A Day in the Life of a Prison Theatre Program

2003 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lorraine Moller

The artistic director of Rehabilitation through the Arts recounts making Voices from Within with and for inmates of Sing Sing, a high-security prison north of New York City. The play, a collaboration developed in a workshop with playwright Barbara Quintero, portrays the strategies prisoners consciously or unconsciously use to survive the experience of incarceration.

Author(s):  
Marysol Quevedo

Born in Salinas, Puerto Rico, William Oritz was raised in New York City. He studied composition at the Conservatory of Music of Puerto Rico under Héctor Campos Parsi and Amaury Veray. He holds a master’s degree from SUNY at Stony Brook (1976), where his professors included Billy Jim Layton and Bülent Arel, and a PhD from SUNY at Buffalo (1983), where Lejaren Hiller and Morton Feldman were his professors. Ortiz served as assistant director of Black Mountain College II, NY, also teaching composition and music theory at the school. He has held the position of chair of the department of humanities and has served as band conductor for the University of Puerto Rico at Bayamón. As a music critic he has contributed to The San Juan Star. Among his many works Oritz has completed commissions for the Casals Festival, the Guitar Society of Toronto, the Puerto Rico Symphony Orchestra, and the New York State Council of the Arts. His approach to composition is characterized by an eclectic adoption of popular and urban music genres as part of his compositional palette. Early on he incorporated elements from urban street music, found mostly in the Latino and Black neighbourhoods of New York City and in the poorer neighbourhoods of San Juan, as reflected in Street Music (1980), Graffiti Nuyorican (1983), De Barrio Obrero a la Quince (1986), and Bolero and Hip-Hop en Myrtle Avenue (1986).


2005 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-246
Author(s):  
Mark Hodin

In November 1910, New Theatre artistic director Winthrop Ames asked his former teacher, Harvard English professor George Pierce Baker, to speak at a reception honoring the theatre's financial backers. The occasion was the start of the New Theatre's second season, and Ames was hoping to raise morale after a disappointing first year. Endowed primarily by millionaires in New York City, the New Theatre was supposed to offer a venue for staging plays free of the usual commercial pressures of Broadway productions. The contradiction at the heart of such an enterprise was manifest, particularly in the New Theatre's architecture and opulent interior design, which continually marked the “noncommercial” house as a monument to the economic power of those wealthy enough to provide for its massive and gaudy construction. Audiences complained that the two-thousand-seat auditorium had lousy acoustics; critics deemed the productions undistinguished and condemned the twenty-three Founders Boxes that ringed the orchestra as vulgar and ostentatious. Maybe an English professor, Ames thought, would have something helpful to say on the matter.


2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 97
Author(s):  
María F. Carrascal Pérez

<p>Given its positive economic, social and urban impact, even with low-cost or low-tech materialization, the urban creativity encouraged by the arts is of great interest today. This narrative reviews one of the most prolific careers in this regard addressing the pioneering work by Doris C. Freedman. The late 1960s and the 1970s, in the context of two financial crises, saw a groundbreaking effort to formalize innovative artistic programs that recycled the obsolete city and integrated local communities in the processes. Doris C. Freedman was the first director of NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, the Public Arts Council, and leader of the organization City Walls. These institutions promoted an unprecedented improvement of the public urban life through the cultural action. Such experiences led Freedman to the conception of her last project, the relevant and, still, ongoing Public Art Fund of New York City. This article focuses on her early professional years, when she began and consolidated herself in the task of legitimizing art as an urban instrument for shaping the city. This research provides a contextualized critical analysis on Freedman’s less-known experimental projects before the foundation of the Public Art Fund, enabling an extraordinary source of inspiration for a current creative city-making.</p>


Author(s):  
James Steichen

Lincoln Kirstein was an American impresario, writer, and philanthropist, best known as the patron and champion of choreographer George Balanchine, whom he brought to the United States in 1933. Born in Rochester, New York, Kirstein was raised among the wealthy elite of Boston and graduated from Harvard University. A prolific writer, editor, collector, and fund-raiser, Kirstein was a tireless advocate on behalf of the arts generally, and ballet and dance specifically, in the United States. He was a founding editor of the literary quarterly Hound & Horn and helped to create the organization that became the Museum of Modern Art. With Balanchine, Kirstein founded a series dance companies in the 1930s and 1940s, as well as the School of American Ballet (SAB), culminating in the creation in 1948 of the New York City Ballet (NYCB). He served as Managing Director of the New York City Center, and was a member of the original planning committee for the Lincoln Center. Kirstein was instrumental in securing major philanthropic support from the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations for SAB and NYCB (in addition to other American dance companies), and was a crucial institutional leader of both organizations throughout his life. An astute and wide-ranging collector of art, books, and dance memorabilia, Kirstein’s donations to the MoMA Dance Archives and the New York Public Library’s Jerome Robbins Dance Division constitute some of the most significant archival holdings in America on the history of ballet and dance.


2009 ◽  
Vol 24 (5) ◽  
pp. 365-374
Author(s):  
Rosemary Scanlon ◽  
Catherine Lanier
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  

2017 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 70-89
Author(s):  
Colleen Hooper

The Comprehensive Employment Training Act (CETA) was a program of the US federal government that employed dancers, performers, and other artists to provide public service in municipalities across the country from 1974 to 1982. This article focuses on dancers who participated in the CETA program. It describes this important source of government funding for dance and the arts that has been largely overlooked in scholarship. Through an analysis of one New York City CETA dance community performance site, it reveals the tensions present in the construct of “dance as public service.” This case study is offered as an exemplar of how the largest CETA arts program in the United States served a wide range of artists and communities. Through an analysis of two CETA dance performances at the Arthur Kill Correctional Facility in New York City, the article questions who was served by dance as public service.


1994 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 306-322
Author(s):  
Rena F. Subotnik

This interview was conducted in March of 1993, in Philip Scheffler's office at the Columbia Broadcasting System's (CBS) administrative and studio headquarters in New York City. It is part of a continuing series of reflections on talent development by prominent individuals outside the field of professional education. Mr. Scheffler's perspectives on the birth and transformation of network news have sweeping implications for nurturing of future talent in broadcast journalism and related fields.


1998 ◽  
Vol 8 (11) ◽  
pp. 121-129
Author(s):  
Fons Elders ◽  

The common root of the humanist and mythological traditions is the projection of a cosmological and spiritual desire, reflected in mythic archetypes such as Venus or the Statue of Liberty in the harbor of New York City. The philosophical companion of Renaissance Venus is Eros as the all-compassing force in nature, and the philosophical correlate of the Statue of Liberty is Immanuel Kant's das Ding an sich. I focus on the intimate reladonship between the domain of artistic imagination and philosophical discourse: the apparent difference is due to the separation between philosophy, science, and the arts since the Enlightenment. Closer scrutiny reveals that the same content is hidden in the various vessels of our modern and postmodern time. Reason and imagination seem to have gone different roads, but I will try to show that they are inseparably interconnected.


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