From the Classroom
On October 1, 2004 students in English 290: Nature Writers walked up the White Arrow trail to the summit of Mount Monadnock .
After reading Thoreau's Walden, these students had gone on to read the parts of Thoreau's journals about his several excursions on the mountain collected in William Howarth's edition Walking with Thoreau. An addition to writing in their journals, sketching, looking up unfamiliar species in field guides, these students also discussed the differences between the views from the mountain, the condition of the trails, and the world they brought with them in 2004 as opposed to the world described in Thoreau's journals. Several students were experienced hikers, but for many others this was the most challenging hike they'd ever attempted. But all said that they look at our region, and this mountain they can see from campus, differently after this experience.
**
Students in Robin Dizard's Black American Literature class received lessons in the cake-walk from William Seigh, of the Theater and Dance department, performed to music by Scott Joplin.
The dance called “The Cakewalk” illustrates the syncretic character of African American art. Charles Johnson “The Cake Walk King” said his mother told him this was a dance from the old days on the plantation. When the people from the “Quarters” watched their masters and mistresses dance the minuet, the comical stiffness of the European dancing style impressed them. So they made up a signifying dance. In the Cakewalk, dancers “signified” by repeating and revising the minuet, adding syncopation, hip and shoulder motions and full-foot strikes on the ground to the stiffly held torso and rigid neck from the European dance. Then it was the turn of “Ol’ Massa n’ Ol’ Miss” to carriage down to the hollow to see dancers perform. Whether the white owners recognized themselves in the parody has gone unrecorded. In any case, the prize awarded to the couple who were judged best was a towering, extra-sweet coconut cake. Music for the cadenced walking and high stepping dance was supplied by a violin, horn and drum. What began as a parody, a way of “putting on ol Massa,” made a fortune for Johnson and his wife, Dora Dean, who took the dance to Broadway in 1895. The cakewalk re-crossed cultural lines again when it was taken up by Debussy, Souza and Stravinsky. This is also the origin for the expression, “Doesn’t that take the cake?”
Students who won the (figurative) cake were Alison Sullivan with Garrett Kopczynski, and Meghan Dooley with Lee Bolash.