Students stepping into Longfellow Elementary in Rock Island this school year will notice physical changes: a new media center and library, a new cafeteria, and a renovation that has added four new classrooms. But a more important change will be the school's new formal partnership with Augustana College.
The relationship will bring a liberal-arts-based curriculum to Longfellow - a contrast to the No Child Left Behind-forced shift in primary education that emphasizes reading and math skills to the exclusion of other subjects. Though the content of the curriculum will still conform to district standards, the way that content is presented will change: The focus will move to collaboration among students, small-group and individualized instruction, interdisciplinary learning, thematic teaching that attempts to make the coursework relevant, and the fine arts.
A No Child Left Behind-influenced curriculum "doesn't have anything to do with creative problem-solving, imagination, collaboration - all of these skills we need to survive in the next millennium," said Pat Shea, an assistant professor of education at Augustana who was part of the planning team for Longfellow. "If we don't get those things taught, it doesn't matter how many facts we know. ... We are so off-target about what it means to be an educated person, and I think we as educators have the first line of responsibility to start speaking to that."
Federico García Lorca's Blood Wedding isn't a play that's "fun" in any traditional sense of the word; you're thrown into complex states of grief and anger within this classic's first few lines of dialogue, and even the infrequent moments of levity are suffused with dread. (By all accounts, the Spanish playwright wasn't exactly a load of laughs, and for understandable reason.)
During a recent post-show conversation, an actor friend and I agreed that perhaps the most exciting moments at any theatrical production are those few seconds before the production even starts, when the lights dim, cell phones (please God) are turned to silent or vibrate, and the venue becomes alive with possibility - with the awareness that, in this live art form, absolutely anything can happen.
Describing composer William Finn's Elegies: A Song Cycle, the first presentation by the Quad Cities' new theatrical company the Riverbend Theatre Collective, artistic director Allison Collins-Elfline says of the show, "It's quirky, it's fun, it's upbeat ... ."
If you majored in English, or are currently majoring in English, or simply wish that you'd majored in English, Peter Parnell's comic fantasia Romance Language might sound like an almost obscene amount of fun. Or perhaps merely obscene, as Augustana College's latest presentation finds Walt Whitman traveling cross-country with Huck Finn, Ralph Waldo Emerson pining over the deceased Henry David Thoreau, Emily Dickinson abandoning her lesbian lover for a Native American warrior, Louisa May Alcott embracing her wild side as an uninhibited dance-hall girl ... . The experience of Romance Language is like tumbling down Lewis Carroll's rabbit hole and landing smack in the middle of a 19th Century American Literature course.
About a half hour into Augustana College's opening-night presentation of the deservedly beloved musical romance The Fantasticks, Brian Bengtson made his first appearance as the aging ham Henry, and I can't recall the last time I was so relieved to see an actor on stage.
So enough of my opinions already. The following are reflections by Derek Bertelsen, Tyson Danner, Kristofer Eitrheim, Kimberly Furness, Jennifer Kingry, Mandy Landreth, J.C. Luxton, Jackie Madunic, Angela Rathman, Jalayne Reiwerts, Susan Simosky, and Doug Tschopp - local-theatre artisans who enjoyed a memorable 2007.
As luck - and the Vikings' football schedule - would have it, Augustana College's opening- weekend performances of The Taming of the Shrew coincided with the school's homecoming weekend, which allowed me the chance to reconnect with some fellow theatre-department alumni both before and after Saturday night's show. At several points during the evening, we laughed 'til we cried at stories of shared friends and past Augie productions, and it wasn't until the next day that I realized why this version of Shakespeare's comedy felt like the perfect play for my mood that night: Just like college, it was all about the joy of getting up in front of people and acting like a first-class goof.
