The Thaumaturgy Department

dagseoul:

Collection of fairytales gathered by historian Franz Xaver von Schönwerth had been locked away in an archive in Regensburg for over 150 years

(via rmgilby)

With our second preview tonight for Sondheim & Lapine’s Into the Woods, a short reflection on folktales.

Website of Prof. D.L. Ashliman, folklorist and literary historian, author of A Guide to Folktales in the English Language and other resources we’ve found quite useful in prepping for Into the Woods (and just intriguing in their own right).

other

Live performances of the radio play will be presented on Feb. 29 and March 1 at WNYC and WQXR Radio’s Greene Space in downtown Manhattan, and produced as part of a longer festival honoring the novel’s anniversary…. The performance will be narrated by Phylicia Rashad; Roslyn Ruff (of “The Help”) will play the protagonist, Janie Crawford; Leslie Uggams will play her grandmother Nanny; and Brandon Dirden will play her lover and husband, Tea Cake. These performances of “Their Eyes Were Watching God” are to be taped for a national broadcast in September….

Do we shape stories, or do stories shape us? After going through much of my mammoth collection of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, I think it’s more often the latter. Fairy Tales, in their original non-Disneyesque glory, are dark and disturbing morality tales that have as much relevance today as they did when the Grimm brothers first started collecting them. Many of our ideas about horror, super heroes, science fiction, and even serial killers come from Fairy Tales. Some of them are so insightful on how people behave, that it’s simply stunning; but Hollywood doesn’t seem to care much about those stories…..

Well, that title pretty much says it all. Click through for a wealth of more specific links.

Florida Folklife from the WPA Collections is a multiformat ethnographic field collection documenting African-American, Arabic, Bahamian, British-American, Cuban, Greek, Italian, Minorcan, Seminole, and Slavic cultures throughout Florida. Recorded by Robert Cook, Herbert Halpert, Zora Neale Hurston, Stetson Kennedy, Alton Morris, and others in conjunction with the Florida Federal Writers’ Project, the Florida Music Project, and the Joint Committee on Folk Arts of the Work Projects Administration, it features folksongs and folktales in many languages, including blues and work songs from menhaden fishing boats, railroad gangs, and turpentine camps; children’s songs, dance music, and religious music of many cultures; and interviews, also known as “life histories.”