Archive for the ‘ Current Events ’ Category

Polish Consulate Commemorates Western Press Coverage of Solidarnosc

Author: admin

Dec 8

Nov. 9, at Polish consulate: journalists John Darnton, Dan Rather, Bill Wheatley, Andrew Gorski and others told funny stories of coverage of Solidarnosc hosted by former journalist, Consul General Ewa Junczyk-Ziomecka. Leading Solidarnosc architect and advisor to the the current Polish president, Komorowski, Henryk Wujek and the scamp of the underground press, Konstanty Gebert, AKA David Warsawski, also spoke. Gebert eluded police for years while playfully confounding them. After the fall of communism he resurrected the Jewish community in Warsaw finding, to his his shock and theirs, many friends with Jewish ancestry. I supported Solidarnosc for eight years because of its public declaration of being anti-anti-Semitic in its famous list of 21…

www.youtube.com

Video of first event for 30 Year Anniversary at the Polish Consulate. Great clips of my friend Elizabeth Sachs who was colleague with Henryk Wujek and Jacek Kuron, Solidarity leaders. Nathaniel Czarnecki, my escort for the event is seen weaving through the background as am I. Nathaniel is the son of the Reuters photo-journalist, Joseph Czarnecki, who took the most famous photos of the period.

On November 9th, 2010, the Consulate General of the Republic of Poland in New York, in cooperation with the Overseas Press Club of America, celebrated the 30th anniversary of the founding of Solidarnosc with a reunion of several U.S. foreign correspondents who witnessed the birth of the independent trade union.

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Dance Theater X offers glimpse of a grim future

Author: admin

Dec 6

Posted on Mon, Dec. 6, 2010

By Merilyn Jackson

For The Inquirer

At the Painted Bride over the weekend, Charles O. Anderson’s Dance Theater X took us to the past and the future to show us what our world could look like in 20 years.World Headquarters features photographic projections, which Anderson designed with Bill Hebert and Troy Dwyer, of President Obama’s first days in office, 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and Nazi death camps. They show us that with just a few more cataclysmic events, our planet could take the few of us left back to our more primitive selves. The World Headquarters of the title has fallen, as represented by the images of the World Trade Center towers falling, and society has broken down.

Hailing from Richmond, Va., Anderson earned a master of fine arts from Temple University and is now an associate professor of dance at Muhlenberg College, where he also heads the African American studies program. For World Headquarters, he was inspired by the late science fiction writer Octavia Butler, but also drew on Essex Hemphill, Sam Shoemaker, and Walter Benjamin for what was a bit too much text that he wrote with Dwyer.

Anderson virtually turned the Painted Bride into a makeshift encampment. He had a section of seating removed and replaced with scrounged objects from children’s books to walkie-talkie, from teepee to TV. The dancers visited this set from time to time but danced mostly on the stage, which held additional seating to accommodate the large audience.

As Professor Bankole Olamina, Anderson led the eight ragtag survivors of “The Pox” in dances ritualistic and mournful. Anderson’s robust dancing hangs from his powerful, undulating shoulders and ripples electrically through his body’s bent knees, essed torso, and imploringly released fingers. Raising the staff he wields, he is clearly the Moses of this tribe.

In the beginning, he leads them in the piece’s most poignant dance. All wear mesh hoods and, with bodies bent over in grief, propel themselves forward as best they can.

It was good to see Michael Velez dancing locally again. He’s late of Koresh Dance Company and working in San Francisco. As Zebulon Pierce, he represents the progenitor of what could be the next generation of these survivors. Shavon Norris and Karama Butler stood out even in the group dancing, but all performed this work they helped create with conviction and skill. In this parable of parables, Butler, as Olamina’s daughter, states: “God is change.”

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Hua-Hua Zhang Puppetmaster

Author: admin

Dec 5

Dec 4th, 2010 | By Merilyn Jackson | Category: Artist Profiles

By Merilyn Jackson for The Dance Journal

Dance is a career that parallels those of athletes in terms of length – short, and actors in terms of character development – elusive.

Dance training – especially on a professional level – is rigorous, endless, expensive, often leads to painful injury, and the repetition can just be a boring pain. But it can also lead to the joy of attaining perserverance and the mastery over a difficult combination and, in the end, the gratitude of an appreciative audience after a soaring performance underpinned by good technique.

Last year, choreographer Kun-Yang Lin devised an innovative training program with master teachers that he hoped would reinvigorate his company by engaging their skills, mind and sense of self. It began with the first visit by master teacher from Taiwan’s Cloud Gate Dance Theater Hsu-Hui Huang and expanded this year with the return of Huang, followed by Chik Qadir Mason in Martial Arts, Hua Hua Zhang a master puppet artist now living in Boothwyn, PA and concluded with Tibetan ritual dance master Losang Samten (who will be the subject of the next installment in this series.) Lin’s intention is to provide his company dancers’ (and any others who wish to participate) with new pathways that can lead them to reach ever deeper into their psyches to bring out emotionally expressive nuances that trump mere technique. As anyone who has watched Lin himself dance knows, the externalization of these inner impulses create a more organic experience for the audience.

