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PBS: New View with Ed Gordon

MSNBC

Wolf Trap: Face of America doc

The 90-minute compendium showcases aerial dancers off the cliffs of Yosemite National Park, synchronized swimmers underwater at Coral Reef National Monument, and follows some of the country?s most exciting young dancers to Mammoth Cave, Wright Brothers National Memorial, the remains of a sugar cane plantation at Virgin Islands National Park, and the sacred terrain of Hawai?i Volcanoes National Park.

Launched in 2000, Wolf Trap?s Face of America commissions dance makers, musicians and performing artists from across the nation to explore the relationship between the natural stage and the creative process; and celebrate fellow National Parks and their cultural heritage using the language of the performing arts. The multi-year initiative of the Wolf Trap Foundation for the Performing Arts has resulted in a series of world premiere, multimedia programs at Wolf Trap?s Filene Center combining live performance with high-definition films of the performers on site at the parks.

I think dance works well to tell the story, says Terrence Jones, president and CEO of the Wolf Trap Foundation for the Performing Arts in Vienna, Virginia. is a medium that has incredible flexibility and with each choreographer a different sense of imagination and spirit.

Featured are Amelia Rudolph and Project Bandaloop at Yosemite with the music of Native American flutist Robert Mirabal; Donald Byrd and members of his troupe with jazz composer/musician Steve Turre at Virgin Islands National Park; Doug Varone interpreting the songs of country music singer Patti Loveless at Kentuckys Mammoth Cave National Park; and Elizabeth Streb celebrating the centennial of flight at Wright Brothers National Memorial in Kitty Hawk. Halau O Kekuhi chants and dances at Hawai?i Volcanoes National Park, while the Olympic Synchronized Swim Team salutes the aquatic life of Coral Reef National Monument.

Discovery Channel: Cave of the Glowing Skulls

When the explorers' flashlights first struck the skulls, they glittered like jewels in the darkness. When the lights were extinguished, the skulls glowed in the dark for nearly a minute before fading away. Their discovery in 1994, deep in a cave in the Mosquitia jungle of Honduras, led the site to be named the Cave of the Glowing Skulls and provided the first evidence of a previously unknown Central American civilization.

Three expeditions to the banks of the Rio Talgua have found other caves where the mysterious people, now known as the Talgua, buried their dead. Explorers also found at least one village where the Talgua settled sometime before 1400 BC and persisted as late as AD 900.

The team that found the sites, fortunately, carried video cameras with them and the record of the journey will be on view tonight at 9 on the Discovery Channel in a documentary called, not surprisingly, "The Cave of the Glowing Skulls."

Viewers will follow archeologist James E. Brady of George Washington University as he plunges deep into the cave systems--sometimes getting stuck in narrow passages--looking for the hidden burials. And they will be there when he stumbles into caverns filled with hundreds of human bones.