Attending Dance Performances from India and Senegal (Africa) with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget
I happily brought my young daughter Florence to all the free programs
and activities for children that Madison (Wisconsin) offered to them when I
lived there like the free zoo and year-round performances by entertainers, who
came to perform at the Civic Center Auditorium.
I found out about this programming in the local newspapers’ print
versions, which is probably offered online now as well.
My favorite venue for year-round children’s entertainment
was the Olbrich Botanical Gardens and Bolz Conservatory, which offered a dance
series for children and scavenger hunts that were fun and educational at the
same time.
I took my daughter to the first of a fabulous dance series
of programs for children called Children
of the Rainforest at the Olbrich Botanical Gardens and had just as much fun
as she did. The first set of shows in
the series was called Dances of India.
The show was made up of six dance sequences that used song, dance,
storytelling, and poetry. The dance
sequences were called: Jungle symphony, Tippani, Mayur Dance, Ferris Wheel, Garba,
and Village Mother.
The music of Anand Shankar evoked the rain forest as young
dancers enacted elements of the jungle including the gentle and savage in the
Jungle Symphony presentation.
The Tippani dance presentation featured a “functional” dance
of India. It is called functional,
because it helps with work. In this
case, it is used to help women of the Saurastra to give them rhythm to their
chore of beating the mud floor of a house during construction.
The Mayur Dance is the Peacock Dance and featured the
peacock opening its feathers to dance. Dancers
gently informed children of the wheel of life in the Ferris Wheel dance. Finally, the Village Mother dance taught about
greed and the Earth’s resources.
This dance series was such a loving way to teach children to love nature,
other cultures, traditional art forms, and beauty.
About two weeks later, I took my daughter to see an African
dance troupe. The introduction to this
group in the brochure described various dances coming from different countries:
Gumboot Dance (South Africa), Che Che Kule (Ghana – Twi people), Goombe
(Liberia), Drum Call (West Africa), Kou Kou (Guinea), and Dounba, Dance of Joy
(Senegal).
The Gumboot Dance was created by South African miners who
wore big rubber boots to work accocrding to the brochure handed out. Che Che Kule was a lot of fun. It is a call and response game of Ghana that
the audience participates in with response, but also with movement, song and
rhythm.
Drum Call could have been the basis of an adult symphony
orchestra. It featured a Djimbe
orchestra “using rhythms from 13th and 14th century West
Africa” according to the guide.
My favorite dance had everyone in the audience up on their
feet dancing. This was the Dance of Joy
from Senegal. First, the dancers
individually showed off their best moves and then everyone in the group was asked
to get up and improvise based on the rhythms.
My daughter and I were the last people to leave this show; I like to
dance a lot.
We especially went to the Olbrich Botanical Garden’s Bolz
Conservatory to visit the tropical plant conservatory in winter. They had several informative guides for
visitors. My favorite one was the one on
Indian plants. We liked looking at fish in the many ponds and trying to find
plants that matched the drawings in the plant guide that was really a scavenger
hunt.
The introduction to the guide and scavenger hunt said that
15% of the Earth’s people live in India.
The guide was also a pharmacopoeia and cooking lesson for adults. The plants we had to find included pomegranate,
scarlet ginger-lily, papaya, tamarind, fig, hibiscus, kumquat, lemon,
angel-wing jasmine, coffee, coconut palm, banana, bamboo, black pepper, and
acacia.
I always like learning new things and tried to impart that
way of looking at the world to my daughter at Olbrich Botanical Gardens. It was nice to learn things in the warm Bolz
Conservatory in a Wisconsin winter, too; I thought that the Olbrich Botanical Gardens
and its programs should have been headline news sometimes.
By Ruth Paget, Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France
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| Ruth Paget Selfie |
Learning about French Culture in Windsor (Canada) and in Detroit at Moliere plays, at the art institute, and other activities with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget
Thanks to my
high school’s French club in Detroit, Michigan, I felt like I made a trip to
France every week for an hour before school started on Wednesday mornings. The Club was open to students who had
completed one year of French with a “B”
or better average.
I was elected Social Chairperson for my ability to come up with activities to
do on a weekly basis. On easy planning
weeks, we would play Milles Bornes™, the French card driving game, and learned
all the vocabulary and insults that went with it. We also played Parlor Games, the French play these at rallyes at home, like 21 Questions, Simon Says, Who am I? and I Spy in Franch.
We went to
see Molière’s (1622 – 1673) Tartruffe with
the third- and fourth-year French class that was performed by the drama department
at Wayne State University. Before going
to see the play, we read the play in French, so we could understand what was being said.
When many of
us became advanced French students, we wrote a play based on Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
and performed it before the junior French classes and the high school’s drama
classes in the school auditorium. I was the lamppost lighter, who chose to light up the world or dim it.
