About The Program...

Since 1992 the Vermont Folklife Center’s Traditional Arts Apprenticeship Program has embraced the challenge of strengthening communities in Vermont through its support of the traditional arts. By offering modest stipends for master artists to work with an apprentice or a group of apprentices who are interested in learning the art forms of their cultural community, the Traditional Arts Apprenticeship Program facilitates the transmission of traditional knowledge, creates connections between generations, and ensures the continuity of art forms that are key to community members’ sense of who they are in the world.

Over the years the Apprenticeship Program has been a community-building tool for Abenaki people in Vermont who have used the program to institute such groups as the W’Abenaki Dancers and the Rainbow of Strength Abenaki Children’s Dance Troupe. More recently the program has become a resource for Vermont’s growing refugee and immigrant communities, supporting such apprenticeship projects as Indian Bharartanatyam dance, Lao folk opera, and Somali Bantu drumming. The Bosnian, Tibetan, and Congolese dance groups featured in the following pages came into being at the initiative of cultural leaders within these communities and have benefit not only for the individual participants but for the larger communities themselves. The Vermont Folklife Center is honored to act as partner in this important work.

Website created by Jacquelyn Antonson, Brittany Anne Coleman, Jessica Kissinger and studioperdue webdesign for the Story and Ritual service learning class, Middlebury College.