Performing Communities 4: Short Essays on Community, Diversity, Inclusion, and the Performing Arts

Performing Community 4 : Short Essays on Community, Diversity, Inclusion, and the Performing Arts

By Blair A. Ruble

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PERFORMING COMMUNITY

The Wilson Center, chartered by Congress as the official memorial to President Woodrow Wilson, is the nation’s key non-partisan policy forum for tackling global issues through independent research and open dialogue to inform actionable ideas for Congress, the Administration and the broader policy community.

Conclusions or opinions expressed in Center publications and programs are those of the authors and speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Center staff, fellows, trustees, advisory groups, or any individuals or organizations that provide financial support to the Center.

Jane Harman, Director, President, and CEO BOARD OF TRUSTEES Chairman of the Board Scott Walker, Former Governor of Wisconsin Vice Chair Drew Maloney, President and CEO, American Investment Council Public Members: Alex Azar, Secretary, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Elisabeth DeVos, Secretary, U.S. Department of Education David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States Carla D. Hayden, Librarian of Congress Jon Parrish Peede, Chairman, National Endowment for the Humanities Michael Pompeo, Secretary, U.S. Department of State Lonnie G. Bunch III, Secretary, Smithsonian Institution Private Citizen Members: Peter J. Beshar, Executive Vice President & General Counsel, Marsh & McLennan Companies, Inc. Thelma Duggin, President, AnBryce Foundation Barry S. Jackson, Managing Director, The Lindsey Group and Strategic Advisor, Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck David Jacobson, Former U.S. Ambassador to Canada and Vice Chair, BMO Financial Group Nathalie Rayes, Vice President of Public Affairs, Grupo Salinas Earl W. Stafford, Chief Executive Officer, The Wentworth Group, LLC Louis Susman, Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Kingdom

CONTENTS Introduction: Innovative Cities at Creative Moments City Profiles Beijing, 1790 / 1 Buenos Aires, 1910 / 4 Cape Town, 2000 / 7 Chicago, 1900 / 10 Havana, 1890 / 14 Houston, 2017 / 17 Lagos, 1970 / 20 London, 1730 / 23 Montreal, 1970 / 26 Moscow, 2000 / 29 Naples, 1760 / 32 New Orleans, 1910 / 35 New York, 2010 / 38 Odesa, 1920 / 41 Osaka, 1700 / 44 Paris, 1860 / 47 Saint Petersburg (Leningrad), 1960 / 50 San Francisco, 2018 / 53 SĂŁo Paulo, 1968 / 56 Toronto, 2010 / 59 Venice, 1620 / 62 Vienna, 1800 / 65 Washington, 1920 / 69 Yekaterinburg, 1980 / 72

Contents of Performing Communities 1, 2 & 3 Performing Communities 1 / 77 Performing Communities 2 / 78 Performing Communities 3 / 80

About the Author

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INTRODUCTION Innovative Cities at Creative Moments

The Woodrow Wilson Center’s Urban Sustainability Laboratory began posting short essays in 2012 concerning the importance of the performing arts for inclusion in an era of urban diversity. The first collection of essays was published in late 2015, the second a year later, the third a year after that. These brief compilations feature essays by Blair A. Ruble, then Urban Laboratory Director, with particular attention being paid to the role of diversity, inclusion and the performing arts in nurturing a sense of community.

Information about the previous volumes can be found at the end of this report.

This collection highlights the special role of pioneering cities in promoting community and artistic innovation. The power of the performing arts to nurture inclusive communities has been praised widely in recent years; so much so that “creative placemaking� is now seen as a powerful tool in community development.

The importance of cities as the sites of cultural invention is less acknowledged.

This collection of essays seeks to highlight moments when innovation became possible because of the urban circumstance in which it occurred.

While not overtly political, a number of the essays highlight the role of bottom-up artistic expression in confronting political control. In many instances, new forms of performing arts function as community shouts for political change that remain out of the reach of authorities and censors.

Students of authoritarian political regimes would do well to look to the sounds on the street for indications of broader political and social change often obfuscated by official proclamation.