Despite a
heavy homework load, I arranged trips to the Detroit Institute of the Arts (DIA)
to see:
-the Detroit Industry Murals
(1932 – 1933) by Diego Rivera
-Martha and Mary Magdalen (c.1598) and The Fruit Vendor (c.1635 – 1620) by Caravaggio (1571 – 1610)
-The Wedding Dance (1566) by Pieter
Breugel (1520 – 1569), called Breugel the Elder
-The Visitation (1640) by Rembrandt (1606 – 1669)
-Ruisdael’s (1628
– 1682) Jewish Cemetery (1654 -1655),
Canal Scene (late 1640s), and Landscape (1665 – 1668)
-The Nigerian sculpture collection
-The medieval knight armor hall
The DIA had docents at the time from the University of Michigan, who gave tours for free, if you reserved ahead of time.
Going
to museums is a French national sport, so we planned several trips to the
Detroit Institute of the Arts, which we traveled to by city buses. We also visited the Detroit Zoo, the Botanical Garden, and the Aquarium and learned all the French vocabulary to describe what we saw.
Sometimes I
had to stretch my imagination for activities to do like planning a baseball and
picnic outing on Belle Isle. Belle Isle
is an island in the Detroit River between Detroit and Windsor, Canada.
The
island has a French name which reveals Detroit’s French heritage. The name Detroit is derived from D’étroit,
meaning “from narrows," because the Detroit River is indeed narrow.
On other occasions,
I would contact the French consulate in Detroit to get films, posters, maps,
and brochures for our club. We all learned about Loire Valley Châteaux,
Paris, the Côte d’Azur (French Riviera), and Normandy from these films.
We organized
dinner parties at club members’ homes and tried our hands at French onion soup,
crêpes, and tarte tatin (apple, upside-down cake). I was more of a taster than a cook then and
was happy that several French Club members knew how to cook. I am a good French cook now thanks to a lot of practice from both necessity and pleasure.
I liked organizing lunches in French restaurants in
Windsor, Canada for about thirty to thirty-five people usually at a fixed
price.
The restaurants would have us
arrive early and gave us a choice between two main dishes such as roast chicken or ratatouille. We would start the meal with vegetable terrines and French onion soup. Cheese, salad, and
chocolate mousse or ice cream would follow the main dish. Water or sodas accompanied the meal.
Long walks around Windsor followed the meal down Oulette Street to the flower gardens by the Detroit River before boarding the Detroit-Canada bus to go back through the tunnel and our
life in Detroit.
We danced to Jean-Michel Jarre music on the Boblo Ferry Boat as our last club activity before college.
By Ruth
Paget, Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France
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| Ruth Paget Selfie |
Traveling around England, Scotland, and Wales with my mom and great aunt by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget
The British said “River Thames” and not “Thames River” I
noticed as my mother and great-aunt purchased tickets for a boat and bus tour
out of London when I was on a trip with them as an elementary student.
We took a taxi to Maidenhead, where we boarded the tour
boat. We stopped first at Stokes Poges
and visited a church from Anglo-Saxon times called Saint Gilles that was more
than 1,000 years old. My great-aunt and
I smelled the antique roses with many petals, whose perfume seemed all that
much stronger in the misty air.
Back on the boat, we passed an English village, which looked
mysterious due to the foggy mist. This
village called Bray on Thames harbors Michelin four-starred restaurants, but I
was enchanted with Bray, because it looked like the drawings in my fairy tale
books.
Finally, we arrived at Windsor Castle. Windsor Castle was built around 1078 by
William the Conqueror as a fortress high on a chalk cliff over the Thames. As a child, my lasting impression of the place
was of the Queen’s Gardens. After
admiring the flowers, we set out for lunch at the Castle Hotel in Windsor.
After lunch, we took the bus to Runnymede where the Magna
Carta was signed by King John in 1215 to guarantee the rights and property of
barons; American colonists knew of this document and used it as a precedent for the American Constitution.
My maiden name is Ruth Pennington, and three Penningtons signed the Magna Carta. I was pretty happy to learn this later in life when I thought about running for president one day.
From Runnymede we took the bus to Hampton Court. The gardens there are fantastic as well, but
under no condition was I allowed to go into the maze made up of towering Yew
trees.
Earlier in the week, while my mother and great-aunt were
watching the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace from the Victoria Monument, I walked across the street and into Saint James Park. I started counting swans, because the Queen
kept track of them.
When I came back out of the park, the English
policemen were on the scene and the whole tour group was rather agitated. I just laughed at all the commotion and got
back on the tour bus for the rest of the London city tour. I had become a "lost child."
