Orphans International America - Artists for Orphans

Our Chautauqua Programs. Orphans International will offer an abundance of adult educational programming for visitors, residents and staff. The programs will be modeled after the Chautauqua movement in the U.S., which had its beginnings in a summer training program for Sunday School teachers, started on Lake Chautauqua, New York 125 years ago. It quickly developed into a traveling tent show of lecturers that brought culture to small-town America.   The Rev. Joan Campbell of the National Council of Churches, incidentally, recently resigned to serve as chaplain at Chautauqua.

The author of Chautauqua: An American Utopia describes the institution as �a cultural playground of concerts, ballet, opera, theater and art exhibitions.� Orphans International�s Chautauqua programs will include the visual arts, including the plastic arts � painting, sculpture, print-making, photography, film, video, decorative arts � and those aspects of the performing arts such as ballet, theater, opera, orchestra, etc. We will also encompass the sciences � biology and geology � language, history, sociology and anthropology.

Our Chautauqua Programs will likewise incorporate indigenous arts. Through Yayasan Orphans International Indonesia, this incorporation will encompass both the Indonesian stringed instrument known as the gamelan and the shadow puppetry of Bali known as wayang. The music of the gamelan, a stringed instrument likened to the sound of moonlight or falling water, is incorporated into an entire range of Javanese and Balinese performing arts � from dance to drama to puppetry. The interlocking rhythmic and melodic patterns of the gamelan were first introduced to the West in 1893 when Claude Debussy and others witnessed the aristocratic refinement of a Javanese ensemble performance at the Paris International Exhibition.   Wooden drums (kendhang), bamboo flutes (suling) and two-stringed lutes (rehab) complete the orchestra. It should be noted that Balinese gamelans are normally owned and maintained by the village music club (sekaha); Yayasan Orphans International Indonesia will nurture such a club on campus for the same purpose. Yayasan will also support the traditional arts of the Balinese shadow puppetry known as wayang (literally, �shadow�), as well as traditional Balinese dance. Wayang puppetry, using highly decorated flat leather puppets, is based on the Hindu religious epics, the Mahabharata (Great Battle of the Descendants of Bharata) and the Ramayana (The Travels of Rama), which became enduring traditions among Indonesian believers and are known today all over the world. Balinese dance is another dramatic form of expression similar to wayang, in which human performers portray gods, heroes, villains, and other characters in literary epics.

As in Haiti and Guyana, he arts are inseparable from day-to-day culture in Indonesia, especially in Sulawesi, Bali and Java. As a guidebook to Indonesia notes, �Dancers, Shaman, actors, puppeteers, priests, storytellers, poets and musicians are members of the community who perform vital roles in informing, entertaining, counseling and instructing their fellows in the well-worn ways of tradition. To Indonesians at least, a coherent society is utterly unthinkable without them.�

William Mitchell, author of Countries of the World: Guyana, summarizes the Guyanese artistic tradition as follow "Guyanese artistic and intellectual expression is characterized by its separate ethnic con-tributions, by the growth of a distinct Guyanese tradition in all fields of creative endeavor, and by an attempt by the government to stimulate interest and support for further development. The historical inspiration for most creative effort was an identification with the grandeur of the Guyanese landscape. This is still present in the art and literature of modern Guyana; yet a new sense of pride is developing as a result of independence. The freedom to discover and build a distinct tradition has encouraged artists to reveal more subtle and complex themes of expression, to develop a pride in the folk-traditions and ethnic contributions of previously submerged elements, and to build a society which can sustain a thriving artistic and intellectual community.