The two dozen cities featured here spawned new forms of performance which, in turn, stimulated and solidified new identities. The dates attached to each essay are not limiting. Rather, they provide orienting guideposts to ground the stories told here in time as well as place.

Now more than a quarter-century old, the Wilson Center’s Urban Sustainability Laboratory — which began as the Comparative Urban Studies Program — has long promoted holistic views of cities as places of promise. Whether sponsoring discussions about the expanding periurban communities in Africa, innovative housing in Latin America, or new smart transit systems in Asia, the Center’s urban programming has sought to embed the discussion of specific urban challenges in larger conversations about community, governance and transparency. Our approach to the urban condition very much aligns with the intention of United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal 11 advocating for cities that are inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable.

As the essays in this collection reveal, the performing arts are an essential component of the quest for such urban values.

As in the first three collections, the essays presented here are by Blair Ruble. They have benefited tremendously from the support and contributions of Urban Sustainability colleagues Allison Garland, Kathy Butterfield and Georgia Eisenmann.

City Profiles

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Beijing, 1790 Beijing in 1790 was at the top of its game.

The city stood at the center of one of the largest multi-ethnic empires ever gathered together. Its Qing dynasty rulers collected wealth from and exerted control over vast territories including much of today’s Chinese mainland, plus Taiwan, Outer Manchuria, Mongolia and Central Asia.

The empire’s population was as diverse as its geographic reach was expansive.

A Manchu elite successfully incorporated Han Chinese, Mongols and other groups into a comprehensive governing system.

The current Qianlong Emperor spoke Manchu, Chinese, Mongolian, Tibetan, Chagati (modern Uyghur) and Tangut.

His court’s diplomatic relations extended beyond Asia to include European powers.

As capital of the highly centralized Qing dynasty and Ming dynasty before, Beijing had enjoyed imperial status for more than three-and-a-half centuries. Vast wealth and power came together around its more than one million residents.

Representatives from across the empire converged on the capital in 1790 to

celebrate the Qianlong Emperor’s eightieth birthday. These festivities would mark what proved to be a highpoint in the dynasty’s eventual more than two-and-a-half century rule. The Emperor would remain officially in power for another five years before turning the throne over to his son, who ruled in name only until his father died in 1799. The spiral of imperial decline that lay ahead was unknown to those reveling in their good fortune at being alive at the center of one of history’s largest and wealthiest empires during a period of unusual stability and success.

Pilgrims came from across the empire to pay tribute, bringing local and regional ensembles of entertainers with them to delight the Emperor. Troupes of musicians, singers, mimes, dancers, acrobats and musicians had wandered across China since before time has been measured.

Localized traditions took shape combining with local folk traditions. Han opera already had developed a number of regional styles, as had distinct regional puppet and acrobatic traditions.

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PERFORMING COMMUNITY

According to legend, the imperial household decided to pull together various regional and performance traditions for an evening of Hui opera to entertain the emperor on his birthday. The result was a new performance merging, music, song, mime, dance, acrobatics and the martial arts which would blend together into what the world would come to know as “Peking Opera.” Over time, the genre would become formalized around several configurations. Generally, Beijing Opera features four role types: sheng (gentlemen), dan (women), jing (rough men) and chou (clowns), who demonstrate their speech, song, dance and combat skills in symbolic movements on a spare (originally square) stage. Music includes arias, songs, and percussion, while movement embraces dance, acrobatics, fighting and mime.

the most democratic of venues as they were open to all audiences including women; and wealthy patrons organized performances — often by their own private companies — in their homes. Opera remained recognizable in its early Qian, Ming and prior formats. Simultaneously, something else was apace in Beijing — and later Shanghai — where opera assumed a new, metropolitan personality.

Traditional opera genres — such as kunju, yabu and huabu — continued to be performed across China in rural as well as small-town settings. Troupes participated in temple fairs and festivals — perhaps

Opera’s ambiguous stature in Beijing became embedded in the capital’s morphology. Forbidden by the court from the Inner City, commercial playhouses nestled in entertainment districts just

Performance in Beijing was, by its very nature, more political than elsewhere given its proximity to power. Commercial considerations drove the development of opera performance more than was the case elsewhere. Profitmaking theaters, small and large, packed the Qing metropolis catering to a seemingly insatiable demand by men of all social classes (women were prohibited from attending until the early twentieth century).

