5 Questions with Arturo O'Farrill
Six-time Grammy® Award-winner Arturo O’Farrill returns to our stage April 13 with his Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra. A Latin jazz visionary and part of our ListenHear series highlighting influential composers of today, we connected with O’Farrill to learn more about him in just five questions. Enjoy!
1) What first got you into music?
It was expected of a firstborn Latin male to follow the family business (my father [Chico O’Farrill] was a famous Afro Cuban composer) and so I was given piano lessons. I had talent, so I was sent to the Manhattan School of Music. Read more...
Engaging our communities with the Negro Ensemble Company
February’s world premiere of
Mecca is Burning, our commissioned play co-produced by our
22/23 season artist-in-residence, the Negro Ensemble Company (NEC), was a resounding success. Through our residency activities, over 150 students at Penn and in Philadelphia schools received special insight into the development of new theatre. NEC Artistic Director Karen Brown visited theatre arts instructor Margit Edwards’ Movement for the Actor class with NEC actor Steven Peacock Jacoby. Speaking to a room of Penn students studying everything from engineering to economics, Brown and Peacock Jacoby emphasized the meaningful place theatre could occupy in students’ lives, regardless of their career paths.
Read more...Thoughts on Martin Bresnick’s Self-Portraits 1964, Unfinished
If the fundamental demand of the self-portraiture artist is “Look at me,” then I ask if the same may be said of the self-portraiture composer. In a way, every piece of art is a self-portrait: a way of saying, “this is how I see the world.” But when the artist places themselves in the picture, the direction of the view has changed and the eyes of the artist are not looking, with us, at something, but are instead looking at us, the viewer. “This is how I see the world” is quite different than “This is how I want you to see me in the world.”
Read more...Bringing Beowulf into the present day with Benjamin Bagby
When we contacted a group of early modernist faculty in the Penn music and English departments about a possible engagement event featuring Benjamin Bagby, whose performance of
Beowulf took place on January 27, the response was immediate and enthusiastic. These faculty, including Assistant Professor of Music Mary Channen Caldwell, Assistant Professor of English Caroline Batten, and Professor of English David Wallace, were more than scholarly appreciators of Bagby’s painstaking historical investigation into the type of harp most likely to have accompanied the epic poem, or his years of touring the globe enlivening the Old English text for contemporary audiences: they were
fans.
Read more...Spotlight on Terence Nance
“His work is an Afrofuturist’s dream that holds a mirror up to present-day reality and forces it to confront itself in an abstract, yet fitting, manner. It serves hard truths you can’t look away from, and it does so in the Blackest way ever.”
–Taryn Finley, Huffington Post
Terence Nance is one of the most extraordinary filmmakers of his generation. While his work is bolstered by its artistic excellence and technical complexity, it resonates because of its social relevance. Nance’s practice is collaborative in scope and serves as an inspiration to many other contemporary artists and filmmakers.
Read more...5 Questions with Lisa McCree
We’re thrilled to welcome the Negro Ensemble Company, our
22/23 season artist-in-residence, back this month for the world premiere of
Mecca is Burning. Ahead of this exciting production, we connected with one of the collaborative playwrights, Lisa McCree, to learn a little more about her and her work. Enjoy!
Read more...The legendary Martha Graham Dance Company brings two Philadelphia premieres and the timeless masterpiece, Appalachian Spring
“Dancer of the Century,” (
TIME) genius, revolutionary, brilliant and superstar. These are just a few of the terms used to describe the mother of modern dance in America, Martha Graham.
In 1926, the Martha Graham Dance Company (MGDC) exploded onto the world stage, stunning audiences with its unique approaches, stimulating subject matters, angular movement vocabulary and powerful theatrics. Graham’s prolific repertoire of 181 dances, her own spectacular performances and her company’s commanding appearances are forever embedded in the memories of devoted fans. Graham’s famous mantra is at the heart and soul of the company’s work, “Dance is the hidden language of the soul of the body. The body says what words cannot. Movement never lies:” Read more...
A renaissance for Penn Live Arts
From the construction of the new Weitzman Theatre, to increased support of student performers across campus, to expanded residencies with groundbreaking artists, Penn Live Arts is putting innovative performing arts center stage at Penn and in Philadelphia.
Read more...Our fall education and engagement activities
“It’s like watching people paint with their life, with their bodies,” longtime Negro Ensemble Company actor Kene Holliday told a roomful of Penn students about the art of acting this past November. Holliday would know; the historic company’s
Brownstein Residency for Artistic Innovation with Penn Live Arts this year marks more than 50 years of the stage, film and TV actor’s career. He and NEC Artistic Director Karen Brown made Penn Professor McKenna Kerrigan’s Intro to Directing class one stop in a busy series of outreach engagements to students and the West Philadelphia community, kicking off our education and engagement activities for the season.
Read more...Thoughts on Dance Theatre of Harlem
Dance
Black ballet dancers were virtually non-existent on the stage in the late nineteen sixties. There wasn’t even a discussion about this exclusion. Mainstream classical ballet was white. The racist norm was that black dancers could not physically perform classical dance and they would “break the look” of dancers in a line.
Philadelphia’s own Joan Myers Brown, PHILADANCO’s founder, was turned away from our hometown ballet company because of race. There was the occasional artist that broke through the color barrier and was by default essentially a token. It was not a very encouraging situation for dancers of color. Read more...
