Kansas Arts on Tour Roster - Theatre

Ride into History has been performing for almost 20 years and offering workshops for ten of those years. Workshop participants learn that historic performers have two responsibilities: to be accurate and to entertain. The workshops grew out of Ride’s experience on the road. Watching other performers, especially at festivals, they saw many who were either very well versed in history but not able to hold an audience’s attention, or were appropriately dramatic but giving out inaccurate information about the past. Their goal has been to increase the quality of historic performance, especially in Kansas. Ride into History has performed in twenty-five states and the Northern Mariana Islands, as well as most of the counties in Kansas. Their work has been praised by youngsters and adults alike.

Program Descriptions

• Amelia Earhart & Calamity Jane: One Frontier, Differently: Two one-woman dramas linked by creative license combine the mystique of horses, flight, and the American West with real heroes. What if the young Amelia had met Calamity Jane??

• Amelia Earhart, Here Today!: The famous pilot tells dramatic stories about her childhood and record-setting flights, revealing her sense of humor (an orange being like a radio?!) and her coolness under pressure.

• Calamity Jane: Everyone’s favorite renegade roars in to tell how she met Buffalo Bill and Wild Bill, became a cavalry scout, and earned her nickname.

• Rachel Carson, Environmentalist: The author of Silent Spring discusses her work as a marine biologist and a best-selling author, ending with why she did not want chemical companies to know that she had cancer.

• Whose Land?/Our Land/My Land: Three fictional, one-person stories over time of one small area of the Louisiana Purchase. Grower cannot understand how her people’s land can be owned, much less sold; Mary and her husband celebrate their new farm; and Georgiana buys her own ranch, where she finds a link to Grower.

• The Land Cannot Be Sold!: Grower, a fictional Earth Lodge woman in 1804 tells teaching stories and reflects on changes brought by traders, speculating on the future after Lewis & Clark will have been through. Hands-on includes tools, seeds, and trade goods.

• Settling in Kansas Territory: The Kansas-Nebraska Act opened land for settlement in 1854. Fictional settler Mary Fix tells stories of when she and her husband came to Kansas, where their only neighbors were Indians.

• Cattle Tales: Fictional Georgiana Jackson tells tales of  the cattle drive, and how when she returned home her family thought she should give it up and be a lady.

• Julia Anna Archibald Holmes: Santa Fe Trail traveler Julia became the first woman documented as having climbed to the top of Pike’s Peak, doing so in a bloomer costume. Hands-on oxen travel activity.

• Fighting Beside My Brother: Fictional composite Civil War soldier Jo’s poignant and quietly humorous stories involve Bleeding Kansas and the Civil War, the scholar tells of how 600 women fought disguised as men.

• School residencies: Short residencies involve performances followed by discussions; contact us for information on longer residencies in which students become historian/researcher/scriptwriter/actors.