Beijing Opera has evolved a rich and Patrons and actors moved from theater varied repertoire despite this seemingly to theater, a behavior which over time limited menu of components. While thwarted the court’s ability to control each of these elements may be found what was happening on stage and in throughout China — with regional opera the audience. Strict hierarchical seating and puppetry being especially important arrangements reenforced customary in the countryside — what became Beijing social distinctions and censors negotiated Opera took a distinctly urban trajectory what could appear on stage. Social very much tied to the ebbs and flows of life transgression nonetheless became a in the great city. hallmark of the opera stage.

SHORT ESSAYS ON COMMUNITY, DIVERSITY, INCLUSION, AND THE PERFORMING ARTS

south of the Inner City’s three gates.

Officials could easily attend these nearby performances, as could other social groups excluded from the inner precincts.

Such propinquity led to a mixing of audiences and genres and tossed longstanding identities into disarray. The steady flow of admonitions issued by court officials over the next decades suggests how ineffectual they were.

Manchu officials developed their own attachments to what had long been Handominated dramatic traditions. Visitors and newcomers from China’s vast regions found themselves together in the same hall. Some contraventions of social norms and roles were harmless; but not all.

Such mixing and matching produced a metropolitan sensibility unlike any that had come before; a distinctive pihuang style closely associated with Beijing.

Andrea S. Goldman in Opera and the City (2012), writes, “The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were a golden age for opera performance in the Qing capital. Many genres of opera, from the elegant Kun operas (kunju, written by scholar-poets), to the far less literary “flowery opera” styles (huabu), all vied for audiences in Beijing. The Qing capital, with a population of over a million and a thriving economy in the eighteenth century, held out the lure of fame and fortune to opera troupes and individual actors throughout the empire.”1 Beijing opera steadily lost favor with audiences during the first-half of the twentieth century, only to fall further

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out of favor with the revolutionary Communist regime founded in 1949. New revolutionary works eventually took over the opera stage, which paved the way for a resurgence of interest in the 1990s.

The genre’s fortunes brightened as China entered a new growth period in the 1980s, expanding domestic and international audiences. By the twenty-first century, performers can draw on more than 1,400 works based on Chinese history, folklore, revolution and contemporary life. The genre’s influences on Chinese cinema run deep. At home in Shanghai and Beijing — with vibrant scenes in Hong Kong, Taipei, and elsewhere — “Peking Opera” has become globally recognized as a major operatic form.

Actors of the Beijing Opera Troupe perform the famous story “White Snake” at the Huguang Theatre in Beijing, China.

Photo: Hung Chung Chi. 2012. Shutterstock.com

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PERFORMING COMMUNITY

Buenos Aires, 1910 In 1580, Juan de Garay, leading an expeditionary force down the Paraná River from Asunción (in today’s Paraguay), reestablished an abandoned trading post.

Within a few years, the Río de la Plata region was being called “Argentina,” which means “silvery” in Spanish, reflecting the hope that riches would flow. This was not to be. The renewed town of Buenos Aires languished for decades as a poorly patrolled contraband port.

Local settlers turned to cattle, hides, meat and the slave trade to survive. By the mid–eighteenth century, Buenos Aires had grown into the largest slave port in South America. The city’s population grew beyond 30,000 by the century’s end, with about a third of the local residents being Afro-Argentine slaves.

The end of Spanish rule during the 1810s unleashed a half century of internecine conflict, pitting — in various guises — emerging oligarchic rancher, urban commercial, and merchant elites oriented toward the port of Buenos Aires against everyone else. Unitarians (unitarios), who were promoting centralization in Buenos Aires, fought with Federalists (federales), who were supporting greater power sharing with the interior.

The continuing struggle between the Unitarians and Federalists took a particularly violent turn in late 1828 when General Juan Manuel de Rosas,

a Federalist caudillo from Buenos Aires Province, emerged as the most powerful figure in Argentina. Afro-Argentines constituted between a fifth and a quarter of the city’s population when Rosas arrived.

