Author Archives: Christina

Feldenkrais Class with certified Feldenkrais teacher

FELDENKRAIS 2017

$5.00 per class

Contact: Sandra Kingsbury westbethevents
@gmail.com

Sponsored by Westbeth Beautfication Committee

Doron Tadmor is a Feldenkrais Guild certified teacher

Class lasts 1 hour

The Feldenkrais Method consists of verbally directed movement sequences presented primarily to groups. A lesson generally lasts from thirty to sixty minutes. Each lesson is usually organized around a particular function.

Feldenkrais’Awareness Through Movement lessons, people engage in precisely structured movement explorations that involve thinking, sensing, moving, and imagining. Many are based on developmental movements and ordinary functional activities. Some are based on more abstract explorations of joint, muscle, and postural relationships. The lessons consist of comfortable, easy movements that gradually evolve into movements of greater range and complexity.

Feldenkrais’ lessons attempt to make one aware of his/her habitual neuromuscular patterns and rigidities and to expand options for new ways of moving while increasing sensitivity and improving efficiency. There are hundreds of Awareness Through Movement lessons contained in the Feldenkrais Method that vary, for all levels of movement ability, from simple in structure and physical demand, to more difficult lessons.

A major goal of the Feldenkrais Method is to learn how one’s most basic functions are organized and improve. By experiencing the details of how one performs any action, the student has the opportunity to learn how to:

attend to his/her whole self
eliminate unnecessary energy expenditure
mobilize his/her intentions into actions
learn and improve

Westbeth in NY Times Magazine
Culture Issue April 2018
The Landmarks that Made New York
A Cultural Capital

Photo: Rob Stephenson

Westbeth Artists’ Housing
Westbeth, on Bethune Street, along the Hudson River, one of the first subsidized artists’ housing complexes in the United States, opened in 1970, providing cheap rent in 384 live-work spaces. Many of the residents that moved in decades ago are still there today. Credit Rob Stephenson

ONE OF THE realities of living in New York is that you cannot become too attached to specific places any more than you can become attached to certain people in your life: the waitress you chat with every weekend, the parking garage guy, the newsstand vendor from whom you buy a paper. Often, they disappear, and you may never learn why. Why was that building torn down? Why did that bar close overnight? Whatever happened to the bartender? And what about Mohammed? He was here yesterday.

Place is as crucial to the architecture of memory as it is to dreaming, and like those New Yorkers who seem to disappear, spaces themselves carry their own memories here. Departed landmarks like CBGB or the Mudd Club are not so much addresses in downtown Manhattan as they are touchstones in the collective consciousness, occasionally reminding us of what was and of how much has changed — not least, ourselves. CBGB is where a 16-year-old Adam Horovitz — soon to be known as Ad-Rock of the Beastie Boys — opened for punk legends Bad Brains in 1982; the Mudd Club is where, a few years earlier, Talking Heads, performing just days after the release of “Fear of Music,” coolly name-checked both spots in the iconic song “Life During Wartime.” (“This ain’t no Mudd Club or CBGB / I ain’t got time for that now.”) Moments like these still haunt the city — half recalled, half imagined — even now that the Mudd Club is a condo building where a unit sold recently for $3.6 million, or CBGB has been colonized by designer John Varvatos, plundering the cultural heritage of the very building he now occupies.

– Bill Hayes

Read rest of article HERE

Beth Soll & Company in “The Window: Visions and Ordinary Rituals”
Saturday and Sunday May 5th and 6th at Martha Graham Dance Studio

Beth Soll Dance

Dance Projects, Inc. presents Beth Soll & Company in “The Window: Visions and Ordinary Rituals”: A new dance choreographed by Westbeth resident, Beth Soll and danced Karesia Batan, Bridget Cronin, Kristen Hedberg, Michelle Micca, Emma Pressman, Beth Soll and Lea Torelli. Music by J.S. Bach and new music by Carolyn Lord and Dewey Emadoo. Also on the program: Beth Soll’s solo: “Dance for Ina,”

When: Saturday, May 5 at 8:30 pm and Sunday May 6 at 3 pm
What: Dance for Ina (2017) and The Window: Visions and Ordinary Rituals (premiere)
Where: Martha Graham Studio Theater at 55 Bethune Street in NYC. 11th floor.

Admission: General $18. Seniors (65+) $15. Children (ages 5-10) $5.

Reservations and/or tickets at brownpapertickets.com or at bethsbron@gmail.com or tickets at the door (cash only).

Information: bethsollandcompany.org, bethsbron@gmail.com, https://m.facebook.com/Dance- Projects-Inc-Beth-Soll-Co- 449503308531483/

Event:
This event will feature a premiere performance of the full-length dance, “The Window: Visions and Ordinary Rituals,” which will be performed by Soll’s company of seven dancers. In addition, Beth Soll will perform “Dance for Ina” (2017) to traditional jazz and the music of J.S. Bach.

“The Window: Visions and Ordinary Rituals,” with music by New York composers Carolyn Lord and Dewey Emadoo, was inspired by the current interest in meditation practices and by rituals in both everyday life and more official contexts. Within the dance, visions of peaceful meditative movement interludes are juxtaposed with unofficial and sometimes athletic, secular rituals.

Kate Walter ‘s latest essay, We Were Immigrants Who Sold our House to Other Immigrants, featured in Purple Clover online magazine.

