Tailored for elementary, high school or college audience, as well as for community groups, churches and museums. Performances for elementary through high school and college audiences involve dialogue with students, invites student participation, and offer in-service for teachers and/or students
Veteran poets with California Poets in the Schools since 1980 and Poets in the Gallery at both the Oakland Museum (Opal Palmer Adisa) and The San Francisco Fine Arts Museums (Devorah Major) both poets have extensive experience teaching poetry and performance to elementary students as well as college students.
Adisa has also taught at City College of San Francisco, San Francisco State University, University of California at Berkeley, Stanford and currently is a Professor at California College of Arts and Crafts where she teaches Creative Writing and Performance.
Major has taught at New College and California College of Arts and Crafts, and is currently a poet-in-residence with the San Francisco Jazz Festival and is currently the Poet Laureate of San Francisco.
Performance Offers:
• Engage students through call and response
• Expose students to relevant poetic themes and important African American, Poets of Colors as well as poets from African and the Caribbean.
• Introduce students to various rhythmic patterns.
• Demonstrate the relationship between poetry and music
Daughters of Yam, either accompanied by musician as a dynamic duo, deliver an hour-long poetry performance, appropriate to audience and theme. With their voices and their bodies they make poetry leap and somersault, proclaiming truths, casting spells and awakening the senses to multiple realities.
WORKSHOP
Daughters of Yam offer several different workshop packages and in-service in conjunction with performances.
Workshop A - Elements of Performance -For students, all ages
This workshop provides students with basic and necessary tools to do performance poetry. A 2-hour workshop that covers: elements of performance, poetry interpretation, voice modulation and rhythmic patterns.
Workshop B - Writing Poetry to Perform - For students, all ages
A 2-hour workshop covers poetic elements such as stanza development, orality, meter, composition and nuances of language. Students will be led through various exercises and will produce poems.
Workshop C - Rhythmic Patters, The Music of the poem
A 2-hour workshop led by one of the musicians on basic rhythm patterns, beat variation and finding/hearing the beat of the poem.
Musician will have a poem that he will practice with group in a choral performance, but individually students can bring pieces to work on.
Workshop D - In-service for Teachers
This workshop provides teachers will sample lessons and ways to effectively teach poetry. It also covers performance, both the dramatic and the writing --language and oratory acquisition skills.
All of the workshops can be repeated several times for the same students.