Few Afro-Argentines were able to break through the discriminatory barriers imposed by slavery and racism.

Collectively, they nonetheless benefited from a more lenient system than that found in the large plantation economies elsewhere in the Americas. Many black men became street vendors, while women earned extra money washing clothes for a variety of clients. Slaves worked the docks and slaughterhouses, and many AfroArgentines headed into the countryside to labor on estancias (ranches).

A gradual process of emancipation produced a highly variegated racial landscape. As Afro-Argentines became ever freer, they “disappeared.” The community’s share of the city’s overall population declined from nearly a third to being negligible. This “disappearance” has been overstated. African Argentine mutual aid societies, newspapers, magazines and informal associations, ranging from Church-sponsored cofradas to self-organized ethnic associations known as “nations,” existed into the twentieth century, long after AfroArgentines themselves were said to have “disappeared.”

SHORT ESSAYS ON COMMUNITY, DIVERSITY, INCLUSION, AND THE PERFORMING ARTS

The rise and fall of Afro-Argentines is inexorably tied to the fate of the Rosas regime. Rosas increased patronage for Afro-Argentines, reined in the slave trade, promoted black military men and offered financial assistance to African mutual aid societies. Interest in and support for AfroArgentine music became one of the most visible ways in which Rosas reached out to blacks.

African musical traditions were on display during these years in weekly, monthly and annual holiday celebrations. Such revelries reflected the diverse ethnic and national origins of the city’s blacks. Different communities competed with one another and, at other times, joined together in communal revelry. Funeral dances similarly became a mainstay of Afro-Argentine religious and community life.

European-oriented intellectuals together with agricultural and merchant oligarchs — including future president Domingo

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Sarmiento — drove Rosas into exile in early 1852. They proved to be not nearly as sympathetic toward African-infused street dancing as Rosas had been. One of Sarmiento’s first actions upon becoming president in 1868 was to ban AfroArgentines from dancing in public.

The new regime similarly used barbed wire, railroads, refrigeration and the extermination of Native Americans to destroy the free-wheeling life of gaucho ranch hands. Many displaced gauchos moved to the rough-and-tumble outer barrios of Buenos Aires known as the arrabal. The tango appeared in such poor neighborhoods as an amalgam of customs brought to town by the poorest of the poor.

The tango combines native Argentine, African and European musical forms and dance traditions. To begin with the tango’s most indigenous roots, the nomadic gaucho life of herding cattle and working

Couple dancing the tango on Florida Street in Buenos Aires.

Photo: Alexandr Vorobev. March 2016. Shutterstock.com.

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PERFORMING COMMUNITY

the sheep ranches in the country’s interior produced a cornucopia of folk musical forms and songs. The gaucho payada tradition based on the poetic sparing of competing singer-guitar players served as glue binding many elements together.

No one knows for sure precisely who took the tango to Paris. Perhaps he, she, or they were upper-class fops who had enjoyed slumming around local bars and brothels before leaving for Paris; perhaps they were returning French tourists; perhaps they were exhausted European The payada — which easily lent itself to immigrants seeking a distant home of long evenings around campfires, afternoon memory, or local Argentine musicians breaks under giant ombŭ and gomero who got a gig on a transatlantic voyage; trees — aligned with the call-and-response perhaps they were a ship’s crew or a traditions of Africans transplanted to the touring theater group. What is known is Americas. Perhaps the greatest payadores that the music exploded across Europe (performers in payada competitions) of the on the eve of World War I. Within weeks era — or of any era — Gabino Ezeiza and of its arrival, tango musicians, singers Higino Cazon — were Afro-Argentine, as and dancers were performing for wildly were many other leading practitioners of enthusiastic audiences, including political the art. leaders, British royals, the Russian tsar By the time Ezeiza died, after being helped and his family, the German Kaiser and the Pope in Rome. off stage a final time in 1916, a new singing duo specializing in Pampas-tinged The tango entered a “golden age” in the provincial folk music was sweeping the years after the war. Urbanites around the country: Carlos Gardel and José (Pepe) world flocked to bars, cafes, cinemas and Francesco Razzano. Gardel, an illegitimate theaters to listen to their favorite groups. immigrant child from France, and Razzano, New mass media — such as radio and who grew up in the Uruguayan capital cinema — transformed the tango from Montevideo, had been making names the dance of a male underworld into for themselves singing in small bars the popular entertainment of bourgeois around their local barrios in Buenos Aires. housewives.