So, my time at Hampton Court was limited to photos in the
garden in my double-breasted, blue coat with brass buttons. My hair was in pony tails, because I had
succeeded in taking down the bun my mother had sent me out into the world with
earlier in the day.
I wanted to see a
castle a day, but I was quickly realizing that the gardens were the true
treasures of the British Isles.
The journal that my great-aunt and mother kept for me of
this trip made me realize that it was my great-aunt, who made me love gardens
so well.
Her handwritten notes about how
much she loved English roses are the best souvenir I have of the wonderful trip
I took to the British Isles many decades ago.
By Ruth Paget - Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France
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| Ruth Paget Selfie |
Learning about Canada's French Culture in Montreal by Ruth Paget
I learned about the vestiges of French exploration and/or
colonization from my high my first French teacher in Detroit, Michigan. She was
from Guadalupe and ran an efficient classroom.
She told us that French was a language of diplomacy,
business, art, cuisine, and fashion to introduce us to the language we would be
studying.
She also gave us expectations
for classroom behavior and homework rules.
She emphasized that if we wanted to go on the spring break trip to
Montreal that we would have to keep our grades up. “Up” meant a “B” or better.
I loved traveling and studied hard to make it onto the train
to Montreal in the province of Quebec, Canada for a week. Instead of taking the tunnel under the
Detroit River to Canada, my mother drove me to Windsor in Ontario over the
Detroit-Canada Bridge, so I could see the Detroit skyline.
As soon as you enter Canada, the signs are in
English and French, signaling a different way of life.
Almost all of the students in my school including me had
been to Windsor, Canada. Windsor offers visitors river front gardens, a great view of
Detroit with John Portman’s (b. 1924) Renaissance Center in the middle of
the skyline, beautiful restaurants, and crystal and china shops galore along
Oulette Street.
Montreal was a cousin to Paris albeit colder, we had learned
in our teacher’s orientation session before we set out on the trip. I thought Montreal must have had massive
traffic jams as it is located on an island where the St. Lawrence and Ottowa
Rivers meet.
Our teacher made sure that
we could order in a restaurant, buy clothes, purchase movie tickets, and get
directions in French before we headed out to Montreal.
Everyone stayed up all night on the train talking with our
friends, telling jokes, and playing logic games like 21 Questions and Who am I?
Upon arrival in Montreal, we loaded our suitcases into a
tour bus and took an all-day city tour, which required several stops and walks
up steep hills. The hills seemed steeper
than they were, because we were tired.
The stop that interested me the most was our visit to St.
Joseph’s Oratory. I had been in Catholic
Churches before, but had never seen a pilgrimage site before. Canes lined the walls along with crutches and
wheelchairs left by people, who had been cured by a visit to the Oratory.
According to the Michelin Guide I read years
later, Brother André, born Alfred Bessette (1845 – 1937) created the devotions
to Saint Joseph at this church that healed ailing pilgrims.
Some of us lit candles and prayed for loved ones.
Our next hilly stop was Parc du Mont Royal which was planned
by the landscape architect Frederic Law Olmstead (1822 – 1903), who had planned
New York’s Central Park.
We drove
through the exclusive Westmount neighborhood to get to the park and took many
photographs of the nineteenth century mansions, which reminded us of Detroit’s
exclusive neighborhoods of Palmer Woods, Indian Village, and Sherwood Forest.
Later in the week, we took another tour bus out to the
Olympic Park built to host the 1976 summer Olympic Games. These games were fresh in our teen minds in
1979. I loved the excitement of sports;
the skier Franz Klammer was my favorite athlete.
We all complained to our French teacher that she had not
arranged for us to go swimming in one of the six pools of the aquatic
complex. I think she might have wanted
to throw all of us into a swimming pool after five days in a youth hostel.
The best part of our trip, though, was getting to spend a
day in a bilingual high school. We
attended algebra, English, and biology classes.
In English, we read parts in a readers’ theatre of part of Shakespeare’s
Macbeth in a Grade 13 class;
Canadians go to school for thirteen years. The algebra and biology classes were taught in French.
I could keep up with the algebra class and was happy,
because I knew that Canadian schools at the time were among some of the best in
the world when using international testing standards.
I also learned from one of the English-speaking teenagers
that she liked studying French, because it reinforced her understanding of
English grammar. I was not entirely sure
of what she meant until I studied French for another year.
When and why to use certain verb tenses
became very clear to me in English as I studied the same verb tenses in French.
When I diagrammed sentences in English class, I knew exactly
what to do with subordinate clauses thanks to studies of French as well. French was my insider secret to doing well in
English class. That secret was the best
souvenir I brought back from Montreal.
By Ruth Paget, Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France
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