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Buffalo Humanities Festival is again excited to partner with Shakespeare in Delaware Park, one of the most beloved summer traditions in Buffalo. This year, #BHF16 will feature Taming of the Shrew performed by Shakespeare in Delaware Park cast members, paired with  an audience discussion.

Taming of the Shrew is always controversial because of the many stereotypes it puts on display:  stereotypes of men and women in society, courtship, and marriage. How do we view this play if the man becomes “the shrew”? Did Shakespeare intend to showcase a negative view of women? Or did he give us one of the most honest partnerships in his writing, portraying mutual respect and a dueling wit between man and woman?  This presentation features scenes 

To join us for this special Shakespeare in Delaware Park performance from 1:00pm-2:00pm in the Burchfield Penney Auditorium, you can purchase tickets and daypasses to the Festival here.

Shakespeare in Delaware Park is a not-for-profit, professional theater company dedicated to providing free, high-quality public theater to the widest possible audience. One of Buffalo’s most beloved cultural institutions, SDP just completed its 41st Summer Season, which featured The Winter’s Tale and The Taming of the Shrew. 


 The Harlem Renaissance has been in the news this summer: a Harlem non-profit arts group is crowdfunding to turn Langston Hughes’ home into an arts and literary community space again, and the Smithsonian is running an exhibit of rarely seen Carl Van Vechten photographs and portraits of the Harlem Renaissance, including many well-known faces. And while figures like Ella Fitzgerald, Alain Locke, Lena Horne, and Zora Neale Huston are rightfully lauded as artistic and creative forces who influenced U.S. culture to this day, Dr. Steve Peraza’s talk for #BHF16 (“Folk Culture in the Harlem Renaissance”) will discuss lesser-known, everyday people of 1920s and 1930s Harlem.

Dr. Peraza’s talk will explore how working-class blacks developed urban folkways that fueled Harlem’s underground economy and popularized southern culture in the North. Folk culture in the Harlem Renaissance helped black workers pay the bills and black artists transform American art. Casting new light on the everyday people of the “Negro Mecca,” Steve Peraza situates black folk culture at the heart of the Harlem Renaissance.

Art–literary, visual, theatre, and music–of the Harlem Renaissance reflected the social conditions and consciousness of blackness in the US in the 1920s and 1930s. Assisted in part by the economic boom of the inter-war period, Harlem became a beacon for African Americans across the country and especially the south, and black Caribbean immigrants searching for jobs and community-building. The wide range of cultural and aesthetic influences due to the black migration (The Great Migration) from across the country and and immigration from across the world (especially Caribbean), along with social and political concerns of the time, would greatly influence the innovative art emerging from the Harlem Renaissance (not unlike the birth of hip hop in the Bronx fifty years later). Now two decades after Booker T. Washington’s famous 1895 Atlanta Compromise speech and racial uplift, the artists and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance grappled with questions of race, gender, and class and importantly, their access to national citizenship: what W.E.B. DuBois would name “the veil” and “double consciousness.”

Join us for Dr. Steve Peraza’s talk on September 24. You can purchase tickets and daypasses to the Festival here.

Dr. Steve Peraza is a policy analyst at the Partnership for the Public Good and a lecturer at SUNY Buffalo State. He earned his Ph.D. in U.S. history from UB, specializing in Atlantic World slavery. He teaches courses on U.S. history, African American history, and Hip Hop Culture.

For another #BHF talk on the Harlem Renaissance, see Jane Fisher’s talk, “Black Soldiers and the Harlem Renaissance.”

If you’re sad that summer Renaissance Faire season is over, don’t be! The Buffalo Humanities Festival has a number of free, outdoor Buffalo Renaissance Festival activities that you can bring your entire family to enjoy!

Come on by the Buffalo State campus at Rockwell Hall for activities like: public art for children, a fiber spinning demonstration, physical fitness bootcamp, GoBike, madrigals, a Sonnet Slam, live, impromptu performances of Shakespeare, social dance, and sidewalk chalk for everyone. There will be a special Kan Jam challenge at noon. What’s Kan Jam, you ask? It’s a popular outdoor lawn game invented in Buffalo.

And of course, volunteers dressed in Renaissance garb will guide people around. Keep your eye on our Facebook, Twitter, and this blog for more details.

While these fun family-friendly events are free and open to the public, a festival pass will get you into the great talks, conversations, live music, Shakespeare in Delaware Park performance, and indie films that are scheduled — as well as FREE ENTRY to the Albright Knox museum during the Saturday festival! Plus, if you purchase your ticket by Wednesday, 9/21, you’ll get a free lunch from the West Side Bazaar.