Guided Search: History and Preservation, Students

MISSION STATEMENT

Multicultural Arts Exchange of CultureTrust Greater Philadelphia is a diverse, professional, cross-cultural arts organization that serves the community by presenting, producing and promoting traditional and contemporary performing and visual arts to the underserved population in Greater Northeast and surrounding areas.

VISION STATEMENT

The German Society of Pennsylvania seeks to foster good understanding between the peoples of the United States of America and Germany by maintaining an awareness of German culture and traditions, and by promoting the understanding of German and German-American contributions to the history, culture, economy, science, and technology of the United States. In pursuit of our mission, we:

The South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA) was founded in 2008 in order to document and provide access to the diverse and relatively unknown stories of South Asian Americans. Our collection reflects the vast range of experiences of the South Asian diaspora in the United States, including those who trace their heritage to Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and the many South Asian diaspora communities across the globe.

“Widely regarded as North America's masters of music for Renaissance wind band” (St Paul Pioneer Press), Piffaro has delighted audiences throughout the United States, Europe, Canada and South America since its founding in 1980. Under the direction of Joan Kimball and Robert Wiemken, Piffaro recreates the rustic music of the peasantry and the elegant sounds of the official wind bands of the late Medieval and Renaissance periods. Its ever-expanding instrumentarium includes over 40 shawms, dulcians, sackbuts, recorders, krumhorns, bagpipes, lutes, guitars, harps, and a variety of percussion — all careful reconstructions of instruments from the period.

Courtyard Dancers is a non-profit Kathak dance company based in Philadelphia and Kolkata. We are especially interested in working with poetic forms in Kathak dance styles such as Ghazal, Thumri and Qawwali for exploring emotional landscapes of love, justice, humanism, and hope. Our dance-theater creations juxtapose the beauty of the classical forms with everyday movements to envision our own collages of life. We strive to make dance relevant to lived and diverse experiences of our lives, both ordinary and unique. While we work with Indian dance forms that are rooted in traditions, we are continuously searching to mold them to express the contemporary. We believe that tradition and contemporary are not oppositional, but are best understood as legacies, connections, and transformations.