To read more:

http://philadelphiadance.org/blog/2010/12/04/hua-hua-zhang-puppetmaster/

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‘Remember Me,’ and you will, at Annenberg

Author: admin

Dec 4

Posted on Sat, Dec. 4, 2010

By Merilyn Jackson

For The Inquirer

EDUARDO PATINO

Parsons Dance Company dances the rock opera/ballet
“Remember Me,” lambasted by critics, loved by audiences.
After two years of touring, choreographer David Parsons’ Remember Me finally landed in Philadelphia Thursday night at Annenberg Center. A brilliant hit, it slams at the highbrow expectations of New York critics who’ve labeled it superficial and more soap than rock opera. Some say it’s a pop-opera; the Village Voice’s Deborah Jowitt called it a dansical.

None of this matters to audiences, which erupt in applause at the end of each act and bolt from their seats to cheer before the finale’s last notes fade. This is the kind of show that would have elicited flowers flung on the stage in another era.

What puzzles me is that Twyla Tharp gets nary a raised eyebrow for her Broadway excursions with Billy Joel and her Sinatra syndrome, while Parsons has his feet held to the fire for collaborating with the East Village Opera Company (EVOC) to create an uber-sexy, easy-to-follow narrative as entertaining as any opera from a century ago – a gorgeously performed work for our time.

Read more: http://www.philly.com/inquirer/magazine/20101204__Remember_Me___and_you_will__at_Annenberg.html#ixzz17BYewx4O
PLEASE NOTE: For some reason, my best line was edited out of the article and now reads incorrectly. It should have read, as I’ve corrected it above: “What puzzles me is that Twyla Tharp gets nary a raised eyebrow for her Broadway excursions with Billy Joel and her Sinatra syndrome…”

I meant it that way because Tharp has gone off the deep end on Sinatra and I’ll gag if I ever have to review one of those pieces again. What’s with that?

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Filed under: Current Events, Dance, East Village Opera Company, Inquirer Articles

A dancer steps into ‘The Rape Play’

Author: admin

Nov 16

Posted on Tue, Nov. 16, 2010

Amy Smith, as Jane Fonda, lends the controversial work her humor.

By Merilyn Jackson

For The Inquirer

There’s theater, dance, dance theater, musical theater, physical theater, and variations with multimedia and new media. The lines differentiating them have been blurring throughout the past century, especially in the last 30 years or so. And in Philadelphia the pairings and sharings among disciplines have blended in some surprising ways, among them That Pretty Pretty; or, The Rape Play, which Theatre Exile opens here this week – with a dancer in a major role.
When Sheila Callaghan’s controversial play premiered last year in New York, it was variously reviewed as tricky and darkly funny or raunchy and only partly successful. It begins with two women in a hotel who entice an anti-abortion crusader into their room and murder him; the scene is immediately replayed with two men who kill a hooker. For the rest of the play, Jane Fonda flits in and out of these scenes like a misguided Tinker Bell, sprinkling feel-good happy dust over the carnage.
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OPEN LETTER TO PENNSYLVANIA GAMING CONTROL BOARD

Author: admin

Nov 16

Dear Unelected Officials:

I live not far from the proposed Foxwoods site. I shop at IKEA, Lowe’s, Home Depot and other businesses along Delaware Ave. (Columbus Blvd.)  The traffic congestion is already such that I plan my shopping for late evening on Mondays through Thursdays. Saturdays and Sundays are impossible.

It is inconceivable to me and my neighbors that you in other parts of the state, who have no experience of our neighborhood, would take it upon yourselves to shove an unwanted business down our throats. The area between 8th  and 4th Streets and from Oregon to Washington is populated by mostly very poor people who will no doubt be lured to spend their welfare checks at a casino that can walk to. Many have large families and the children will surely suffer when money for food is gambled away. You need only go to Atlantic City to see the low-income and elderly populations that the casino industry preys upon and, moreover, how depressed that city is. Gambling only furthered the decline of Atlantic City.

I am not against gambling. For some who can afford it and have self-control, I say if they are stupid enough to gamble let them be free to do so. But I am against putting the opportunity to do so so close to family neighborhoods, the poor and elderly and schools.

There are plenty of other sites outside of Philadelphia that would be more suitable. You have already blighted our city with Sugarhouse and its low-income “jobs.” Rest easy that you have done enough damage to a city you seem to hate and that we love. Neither Foxwoods nor any other casino-entity will serve our wonderful city well. Have mercy on us and revoke Foxwoods license and grant none to any other investors.