They began to hear about one another, because they were often performing in The tango is a product of the potent the same clubs, before finally running diversity and energy of the city; but not into one another in 1911. Within months, just any city. The tango is what happened Razzanno needed a partner for a tour of when diversity was placed within the small provincial theaters scattered around pressure cooker of a Buenos Aires on the Buenos Aires Province, and he tracked make. down Gardel. Thus was born one of the great entertainment collaborations of the twentieth century.

SHORT ESSAYS ON COMMUNITY, DIVERSITY, INCLUSION, AND THE PERFORMING ARTS

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Cape Town, 2000

When, on the evening of February 11, 1990, the newly liberated Nelson Mandela stepped onto the balcony of Cape Town’s City Hall to address a throng of fifty-thousand jubilant supporters, South Africa and Cape Town changed forever.

Beyond the political transformations that lay ahead, Cape Town was about to enter a world where cities were being tossed into a global competition for investments, resources and advantage. It became a “world city” dominated by a burgeoning service sector. A neoliberal economic paradigm known as the “Washington Consensus” dictated that cities sink or swim on their own, unprotected by national social and economic policies.

Little during the apartheid period prepared Capetonians for this rapacious world of late-twentieth-century and early-twentyfirst-century global urban capitalism.

Today’s Cape Town — a sprawling metropolitan region containing nearly 4 million people — is much larger, more complex and diverse than in its previous incarnations. Administratively, it is larger, because the post-apartheid settlement merged two dozen racially segregated

municipalities together with nearly seventy decision-making authorities to form a single unit. Eventually, in December 2000, the Cape Town “Unicity” came into being, unifying the metropolitan region for the first time. As elsewhere around the world, municipal services were increasingly privatized, leading to marked inequality in their distribution.

Simultaneously, others came to see the possibility of a future that might be more progressive than the city’s past. From this perspective, the seeds of a more hopeful future can be found in Cape Town’s embrace of diversity—albeit an uneasy one. Such trends are evident in various efforts to reinvigorate the local jazz scene.

Many prominent South African musicians in exile required time to overcome skepticism about the changes taking place at home. Such decisions about whether and when to return were personal. A number of prominent jazz musicians began returning to South Africa in the months immediately surrounding Mandela’s release. Hugh Masekela, in contrast, took some time before he was willing to commit to the new South Africa. Others, including the drummer Louis Moholo, who

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PERFORMING COMMUNITY

had established careers abroad, chose to remain in exile. Significantly, several prominent musicians — such as Abdullah Ibrahim, Miriam Makeba and Caiphus Semenya — enthusiastically returned to nurture a renewed music scene.

Once back in South Africa, they found a growing number of venues, including prominent clubs that had desegregated voluntarily (e.g., Kippie’s in Johannesburg, Bassline in Melville, and Rosie’s and Mannenberg in Cape Town). As everywhere, jazz often proved to be a difficult product to market to mainstream audiences. A pervasive atmosphere of violence that affected urban South Africa often reduced audiences. Yet, by the late 1990s, a national and even local Cape Town circuit of venues sympathetic to jazz had come into existence.

Jazz is an apprenticeship genre that requires a multiplicity of places where a knowledgeable audience can listen to and encourage a mix of younger and older musicians moving the music forward. In other words, it requires players and places for them to play. The microenvironment that had made the first Cape Town jazz wave at mid-century recreated itself as the twentieth century turned into the twenty-first. Old masters, such as the returning Ibrahim and Winston Mamkunku Ngozi, held forth, along with exciting new musicians, such as the pianist Moses Taiwa Molelekwa (who died in 2001), and the saxophonist Zim Ngqawana (who died in 2011). Very quickly, a growing roster of players — such as Khaya Mahlangu,

Sidney Mnisi, Zim Ngqawana, Andile Yenana, Marcus Wyatt, Feya Faku, Herb Tsoedi, Fana Zulu, Lulu Gontsana, Louis Moholo and many others — formed a vibrant community.

