For the first time, Muse Machine held its annual summer institute for educators in Yellow Springs, at the Foundry Theater, last week. Several dozen Miami Valley educators spent the week learning about folk art traditions, and as part of the week’s events, broke into small groups led by area folk artists to create their own performances. Pictured is a group led by musician Rick Good of Dayton’s storied Rhythm In Shoes, at left with his banjo, as the group practices their performance, centered on the theme of “home.” (Photo by Lauren "Chuck" Shows)
Muse Machine at ‘home’ in the Foundry Theater
- Published: July 30, 2025
Since 2023, the Foundry Theater at Antioch College has been a near-constant host to performances of all stripes — from national and international touring musical acts and high-flying aerial arts shows to local choir concerts and theater productions.
Last week, the Foundry was activated for a different purpose. The theater was filled with the hum of conversation and the shuffle of chairs as several dozen educators prepared for a special kind of professional development: For the first time, Muse Machine’s Summer Institute for Educators was held in Yellow Springs, inside the Foundry.
With its stages and rooms now regularly in use for a number of artistic expressions, it played a fitting host for this year’s Muse Machine institute, “Storytelling and the Folk Arts Spirit: The Roads that Lead Home.” The four-day program invited Miami Valley educators to explore how folk arts within music, dance, theater and oral storytelling traditions can become tools for classroom learning and cultural connection.
Muse Machine Executive Director Ruth Reveal told the News on the institute’s last day of programming that hosting the institute at the Foundry helped expand the scope of the program.
“We’re usually in Dayton because our office is downtown,” Reveal said. “So, when [Foundry Director] Chris [Westhoff] pitched it, we thought, how cool would it be to show the teachers this space and to get them thinking about other places in our community that are making art?”
(Photo by Lauren “Chuck” Shows)
Muse Machine was founded in Dayton in 1982, and since then has grown into an organization that serves nearly 80,000 students in central and southwestern Ohio, as well as Indiana and Kentucky, via in-school performances, access to out-of-school performances, residencies, workshops and youth productions. Its annual summer institute — which is provided free of charge for educators — brings together K–12 educators across subject areas to work with professional artists, and offers hands-on workshops and collaborations.
“We know that when we can equip [educators] with the skills to bring the arts into their classrooms, they reach exponentially more students, and they can really deeply impact them in whatever subject they teach,” Reveal said.
This year’s summer institute instructors included storyteller and frequent artist-about-the-village Omopé Carter Daboiku, musician Rick Good and dancer/choreographer Beth Wright — both of the former Dayton folk arts mainstay Rhythm In Shoes — and Westhoff, who is also managing director of Mad River Theater Works. Together, the artist-instructors led sessions on movement, songwriting, narrative structure and the role of tradition in shaping creative expression.
Educators were grouped into small teams to work collaboratively on a final performance, with each group creating an original song and performance based on the week’s theme of “home.”
(Photo by Lauren “Chuck” Shows)
The resulting songs ranged in tone and subject matter, with one group reimagining “Home on the Range” — renamed “Home that We Made” — to reflect the way the concept of home can shift as families grow and communities are built. Another group created “As the Circle Turns Again,” which used the melody of “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” to tell a story of ancestry and inheritance.
A third group adapted “This Land Is Your Land” to meditate on immigrant identity and belonging, concluding that “this land was made to be our home.” The most somber of the four, “The Ballad of Guadalupe,” was performed to the tune of the church hymn “Pass It On” and memorialized the lives lost in the catastrophic Texas flood earlier this summer, focusing specifically on the losses sustained in a girls camp.
Katie Burns, a technology teacher at City Day Community School in Dayton, said she found deep connection with her group as they worked on the Guadalupe song.
“It’s a church song,” she said. “But apparently the girls were singing [‘Pass It On’] when they were leaving camp. That’s why we picked it.”
For Burns, who is in her first year teaching and her first year attending the institute, the collaborative nature of the workshops stood out.
“A lot of people here have been teaching for years, so I wasn’t sure how much we would have in common,” she said. “But we all have this passion to teach our children and help them grow.”
(Photo by Lauren “Chuck” Shows)
This year’s theme, Reveal said, grew out of the success of last year’s institute, which focused on Dayton funk music. That deep dive into the area’s history of the funk tradition inspired the organization to explore folk traditions.
“It really opened us up to this idea of focusing on local artists and all of the resources that we have in our community,” she said. “What was built there was this deep pride in Dayton and the music that was made there — so we thought, what other types of art are really born out of community?”
As part of the week’s events, the summer institute also featured guest speakers, including Dayton mixed-media artist Yetunde Rodriguez, World House Choir Director Catherine Roma and WYSO’s Neenah Ellis.
On the morning the News was present at the institute, Ellis gave an hour-long presentation on the history of WYSO and her own history with radio — which began in early childhood, as her father was a DJ in the Chicago area, and her parents built more than one radio station from the ground up. Connecting to the theme of the week’s institute, Ellis noted that her father chose to platform country music as a DJ, in part, because many of his listeners had come to Chicago from areas where country music was prevalent.
“They missed home,” Ellis said. “Radio provided a connection to home.”
Robin Blathers, who teaches eighth-grade social studies at Miamisburg Middle School, said the week’s exploration of music, in particular, helped solidify her current practice of exploring historical context through song — she regularly teaches a unit on the War of 1812 that examines the lyrics of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” she said. Now, she said, she hopes to expand that practice.
“Incorporating songs that are older, like ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy,’ could help students understand the Revolutionary War,” she said.
(Photo by Lauren “Chuck” Shows)
Using art to make emotional learning visible was central for Karen Wilson, a prevention educator who works with multiple districts through the Montgomery County Educational Service Center. Wilson said her work focuses on helping students learn to self-regulate and understand their emotions — skills she believes the arts can support.
“The arts help you express yourself with your emotions and help manage your emotions,” she said. “I use a lot of singing to help regulate [students], but I want to bring in more movement.”
Wilson said this was her eighth year attending the Muse Machine Summer Institute, and this year’s location in Yellow Springs held special significance for her, as she earned her bachelor’s degree from Antioch University and completed her master’s thesis, which was focused on YS Kids Playhouse, in the Foundry building.
“Just like the theme, it was like coming home to me,” she said.
As the week’s events wrapped up, educators gathered in the Foundry’s experimental space to share the songs they had crafted throughout the week, incorporating theatrical and dance movement into their collaboratively created pieces.
Sharing is part and parcel of the summer institute experience, Reveal said — and it’s what makes the four-day event empowering for educators.
“We’ve had teachers say it’s the best professional development that they go to because it’s very active,” she said. “And we want it to be actionable for educators.”
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