Masks are required regardless of vaccination status for this event.
About the film
Talking Feet is the first documentary to feature flatfoot, buck, hoedown, and rural tap dancing, the styles of solo Southern dancing which are a companion to traditional old-time music and on which modern clog dancing is based. Featuring 24 traditional dancers videotaped on location in West Virginia, Kentucky, Virginia, and North Carolina.
Following the screening, we will have a discussion facilitated by Dr. Julie Shepherd Powell, director of the graduate program for the Center for Appalachian Studies at Appalachian State University.
This film project grew into the 1992 book Talking Feet: Solo Southern Dance of the Appalachian, Piedmont and Blue Ridge Mountain Regions, by Mike Seeger with notes by Ruth Pershing.
"Talking Feet is a film about a forgotten side of American dance culture: solo mountain dancing. Mike Seeger and Ruth Pershing take us to the southeastern mountains of the U. S., the source of this genre, and to a range of individuals (old, young, black, white, female and male) who grew up with the idea of talking with their feet. The film captures the deep sense of tradition and the value of freedom of expression these dancers share. Talking Feet is an exploration of a dance form rich in American do-it-yourself pride."
-- Frank Hall, dancer, dance anthropologist.
"Once we started meeting more and more people in different parts of the mountain areas it really opened up what we could do and how we heard the music and reacted to it. . . . They were beating out the rhythms with their feet and really paying a lot of attention to the changing of the phrasing of the music, rather than executing 'precision' steps and trying to do high kicks."
-Rodney Sutton of The Green Grass Cloggers and The Fiddle Puppets
This film is presented by the Center for Appalachian Studies at Appalachian State University.
About the Speaker:
Julie Shepherd-Powell is an assistant professor and graduate program director in Appalachian Studies at Appalachian State University. She is clawhammer banjo player and flatfoot dancer and calls square dances anywhere from Vancouver, BC to New York City. She has won numerous awards for her flatfoot dancing, including a second-place finish at the Appalachian Stringband Festival in Clifftop, West Virginia in 2019. She recently co-founded the Kraut Creek Ramblers, the premier stringband of the Center for Appalachian Studies at Appalachian State.