The success of the Cape Town jazz scene, and the local music community more generally, has depended on its ability to leverage engagement with the global to create the space for the local.

Globalization in Cape Town has often seemed hollow and dispiriting, in a city of stark economic and social inequity tied to skin color. In music, however, the city’s deep local traditions have sustained a performance culture that remains significantly local even as it has become global.

The city’s history, from the moment Jan Van Reibeeck led his motley band of Dutch East India Company employees to shore, has been marked by all the crimes, injustices and indignities that a human mind can conjure to commit against those who are somehow different. Humans seemingly are capable of developing endless criteria for asserting differences, so the city’s past and present have contained far more stories of villainy than decency. Even the tiniest of tears in the stunningly beautiful surface visions of Table Mountain and Table Bay tossed up by tourism promoters expose human cruelty in all its multitudinous forms.

Yet the incredibly rich history of Capetonian music reveals a different story, one of improbable beauty and

SHORT ESSAYS ON COMMUNITY, DIVERSITY, INCLUSION, AND THE PERFORMING ARTS

inventiveness. This is a town that has been home to an opulent multiplicity of humankind, each seeking solace and meaning in the creation and performance of song and dance. The intermingling of indigenous African and imported European and Asian instruments; the two-century-long absorption, adaptation and reinvention of American musical forms that continues until today; and the stunning integration of Islamic, Christian and African vocal forms all speak to an uncommon Capetonian capacity to create aural beauty.

Cape Town has become one of the most musically inventive places on the planet precisely because it has been one of the most dastardly innovators for thinking about how to divide humankind into rigid, allegedly immutable categories. Both inclinations emerge from the realities

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of having thousands and thousands of people who are different in every conceivable way live on top of one another in the intimate relationships of shared destinies.

Capetonians did not just create music.

They fashioned a very special kind of music. Their sound defies easy categorization by merging different traditions together in fresh and new ways.

The musicians of Cape Town, whether fathers or mothers, brothers or sisters, uncles or aunts, or foreign cousins, have created a distinctive Cape Town sound, one that is a celebration of syncretistic, sweeping diversity. To paraphrase local music commentator Jeremy Cronin in his article “Creole Cape Town,” Cape Town’s musical subconscious has always understood that we are all the bearers of the same mixed-up cultural bredie (stew).2

South African street jazz band on the Waterfront in Cape Town.

Photo: Inna Felker. 2007. Shutterstock.com.

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Chicago, 1900 Chicago at the turn of the last century was the magical city of Oz. Chicagoan L. Frank Baum’s 1900 tale — and subsequent American film classic — about innocent Midwestern farm folk being drawn to a “wonder city” of danger and delight was inspired by his hometown, a city overflowing with wonderful wizards, scared men of straw and wicked neighbors.

Chicago’s remarkable growth over less than a century from a wild onion field to North America’s “second city” was extraordinary by any standard. The period

framed by the signing away under duress of the last aboriginal claims of Native Americans in 1833 to the city’s emergence as the continent’s great transportation linchpin required but a human lifetime.

Chicago’s dynamism and diversity overwhelmed the city’s infrastructure and governance structures alike. Successful politicians in this hurly-burly world were forced to serve as brokers among highly fractured and decentralized social, business and political institutions. The city’s most successful bosses of the era did not rule by fiat so much as they

Photochrom print of Randolph Street, Chicago, Illinois.

Photo: Detroit Publishing Co. 1900. US Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

SHORT ESSAYS ON COMMUNITY, DIVERSITY, INCLUSION, AND THE PERFORMING ARTS

headed to cigar-smoke-filled backrooms to cut deals among contending groups.

Their considerable successes rested on Oz-like illusion as much as on hard, empirical realities.