KATE WALTER immigrant article

About five years ago, Olga asked my mother if she would consider renting the empty first-floor apartment. Olga wanted to sponsor her sister and brother-in-law and bring them from Ecuador. Mom agreed.

Bella and Jorge became tenants in the house too; it felt safer to us with a man on the premises. Bella was eager to learn English and Mom tutored her using books my sister had from her career as a reading teacher. My mother, who’d come here from Ireland as a child, was glad to help the new arrivals adjust.

Now Olga wanted to buy the house….

Read the full article HERE

Kate Walter is the author of the memoir Looking for a Kiss: A Chronicle of Downtown Heartbreak and Healing. Her essays and opinion pieces have appeared in many publications. She teaches personal essay writing at New York University School of Professional Studies.

PEN America World Voices Festival
Literary Quest
Westbeth Edition

PEN Poster 2018 Public

When: Friday April 20
Where: Westbeth Community Room 155 Bank Street
When: 6:30pm – 9:30pm
Tickets: $20
Order tickets here: https://worldvoices.pen.org/session/literary-quest-westbeth-edition/

Experience the artist’s life in one of New York’s leading artist housing communities. The artist-residents of this cultural institution open their homes for intimate, salon-style readings and conversations with Festival authors, followed by cocktails in their legendary gallery.

With PEN Authors:
Nachoem M. Wijnberg (Amsterdam, 1961) is a Dutch poet and novelist. His poetry has received many awards, including the 2018 PC Hooft Prize, the most important career award in the Netherlands. His work has been translated into many languages, books in English include Advance Payment (Anvil Press/Carcanet, 2013), Divan of Ghalib (White Pine Press, 2016) and Of Great Importance (Punctum, 2018).He is also a professor at the University of Amsterdam Business School.

Rupert Thomson’s latest novel is Never Anyone But You slated to publish with Other Press this June. He is the author of nine highly acclaimed novels, including Katherine Carlyle; Secrecy; The Insult, which was shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Prize and selected by David Bowie as one of his 100 Must-Read Books of All Time. He lives in London.

Ashley Hay’s work has been praised for its “incandescent intelligence and a rare sensibility.” An award-winning essayist and science writer, her three novels–The Body in the Clouds, The Railwayman’s Wife, and A Hundred Small Lessons–have received or been shortlisted for literary awards in Australia and beyond.

Susan Kuklin is an author and photographer of nonfiction books for young adults, including Beyond Magenta, Transgender Teens Speak Out, No Choirboy: Murder, Violence and Teenagers on Death Row, and Dance, coauthored with Bill T. Jones. Her photographs have appeared in major newspapers and magazines, documentary films, and the permanent collection at the Museum of the City of New York.

Susan will be reading from a soon-to-be-published book, Here to Stay, Undocumented Young Adults.

Trifonia Melibea Obono is a journalist and a professor at the National University of Equatorial Guinea. She is pursuing her doctorate in gender studies and human rights from the University of Salamanca, Spain.

Sharon Bala’s debut novel, The Boat People, was published by McClelland & Stewart and Doubleday US in January 2018. The manuscript won the Percy Janes First Novel Award and was shortlisted for the Fresh Fish Award. A three-time recipient of Newfoundland and Labrador’s Arts and Letters award, she has stories published in Hazlitt, Grain, The Dalhousie Review, and others.

Demian Vitanza is an acclaimed Norwegian playwright and author. He taught writing in Norway’s high security prisons when he met a young Norwegian-Pakistani man imprisoned for traveling to Syria and taking part in terrorist actions. This Life or the Next is Vitanza’s third book.

Alicia Kopf is the artistic name for Catalan writer Imma Ávalos. After her first individual exhibition at the Joan Prats Gallery in Barcelona, she participated in many collective exhibitions at CCCB and MACBA, or the Tàpies Foundation, amongst others. Her first novel, Germà de gel (L´Altra Editorial, 2016), has received several awards and will be published in nearly 10 languages.

Hadi Nasiri is an Iranian multidisciplinary artist and activist whose work involves painting, sculpture, film, graphic design, performance, and political protest. Hadi is the first artist to participate in the New York City Safe Haven Residency Program, a multi-organizational artist residency program designed to house, integrate, and support artists under threat.

Basma Abdel Aziz

Ayelet Gundar-Goshen

Kanchana Ugbabe is an Indian-Nigerian Writer and scholar teaching creative writing at Fordham University. She is the New York City Safe Haven Prototype’s first Writer at Risk in Residence of the Fordham University’s English Department living in Westbeth. Kanchana work surrounds cross-cultural negotiations and ethno-religious conflict in the city of Jos, Nigeria. She spent a year as Scholar at Risk at Harvard University, and many years as professor of English at the University of Jos.

Ayşe Kulin is one of Turkey’s most beloved authors, with more than ten million copies of her books sold. In addition to penning internationally bestselling novels, she has worked as a producer, cinematographer, and screenwriter for numerous television shows and films. Her novel Last Train to Istanbul won the European Council Jewish Community Best Novel Award and has been translated into twenty-three languages.

Leni Zumas is the author of the story collection Farewell Navigator and the novel The Listeners, which was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award. She is an associate professor in the MFA in Creative Writing program at Portland State University.

Co-presented with the Westbeth Artists Residents Council

Tickets: $20
Order tickets here: https://worldvoices.pen.org/session/literary-quest-westbeth-edition/