Roadside's Local Program

About: Roadside Theater's Local Program

Since its founding in 1975, Roadside Theater has developed and maintained a local program. The company’s original Appalachian plays and community cultural development methodology were, and continue to be, developed with the people in southwest Virginia and east Kentucky, a home-base that is culturally rich and economically challenged.

From 1980 to 2001, Roadside toured nationally 35 weeks of the year. Because more funding was directed toward bringing performing artists to a community than to pay performing artists to perform in their own communities, Roadside could use some of its earnings from national touring performance fees to subsidize its work at home in the mountains. 

By 1997, cumulative budget cuts at the National Endowment for the Arts, reorganization of the agency’s discipline programs into generic themes, and drastic reduction of arts presenting subsidies for national touring productions began knocking the financial props out from under theater companies creating and touring original work. This meant that the company needed to form more partnerships at home to fund local work. Today, these partnerships not only provide some income for the work, but also drive it deeper into the community. 

In 2004, Roadside began expanding its local program to include a myriad of partners in an initiative to perpetuate and make new its Appalachian traditions and to use this strength to address pressing local issues. Led by ensemble member Ron Short, the following outlines some of the Program's accomplishments to date.

A traditional Appalachian music program developed in Southwest Virginia including:

• Traditional music classes added to Mountain Empire Community College’s curriculum, and credit for these classes accepted when students attend East Tennessee State University. 
  
• An ongoing week-long summer “Mountain Music School,” where people of all ages learn to play an instrument aurally.
• New music venues for playing and listening to traditional music in collaboration with the Crooked
• Road Music Trail, Southwest Virginia Museum, and Natural Tunnel State Park.
• “Music of Coal: Mining Songs from the Appalachian Coalfields,” two-CD and book combination released on Lonesome Records & Publishing in collaboration with Lonesome Pine Office on Youth and Maggard Studios.

Home Season of Performances and development of three Roadside musical plays:

• Music from Home, written and performed by Ron Short.
• Christmas in Appalachia, a new version developed every year in collaboration with Old Indian Bottom Church and the Jettie Baker Center.

Multiple community cultural development residencies conducted. Two examples are:

• Daniel Boone Wilderness Trail Project, in collaboration with the Daniel Boone Wilderness Trail Association and Natural Tunnel State Park, which resulted in a new form of outdoor, site-specific theater.
• Capturing and Telling Your Community’s Cancer Story, in collaboration with Mountain Empire Older Citizens, East Tennessee State University’s Nursing Department, and cancer survivors and their families in Southwest Virginia, West Virginia, and North Carolina.
  
  

Partners in this work include, but are not limited to: 

Public Schools & Public Colleges: 

• Mountain Empire Community College, Big Stone Gap, VA
• University of Virginia’s College at Wise, Wise, VA
• MEOC’s Education Outreach Program to the Public Schools, Big Stone, Gap, VA. 
• East Tennessee State University, Johnson City, TN
  
  Social Service Agencies: 
• Mountain Empire Older Citizens, Big Stone Gap, VA
• Lonesome Pine Office on Youth, Big Stone Gap, VA
• New Beginnings Treatment Center, Pennington Gap, VA.

Cultural Heritage Tourism Enterprises:

• Crooked Road Music Trail, SW VA
• Ralph Stanley Museum, Clintwood, VA
• Southwest Virginia Museum, Big Stone Gap, VA
• Daniel Boone Wilderness Trail Association, TN & VA
• Clear Creek Music Festival, Clear Creek, KY
• Tri State Singing Convention, Big Stone Gap, VA
• Natural Tunnel State Park, Duffield, VA
• Lonesome Records & Publishing, Big Stone Gap, VA
• Seedtime on the Cumberland Festival, Appalshop, Whitesburg, KY

Other:

• Old Indian Bottom Church, Blackey, KY
• Cowan Creek Community Center, Cowan, KY

Article: Music of Coal, from Cape Breton to SWVA

Music of Coal, from Cape Breton to SWVA

Coalfield Progress, Norton, VA, February 2007

Most people will not know that the first commercial coal mines in North America were opened in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia around 1720. Towns like Inverness and Glace Bay, Nova Scotia were not too different than the coal-camps of Jenkins, Ky. or Appalachia, Va., including the cycles of “bust and boom” that shaped the economies and the cultures of these communities.

On Feb. 5 and 6, audiences in Whitesburg, Ky. and Big Stone Gap will have the rare opportunity to hear a concert of coal mining songs and music featuring, Men of the Deeps from Cape Breton, N.S. and local artists from the Music of Coal CDs produced by Lonesome Pine Office on Youth in Big Stone Gap.