A sense of predestination surrounds Chicago. Located astride the lowest of North America’s continental divides — a mere ten-foot-high ridge separating two principal water systems (one extending through the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River to the Atlantic, the other running down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico) — Chicago has several incomparable natural advantages. Its success has been rooted in the exploitation of these natural benefits.

Chicago traces its origins to the arrival of the region’s first non-native resident, Baptiste Point Du Sable. Du Sable had been born in Haiti in 1745, the son of a Frenchman and a free black woman.

Highly successful, Du Sable and his Potawatomi wife, Kitthawa, built a trading compound on the lakefront that eventually would encompass nine buildings, including the city’s first elegant lakefront mansion.

Du Sable retired to St. Charles, Missouri, following his wife’s death in 1809, where he lived until his own passing in 1818.

Discussions of Chicago’s evolution must begin on October 8, 1871, as that date’s “Great Fire” became Chicago’s defining moment. The city would long bear the indelible psychological, political, social

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and physical imprint of the conflagration. It made possible many of the city’s greatest achievements, especially in architecture and urban design, while underscoring the impermanence of human endeavor for more than a generation of Chicagoans.

Migrants from upper New York State and New England joined immigrants from Europe to reinvent Chicago with such rapidity that there was seldom an opportunity for any single elite to gain total dominance. The city’s volatile mobility unleashed an intense search for the distinctly American in commerce, industry and the arts. It drew on the wealth of the American Midwest to revolutionize the grain, meat and lumber industries.

Chicago invented the twentieth-century capitalist metropolis, serving as political capital of nothing larger than its own county.

Foreign-born immigrants constituted perhaps the most visible component of the local scene during the post-fire decades.

Chicago remained a fundamentally German and Irish town throughout the late nineteenth century. The city at that time became home to more Poles, Swedes, Czechs, Dutch, Danes, Norwegians, Croats, Slovaks, Lithuanians and Greeks than any other American city.

The city’s various ethnic groups lived in tightly knit, highly congested clusters around neighborhood centers spread along major transportation routes.

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Individuals were far from immobile, even as their neighborhoods tended to remain home to largely one ethnic community over time. At the center of neighborhood life stood the appropriate church, a school and several saloons and beer halls.

Local entrepreneurs moved toward manufacturing the machines that hastened natural resource exploitation and transportation. By 1890, the city had the nation’s second largest manufacturing center, surpassed only by New York in terms of the gross value of its products.

Chicago’s business leaders were inventing entirely new ways of life.

The rise of Chicago more or less paralleled the ascendancy of the American corporation. Outsized business organizations emerged during the late nineteenth century as regional commercial networks stitched together into a national market. This new form of corporate organization lent itself to large-scale operations. The massive consolidated stockyards on the city’s south side offer one prominent example of such gargantuan development. By 1870, just five years after the yards opened, its assembly line of death and dismemberment processed three million animals. Over its first half-century, the Union Stockyard would earn nearly $10 billion in income.

Chicago simultaneously earned a reputation for brutal labor relations. The city was the site of heated strikes during the 1870s, the well-publicized anarchist bombing of the 1886 Haymarket affair, the infamous Pullman strike of 1894 and

a dramatic peaceful work stoppage in the stockyards throughout the summer of 1905.

As elsewhere in America, the politics of urban space and community consumed middle and upper classes, with the quest for social segregation simultaneously deconcentrating and suburbanizing the city. In Chicago, as elsewhere, segregation increasingly involved questions of race as well as class.

Chicago’s vigorous African America community began to take shape during these same years. Race relations had remained relatively tranquil throughout the late nineteenth century. This relative calm would change with the onset of the Great Migration of black Southerners to the industrial North during the 1910s and 1920s.

