Press Release – General Announcement/Early RegistrationAbout Us
THE JUNE BUG: A CENTER FOR THE STORIED ARTS
The June Bug celebrates the storied arts in practice, performance, application and study as a unifying principle to harness the power of cultural foundations, communications and technologies to bring the arts to life in transformational ways for 21st century audiences.
What Are Storied Arts?
The storied arts are any art forms grounded in narrative and presented in traditional, industrial and digital formats or combinations thereof. The following is the June Bug guideline, albeit imprecise because emerging technologies continue to blur the lines.
Traditional forms are unplugged and include song, dance, oral histories, storytelling and similar forms that do not rely on hard or soft technologies for their presentation.
Industrial forms include print, film, theater, puppetry, electric instruments, and some distribution technologies such as radio, television, and cable.
Digital forms include those forms which are created through new and emerging information age technologies such as websites and DVDs.
Why Storied Arts?
The June Bug believes the story to be the most common communication form linking people across time and space and containing within its form the capacities to entertain, to educate, to transform, and to develop well-being for the whole by expanding the boundaries of individual interests and abilities. The story is fixed and changing, deriving from archetypes and re-presented within forms traditional, industrial, and digital. The story isolates and integrates narrative, image, mechanicals, music, and movement across cultures in a remembered past, a lived present, and an envisioned future. The continuum of storied arts is the ideal vehicle to preserve the past, inform the present and create the future for people, individually and in community.
Where is The June Bug located?
The June Bug is located in 3 (three) buildings at 251Parkway Lane, South in Floyd Virginia, just ½ mile south of the only stoplight in town. The June Bug maintains many partnerships across southwest Virginia and its services are often available in many communities.
Modes of Production
The June Bug is genre inclusive - - live theater, music, sound, dance, movement, written word, spoken word, storytelling, puppetry, image, cinema, and emerging genre using multiple intelligences content, multimodal techniques, and multidisciplinary principles to make its performances, programs, trainings and other services interesting, understandable and valuable to 21st century audiences in participatory, accessible, affordable, expansive, and environmentally responsible ways.
Location
The June Bug strives to be a physical and virtual presence throughout southwest and central Virginia and beyond with presence on-site at the Center, on-location with programs in your community, school, library, or business, on-line through the internet and telephone-based technologies, on-air with periodic programs for community and cable access channels, and on-tour with performances in your community performance spaces.
Audiences
The June Bug serves on-target diverse audiences including community-based individuals and groups; educators and administrators; early childhood through high school learners; parents and caregivers; amateur, aspiring and experienced artists in the storied genres; educational and business organizations, and special need populations.
BRINGING THE ARTS TO LIFE
The history of humankind is encapsulated in the transformation of human culture from agrarian to industrial to informational. The storied arts parallel the same transformational patterns as the greater human experience, making them the oldest and the most important process to bring meaning, continuity and change to life.
Famed scientist Nicholas Negroponti once observed that old technologies never really disappear but find new applications. The same can be said of the storied which remain transmitters of culture but are quickly becoming processes for knowing. Consider the storied arts in all their applications – transmitters of traditions, values, and knowledge; tools for change and transformation in individuals, communities, and corporations; witnesses of life and experience; advocates for the voiceless; and purveyors of diverse visions.
The June Bug Center focuses on the storied arts as the unifying principle of its work to tackle the challenges of serving 21st century audiences of all ages. Being artistically relevant in the 21st first century means to find many ways to bring the arts to life. To guide its mission, The June Bug Center embraces a simple four tiered approach adapted from a growing body of work in 21st century needs: (1) Cultural Foundations; (2) Effective Communication; (3) Technology; and (4) Bringing The Arts To Life.
The June Bug Center draws its content from core subjects and multidisciplinary exploration of themes, aligning its educational, artistic, and transformational activities with cultural and multicultural foundations of knowledge and understanding. To this content, the June Bug Center brings traditional and innovative communication process as well as new technology applications. Ultimately, the June Bug Center brings the storied arts to life by integrating content, communication and technology in performances, programs and services that help people, individually and in community, lead more satisfying, self-directed and productive lives.