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Through blog posts, podcasts and videos presentations of public programs and concerts, you can learn more about the American Folklife Center's collections directly from folklorists, specialists, and performers.
Folklife Today is a blog for people interested in folklore, folklife, and oral history. The blog features brief articles on folklife topics, highlighting the unparalleled collections of the Library of Congress, especially the American Folklife Center and the Veterans History Project.
The highlighted blog posts below focus on the topic of Dance.
Discover the treasures of the Library through its experts and special guests. Find full podcast series produced by the American Folklife Center by following the links below.
Folklife Today Podcast Series
America Works Podcast SeriesSince its inception in 1976, the American Folklife Center has routinely hosted public programs at the Library of Congress in the form of concerts, lectures, panels, and symposia. From 2006 on, most of these public programs have been video recorded and made available online.
There are a number of playlists available on the YouTube page that gather videos from certain seasons of our Homegrown Concert series External or pull together various lectures as a sampler External of the types of topics covered. You can also simply search "folklife" on the YouTube page External to pull up hundreds of videos.
It is also possible to view entire series of American Folklife Center videos on the Library's website. Those links are provided below. Many (if not all) of the same videos can be found on the Library's YouTube channel.
Performance by the Sattriya Dance Company with the Dancing Monks of Assam. Sattriya is a dance form which is more than 500 years old, and which comes from the Vaishnavite monasteries of Assam northeast India. The dance was not accessible to women for centuries. In 2000, the Indian government recognized Sattriya as one of the country's major dance forms.. (Event date: April 19, 2018)
The Jones Benally Family Dancers sign, chant and perform a repertoire of over 20 traditional Navajo dances. They are particularly well known for the hoop dance, in which they evoke traditional figures and shapes using five, nine, a dozen or many more hoops. Navajo dance is a sacred tradition encompassing a wide variety of forms, all of which aim to heal the body, mind or spirit. When presented outside the Navajo community, these dances are modified for public viewing, but they retain their deep capacity to move hearts and minds. Jones Benally's grandchildren are the next generation to take up the family legacy of Navajo music and dance.. (Event date: September 10, 2019)
