Musical Entertainment At Great Plains Opera Houses, 1887-1917," Layne Ehlers discusses the importance of the Nebraska small town Opera House as a symbol of status and culture:
Opera Houses represented a sense of "arrival" for communities which had begun only a few years before with wooden false fronts and a makeshift railroad depot. Starting out as converted second floor retail establishment, true ground floor theaters, for economic and aesthetic reasons became the norm by 1900.
Ehlers' research identified 125 extant theaters of which 26 had been nominated to the National Register of Historic Places. According to Ehlers, the name "Opera House" was something of a misnomer, as relatively few operas were presented in these theaters. Rather, dances, local entertainment and traveling troupes referred to as "combination companies" or "Lyceum Bureaus"-this referring to musical performances, lectures and specialty acts administered by local high schools or commercial booster clubs as fund raisers-provided the local programming. The heyday of the Opera Houses came to an end with the arrival of "Mr. Edison's moving pictures" and by the time of America's entry into World War I the brief history of the Opera Houses was over.
Comments
Copyright 2000 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln