High Country Humanities

Toy Sheep Microcinema, with the generous sponsorship of the Appalachian Theatre and Awesome Space, comes charging back for its 2025-26 season with a martial arts triple-feature: The stone-cold classic Bruce Lee movie “Enter the Dragon;” the experimental / exploitation short “A Brighter Summer Day (For the Lady Avengers),” directed and written by Birdy Wei-Ting Hung; and the documentary “Enter the Clones of Bruce,” about the Hong Kong filmmakers who tried to create a new action star after the sudden death of Bruce Lee.

In this slide-illustrated lecture, Dr. Jodi Magness, the Kenan Distinguished Professor for Teaching Excellence in Early Judaism in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, will survey the history and archaeology of Jerusalem in the Late Second Temple period (late first century BCE – first century CE), ending with the city’s destruction by the Romans in 70 CE. The presentation will focus mainly on Herod the Great’s reconstruction of the Second Temple and Temple Mount, and Jesus’s final days in Jerusalem.

Places can be inspiring, and Western North Carolina boasts quite a few. Nestled in the mountains in Blowing Rock, Camp Catawba, a summer camp operating between 1945 and 1970, inspired its founder, Vera Lachmann, and her partner, Tui St. George Tucker, in a variety of ways. In this talk, Dr. Reeves Shulstad, a professor of musicology in the Hayes School of Music, will provide a brief history of Lachmann’s founding of the camp and its mission.

In remembrance of that we are hosting a community listening day for people to share their experiences of Hurricane Helene and its aftermath. There will be four recording stations set up in the museum with opportunities to share your stories. Segments of the interviews will be broadcasted on WFDD radio station in the two weeks following the event. The interview sessions will be followed by screenings of two documentaries about the storm. “We Begin Again at 9:30” by Beth Davison and “Inundation” by Tom Hansell. In partnership with the University Libraries Oral History Office.

This inaugural concert will be performed by the Faculty Ensemble of the Hayes School of Music and is open to the public. The music was composed by Roger Tréfoussse who met Jack Boul in the 1960s when he was a music counselor at Camp Catawba in Blowing Rock. Subsequent performances of this music will be performed in Washington DC, New York, and Berlin Germany. 8 movements in the suite, inspired by 8 paintings of Jack Boul's and performed by 8 musicians.

Join App State’s Dr. Neva J. Specht for an in-depth look at Camp Catawba. This presentation will highlight founder Vera Lachmann’s vision for the camp, stories about their adventures, and the importance of the camp to the attendees as they became adults. Lachmann escaped Nazi Germany to immigrate to the United States. She was a trained classicist, taught kindergarten in Germany, and became an academic in the United States. In the summers, she turned an old chicken farm into a “groovy summer camp” for young boys.