Featured artists will include Roadside Theater’s veteran performer Ron Short, young and gifted singer Molly Slemp, along with talented father/son duo Rick and Chris Saenz.

Men of the Deeps is a choir of working and retired coal miners from the island of Cape Breton in Nova Scotia, Canada. Organized in 1966, the group’s inception was an effort by the people in Cape Breton to preserve in song the rich culture and folklore of Cape Breton’s coal mining communities.

The choir has performed all over the globe to wildly enthusiastic audiences, but rarely will their concert have greater resonance then here in the coalfields of Eastern Kentucky and Southwest Virginia.

The 2 CD collection, “Music of Coal: Mining Songs from the Appalachian Coalfields,” produced by the Lonesome Pine Office on Youth, breaks new ground musically and historically by producing one of the most complete histories of coal mining in song. And, most importantly, the two CDs feature songs written and sung by coal miners, their children and grandchildren.

Many of the featured artists, ranging in ages 13 to 90, have lived through the events they sing about. They are makers and inheritors of the legacy of coal mining. And, they are makers and inheritors of the legacy of Appalachian music which continues to grow; nearly half the songs on the CDs are new songs, never before heard.

On Feb. 5, Men of the Deeps and artists from Music of Coal will perform at the Letcher County Central High School in Whitesburg. Music of Coal will begin at 6 p.m. and Men of the Deeps will take the stage at 7 p.m.

On Feb. 6th, Music of Coal and Men of the Deeps will be appearing at Mountain Empire Community College’s Goodloe Center in Big Stone Gap starting at 6:30 p.m. and Men of the Deeps at 7:30 p.m

About: Mountain Music School

Mountain Empire Community College’s Mountain Music School is a week-long event dedicated to the preservation and continuation of Appalachian music and culture. 

Located in Big Stone Gap, Virginia, the school provides opportunities for students age 10 and up to experience traditional old-time music with fun and supportive instruction by talented, encouraging instructors who are masters at their craft. 

Students may select an instrument and skill level of their choice, including beginning and advanced old-time fiddle, claw-hammer banjo, guitar, mandolin, dulcimer, autoharp, dog house bass, string band, shape-note singing, and traditional ballads. Students and instructors also dance and sing along at daily concerts featuring some of the region’s most gifted old-time musicians, and all receive a Mountain Music School tee-shirt.

Launched in 2004, the school was created by Mountain Empire Community College and Roadside Theater member Ron Short to address a growing concern that traditional mountain music was not being passed down to the youth of Southwest Virginia. Today, the school has grown to include more than 100 students of all ages, many of whom travel from throughout the country to participate.

For more information visit www.mountainmusicschool.org

About: Daniel Boone Wilderness Trail Association Project

Through a 2012-2014 community cultural development residency, a reenactment drama was created with Appalachian folk artists and local performers, and premiered at Natural Tunnel State Park in Duffield, Virginia. A group of Eastern Cherokee tradition-keepers are primary collaborators, and co-producers are the Daniel Boone Wilderness Trail Association, a nonprofit volunteer organization in Tennessee and Virginia, and Natural Tunnel State Park of Duffield, Virginia.  

The project builds on storytelling and music workshops conducted by Roadside Theater at the Tunnel Park, as well as an historical reenactment of a local pre-Revolutionary War kidnapping story now performed annually by local residents at a reconstructed Block House (1700’s small house/fort) located in a wooded area of the Park.  

The work is part of Roadside’s ongoing exploration of new forms of American theater that aim for the highest artistic quality, welcome an entire community, and help communities to develop their own futures. The play was performed at Natural Tunnel Park, not on a stage, but outdoors in a setting that incorporates the landscape and re-created structures of the stories being told – for example, the settler’s village and a Cherokee settlement. The residency, the play, and other related culturally-based tourism activities are part of a regional community rebuilding strategy. 

Article: Mountain Music School 2013, SWVA Museum's 65th Birthday

Brochure: Mountain Music School

Article: Through Music, Short Preserves Local History
By Colleen Birch Maile

This story first appeared In the November/December 2006 edition of Atlantic Southeast Magazine, the inflight publication of Atlantic Southeast Airlines Delta Connection.

Article: A Decade In, Mountain Music School Expands Vision
By Coalfield Progress, Norton, Virginia

Photos: Gathering in the Gap

Photos: Mountain Music School, Big Stone Gap, Virginia