Contact:Micki Leventhal, 312-344-7383, mleventhal@colum.edu
NOTE: Gunkel is available for interviews.
Chicago, September 2003--Chicago blues, Chicago hot-dogs, Chicago architecture--and Chicago polka. Our homegrown brand of polka is at the forefront of the genre, and polka itself has a political soul, according to Columbia College Chicago Professor Ann Gunkel. In Polka and Cultural Resistance, she weaves together music, videos and photographs to immerse her audience in Polish, Slovenian, German and Tex-Mex polka and to reveal the dance's class awareness. The program will take place at 6 p.m. Thursday, October 2 in the Fifth Floor East Meeting Room of the Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington. Admission is free. For more information, call 312-744-6630 or visit www.intersections.colum.edu.
The lyrics and venues of polka today represent one of the few forums of resistance to an all-usurping commodity economy, write Charles and Angeliki Keil, authors of Polka Happiness (Temple University, 1992). Polka is still a proletarian style at roughly the point where blues . . .were in the 1950's. Not a folk dance, not Polish, not dying out, polka is a vibrant multi-ethnic urban genre that crosses generational lines and reinforces working class consciousness.
Dr. Gunkel (M.A., Loyola University, Chicago; Ph.D., DePaul University) is an award winning designer of educational multimedia and a former Fulbright scholar. Publications include work on urban religion, Polish-American children's history, and cyberspace, as well as polka. She co-curated the Witte Museum's queezebox: Accordion Cultures in the U.S. exhibit. She is currently Professor of Humanities and Cultural Studies at Columbia College Chicago.
Polka and Cultural Resistance is the second presentation in the second year of the adult education series, Intersections: A Meeting Place for Diverse Ideas on Contemporary Culture and the Arts. Intersections, which is a collaboration between the Cultural Studies Program of Columbia College Chicago and the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, presents monthly lectures and discussions that investigate and celebrate the complexity of contemporary culture and the arts in which scholars and educators from Columbia College Chicago explore a broad range of compelling topics in a format designed to be informative, invigorating and accessible.
Intersections lectures offer Continuing Education Credit for Illinois Public School Teachers. For information on CE credit, contact Paul Camic, Ph.D. at pcamic@colum.edu.