Integrating the Arts into your Classroom

The Performing Arts Series is committed to fostering learning through the arts. Most of our events offer educational ties that enrich coursework. 

An extra discount in addition to the student/youth price is given to students who are requiredto attend one of our events. Faculty and teachers receive two FREE tickets when you require students to attend a performance for class.

For details on how to participate, click here. 

Fall 2009 Curricular Connections

Freedom & Joy: Celebrating the 20th Anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall
Miami University Symphony Orchestra
Ricardo Averbach, conductor
President David Hodge, narrator
Tuesday, December 1, Hall Auditorium, 7:30 p.m.

From the Havighurst Center for Russian & Post-Soviet Studies
Fall 2009 marks the 20 year anniversary of the collapse of communism in Central and Eastern Europe. The Revolutions of 1989, sometimes called the "Autumn of Nations," was a revolutionary wave that swept across Central and Eastern Europe in the autumn of 1989, ending in the overthrow of Soviet-style communist states within the space of a few months.

The political upheaval began in Poland, continued in Hungary, and then led to a surge of mostly peaceful revolutions in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria. Romania was the only Eastern-bloc country to violently overthrow its communist regime and to execute its head of state.

The Revolutions of 1989 greatly altered the balance of power in the world and marked (together with the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union) the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the post-Cold War era.

Miami memories of 1989
CNN.com coverage of the anniversary 

Past 2009-10 Curricular Connections 

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Down in Mississippi: A Gospel Play with Music

8:00 p.m., Oct. 1-3 & 8-10
3:00 p.m., Oct. 4

Nationally recognized playwright, Carlyle Brown, was commissioned to write a play that would speak to Miami’s student audience and touch on the important local history connection of Western College for Women to Freedom Summer. In June 1964, activists chose Oxford Ohio’s Western College as the site for training volunteers who would build community centers, teach in freedom schools, and register black voters in Mississippi throughout that summer. While in Oxford, they learned that three of their fellow activists were missing and probably dead. Their work took them into the national spotlight, and Freedom Summer became a key turning point in the Civil Rights Movement and our nation’s history.

For more information about Freedom Summer and the Civil Right’s Movement, please visit: www.muohio.edu/freedomsummer2009
Click here for more on how to incorporate this into your curriculum.

The Laramie Project: 10 Years Later, an Epilogue

In October of 2008, ten years following the killing of Matthew Shepard, members of Tectonic Theater Project returned to Laramie to interview again the people who participated in the original Laramie Project, for the purpose of writing a new play, as an Epilogue.

Excerpt from NewsWeek:
One month after the brutal murder of gay University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard in 1998, 10 members of the Tectonic Theater Project, led by playwright and director Moisés Kaufman, went to Laramie, Wyo., to interview residents about the killing. Those interviews served as the basis for "The Laramie Project," a play that chronicles how the community grappled with the slaying. On the 10th anniversary of Shepard's death, which has become a rallying cry for gay rights and hate-crime laws, the theater company returned toLaramie. These are their observations:

In returning to Laramie, Wyo., 10 years after the murder of Matthew Shepard, the pressing question for all of us was: how has the town changed since 1998? But soon a different question arose: how do we measure that change?

Read the entire article here.

This video, edited by Brian Kates, is a short sampling of some of their responses. The full Epilogue will be performed live, on October 12, in 100 theaters on the same night. Click here for the video.