Author Archives: Christina

WESTFEST 2015 dance review – A sheer thrill!

WESTFEST NEWS ARTICLE 2015

WestFest’s “All Over Westbeth” takes advantage of the site-specific possibilities of the Westbeth Artists Community, an enormous complex in the far West Village. A former Bell Laboratory, the buildings were repurposed in the 60s to provide inexpensive housing for creators of all stripes. Curators Carol Nolte and Carol Mendes say, “WestFest itself was born from the idea of embracing the outstanding artist history at the Westbeth’s building.” In “All Over Westbeth,” residents lead tours through the sprawling compound for small groups to witness short spurts of dance unfolding in the most unexpected of places.

Read the full article by Erin Bomboy here: The Dance Enthusaist

Will Westbeth be the new St Vincent’s? Read the article by Catherine Revland published in WestView .

REVENUE RUNAROUND: A view of Westbeth’s prime commercial luxury space: sweet deal or a breach of fiduciary trust? Photo: Ramscale.

REVENUE RUNAROUND: A view of Westbeth’s prime commercial luxury space: sweet deal or a breach of fiduciary trust? Photo: Ramscale.

Westbeth Board Sues the Attorney General

From its inception in 1970 the revenue from artist residents has far exceeded that of the commercial tenants, and for decades the Westbeth Board of Directors’ excuse has been the undesirability of the neighborhood. Although this excuse is no longer valid, the current Board refuses to reveal information about the current commercial rent roll. In fact, Executive Director Steven Neil has told the Westbeth Artist Residents Council (WARC) they do not have the right to receive any details about Westbeth’s finances.

Read more here: http://westviewnews.org/2015/05/will-westbeth-be-the-next-st-vincents/

Carol Hebald publishes new chapbook of poems, Colloquy

CAROL HEBALD Postcard(FRONT&BACK)

In these poems Carol Hebald’s “Colloquy” with the too-soon-departed father glitters with a honed craft as she poignantly grapples with a universe of personal emblems and elemental memories, invoking the natural world and conflicted love. For example, as she reports in these evocative lines from “In Memoriam”:
I feel your absence
more than I miss your presence.
Where you went I never knew.
The key my memory left with you
is underneath the snow…
Oh my father, I call your name
but cannot speak your name.
—Hugh Seidman, author of: Somebody Stand Up and Sing (from New Issues Press 2005)

Carol Hebald’s new collection Colloquy is an extraordinary achievement. It’s a dialogue between a young woman and her father, who died when she was a young child. Their voices, his imagined from beyond the grave, merge on and off through this lyric meditation. Even though the poems are connected, each poem is self-contained and remarkable, and many individual poems contain the full drama of the whole. Whether in the first or third person, an intimacy is experienced throughout. “How passionately we spoke, how well!” she says to her father, and this is so true of the poetry on every page.
—Barry Wallenstein, author of DRASTIC DISLOCATIONS, New & Selected Poems (NYQ Books).

Rivers of soft rain and storms of hot blood run through Carol Hebald’s new and most impassioned collection of poems. COLLOQUY is a beautifully crafted work of yearning memory that explores the dark worlds of temptation, seduction, and abuse, and the final journey to forgiveness and light in the history of a daughter’s and father’s love.

—Martin Tucker, author of PLENTY OF EXITS, and Editor-Emeritus of CONFRONTATION Magazine.

Westbeth video artist Maya Ciarrocchi
in NY Times article about
“Telephone” art exhibit/

Maya Ciarrocchi TELEPHONE

Sometime last winter, Terri St.Arnauld and Frank Yezer, photographers in Austin, Tex., and Maya Ciarrocchi, a video artist in New York, each received an email that contained a song. The tune was by Stelth Ulvang, a musician from Denver, whom they had never met. In a spare recording, on banjo and accordion, Mr. Ulvang sang of a forlorn man and a landscape of smoke and clouds.

All three recipients got down to work, poring over the lyrics, “trying to understand what the artist was conveying,” Ms. St.Arnauld said. Their goal was to make something inspired by the song, and to connect in a mysterious creative experiment.

Read more about the project here:
NY Times article

Lilly Rivlin film “Esther Broner: A Weave of Women” featured at Grace Paley Symposium at New School on April 9, 2015

Lilly Rivlin GracePaley Schedule

In 1975 Esther Broner and Naomi Nimrod wrote the first Women’s Haggadah, paving the way for modern Jewish feminism. For the next 36 years, Esther Broner led the Feminist Passover Seder in New York City, with a core group of women. This film documents the evolution of Jewish feminism through archival footage and interviews with leading Jewish feminists. At the same time it tells the story of Esther Broner, described by the New York Times as a writer who explored the double marginalization of being Jewish and female. Without her, we can assume, modern Jewish women might not have found a worthy place in the home, in society, and in Jewish tradition.

More info about the film: www.estherbronerthefilm.com

More info about symposium: