Welcome to the
The Red Skies Tent
Led by Trudy Williams, The Red Skies Tent initiative offers original and repertoire shows adapted to include local historic resources. The shows aim to give local audiences a performance-based experiential engagement with the resources, collections, themes and exhibits of local museums, libraries, historical societies, and educational and community organizations. Programs are adaptable in scale and budget for informal or formal settings. Cast and crew are drawn from community professional and non-professional artists.
Animating Public History
With a humanities platform, The Red Skies Music Ensemble public musicology model for presenting Public History uses music as the portal into facts and interpretations about American history and culture as a lively way to communicate and engage local audiences with the resources and exhibits of local museums, libraries, historical societies, educational and community organizations.
The ninety-minute cross-disciplinary programs combine a research-based narrative, live music, theatrical vignettes and large screen archival images to give audiences a transformational experience through hearing and seeing, along with a sing-along component during the program and the Q&A at the end.
This multi-media format allows content to be readily adapted for any thematic needs, including the results of on-going local research initiatives to equitably and inclusively expand the narrative of American history and culture.
Red Skies Tent programs, with their weave of contextual meanings and inter-connections among artifacts, archives, music, history and culture, help support community members' enlivened, closer relationship to local historic and humanities resources. These creative, performance-based encounters may help increase community awareness of the value of preservation, and inspire increased civic engagement with, the humanities and the tangible material efforts to protect, sustain and communicate the democratizing continuous discovery of, and general public access to, America's fuller multi-cultural historic narrative.
With a humanities platform, The Red Skies Music Ensemble public musicology model for presenting Public History uses music as the portal into facts and interpretations about American history and culture as a lively way to communicate and engage local audiences with the resources and exhibits of local museums, libraries, historical societies, educational and community organizations.
The ninety-minute cross-disciplinary programs combine a research-based narrative, live music, theatrical vignettes and large screen archival images to give audiences a transformational experience through hearing and seeing, along with a sing-along component during the program and the Q&A at the end.
This multi-media format allows content to be readily adapted for any thematic needs, including the results of on-going local research initiatives to equitably and inclusively expand the narrative of American history and culture.
Red Skies Tent programs, with their weave of contextual meanings and inter-connections among artifacts, archives, music, history and culture, help support community members' enlivened, closer relationship to local historic and humanities resources. These creative, performance-based encounters may help increase community awareness of the value of preservation, and inspire increased civic engagement with, the humanities and the tangible material efforts to protect, sustain and communicate the democratizing continuous discovery of, and general public access to, America's fuller multi-cultural historic narrative.
Who is the Red Skies Tent for?
- Institutions and Community Organizations of any size wanting to engage general audiences through a Public Musicology model for experiencing Public History in performance.
- Curators, Musicologists, Independent Researchers who want to partner in creating new programs to see their work, research findings, insights, holdings or exhibits animated on stage.
- Scholars considering a performance model as an alternative, or addition to, to publication as a way to share their research with the public.
- Community Musicians, Actors, Stage Crafters interested in participating in a Public Musicology model for presenting Public History and Culture through performance.
Images from The Emily Dickinson Museum; Long Island Museum of American Art and History; The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.
Copyright 2024 George Boziwick and Trudy Williams. The Red Skies Music Ensemble: Co-founded in 2010 by George Boziwick and Trudy Williams