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Lucy Wilhoite, my Great Grandmother and Grandfather Louis Arrested

Author: admin

Nov 9

From the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin
By Joe Blackstock, Our Past
Created: 05/11/2006 09:34:10 PM PDT
L.C. and Lucy Wilhoite lived their lives deeply devoted to combating one of society’s evils — demon rum — and they weren’t shy about getting into a fight about it.Before they came to live in Upland in the 1920s and 1930s, Lucy Wilhoite was twice jailed in Kansas with prohibitionist Carrie Nation, after they used hatchets to break up saloons in Wichita.

Lucy Wilhoite later came West and became a minister, still continuing the fight against booze as president of San Bernardino County’s Woman’s Christian Temperance Union.

One day in 1932, her 83-year-old husband got into an argument with a man about Prohibition and was arrested for threatening him and using profane language. City Attorney Edward E. Gray said Wilhoite was ‘‘intoxicated with anger.”

Given the choice of a $60 fine or 30 days in jail, he stubbornly chose the latter.

http://www.dailybulletin.com/family/ci_3812989

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Wordplay Going Around the Tea Party

Author: admin

Nov 5

Did you know that, the words “race car” spelled backwards still spells “race car”?

And that “eat” is the only word that, if you take the first letter and move it to the last, spells its own past tense, “ate”?

And if you rearrange the letters in “Tea Party Republicans,” and add just a few more letters, it spells:

“Shut the fuck up you free-loading, progress-blocking, benefit-grabbing, resource-sucking, violent hypocrites, and deal with the fact that you nearly wrecked the country under Bush and that our president is black, so try and get over it.”
Isn’t that interesting?

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Recycled or new, Koresh dance dazzles

Author: admin

Nov 1

Posted on Sat, Oct. 30, 2010

The troupe’s students were smooth, too.

By Merilyn Jackson

For The Inquirer

Koresh Dance Company, at Thursday’s opening of its fall run at Suzanne Roberts Theatre, did what it always does – stormed the stage and took no prisoners.Roni Koresh opened with the Koresh Youth Ensemble performing an excerpt from one of his best works, Negative Spaces, a fiercely staccato dance of fisted hands and attacking feet.

Normally a student group wouldn’t be reviewed, but the ensemble’s 13-to-18-year-olds danced the challenging piece almost as well as I recall the professional troupe did some five years ago. Charged up by the antic music of the Romanian brass band Fanfare Ciocarlia, they brought the piece home with their fake laughter and perfect timing.

Benchtime Stories and Somewhere in Between were announced as world premieres, but some parts were recycled. In any event, sections one and five of Benchtime Stories – short episodes set on and around benches – were better in their second comings. Both are comedic. In “The Bums,” Eric Bean and Micah Geyer created drolly drunk shtick. Instead of pratfalling, they land in perfect splits and backflips. Bean, in “The Bench” takes a pretty funny beating as Alexis Viator seduces him while they wait for a bus.

Read more: http://www.philly.com/inquirer/magazine/20101030_Recycled_or_new__Koresh_dance_dazzles.html#ixzz13sEW0O2u

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Is it Harassment?

Author: admin

Oct 29

Ken Metzner is executive director of Kun-Yang Lin/Dancers, a lawyer and minister who advocates for his beleaguered community and the entire City of Philadelphia for reform of the Board of Real Estate Taxes (BRT.) It’s a Sisysphian battle but we’ve won a few rounds thanks to active citizens like Metzner. Now this unqualified board is calling homeowners to inspect the interior of their homes, an unprecedented move. Even the office of Licenses and Inspection can’t be moved to inspect a home’s interior unless they receive many complaints from neighbors of a valid problem. Please take a moment to read Metzner’s letter below and let him know what you know about interior inspections.

I, for one, would not allow anyone from the BRT into my home until I learn if it is

a. lawful and until

b. I am certain the inspectors are qualified and

c. know what it is exactly they are looking to find and d. how that would influence my tax assessment.

Hi Folks — A few people who have appeals pending before the BRT for the proposed 2011 taxes have contacted me recently to say that the “Office of Property Assessment” [new name, same assessors] has been calling to schedule an inspection of the INTERIOR of their homes.

Has anyone else received such a request?  If so, please let me know.  Some are viewing this latest development as further intimidation of those who file appeals given that the homes of folks who are not appealing do not appear to be subject to this kind of inspection.  I’d therefore like to look into it a bit more and would appreciate your stories…

I’d also like to hear from any long-time Philly residents regarding their experience, if any, with interior inspections being requested by an assessor.  Our feeling is that this is something very new.

Thanks for keeping the information flowing.

Regards,

Ken Metzner

[email protected]

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