Chicago combined America’s roughhewn exterior with boisterous economic — and even social — inventiveness. The city became a focal point for aggressive reform in virtually every area of social and public policy. Unlike continental Europe, Chicago’s reform impulse found expression largely through non-state entities. The city’s reform community was a diverse and only partially overlapping meld of distinct crusades that mobilized a variety of citizens from academic leaders (such as Edith Abbott, Sophonisba P. Breckinridge, John Dewey, Ernst Freund, William Rainey Harper and Charles E. Merriam) and writers (Dreiser, Lewis and Robert Herrick) through community organizers (Addams, Florence Kelley and Ellen Gates Starr) and religious

SHORT ESSAYS ON COMMUNITY, DIVERSITY, INCLUSION, AND THE PERFORMING ARTS

activists (such as William Thomas Stead and the Sisters of the Good Shepherd).

Chicago’s dynamic reformism symbolized the era’s “progressivism.” Decades later, waves of Chicago academics would join Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “New Deal” in Washington.

Chicago — America’s “Porkopolis,” its bovine city — simultaneously became a major cultural center. Its writers, including L. Frank Baum, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair, Will Payne and Ella Wheeler Wilcox, were leaders of American popular letters.

Its philosophers defined an American pragmatism. From Dorothy along the yellow brick road to Sister Carrie’s discovery of urban realities, from the jungles of Tarzan to those of the South Side’s stockyards, Chicagoans redefined the American written word.

More than a few Gilded Age Chicago wizards stood behind emerald screens, pushing, pulling, turning and twirling various levers, knobs and wheels to give the appearance of action. Unlike L. Frank Baum’s Dorothy caught in Oz, however, Chicagoans could not merely click their heels and return to a more peaceful time.

The politics of pragmatic pluralism required more than spinning wheels; it took hard work. Those civic and cultural leaders who made the effort bequeathed through their labors a number of achievements that continue to serve the city well a century later.

The Chicago Theater, built 1921.

Photo: Shutterstock.com, by dibrova.

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Havana, 1890 By the mid-eighteenth century, Havana was a wealthy city. Its population of around forty thousand surpassed that of British New York and Boston at the time.

Some two centuries old, Havana was a lynchpin for Spanish America.

Columbus sailed to Cuba’s southern shore on his first voyage across the Atlantic in 1492, landing after he had been disappointed with what he found at Watling Island in the Bahamas. He and his men immediately began pillaging the “New World.” They stole what gold they could find and kidnapped several Taino people.

During this first encounter, the Taino presented Columbus with a brown leaf they called tabaco. The Spanish plunder of the Americas had begun.

The Taino were the most populous people of the Caribbean, numbering in the several hundred thousand across what we know as the West Indies. Within a handful of decades, a combination of war, inhumane forced labor, rape disease and an especially fiendish device the indigenous peoples used to roast meat called a barbacoa exterminated some 90 percent of the Taino throughout the region. The island — approximately the size of Virginia, and larger than Portugal — was effectively depopulated (aside from a few survivors seeking refuge high in Cuba’s mountain interior).

Columbus and his son would return to Cuba on subsequent journeys. In 1508, Sebastián Ocampo explored the island’s entire coastline, becoming the first European to sail into Havana Bay. In 1512, Juan Ponce de León, the governor of Puerto Rico who “discovered” Florida, found the Gulf Stream. By 1519, Hernando Cortés set off from Cuba for Mexico, beginning the Spanish conquest of the American continents.

The Spanish established a half-dozen settlements along the island’s north coast between 1514 and 1519, one of which would become today’s Havana. The Spanish governor took up residence in 1553, with Philip II designating Havana as a city under the Spanish Crown in December 1592.

Havana’s central location in the Caribbean, its secure anchorage, and quick access to the Gulf Stream made the city a fulcrum of Spanish power and wealth across the Americas. For two-and-a-quarter centuries beginning in 1564, the Spanish crown gathered the wealth of their American empire onto convoys that would meet in Havana before setting off across the Atlantic. These treasure fleets — at times reaching sixty or more galleons containing unimaginable wealth — sailed twice a year in April/May and July/August.

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Havana unsurprisingly became a target for the English, the French and pirates of all nations; so much so that the city would briefly change hands from time to time. In response, the Spanish constructed Havana as a walled enclave more reminiscent of Medieval Europe than the relative open and orderly new cities established under the Law of the Indies of 1573. The surrounding stone fortresses would define the city and its fate for decades to come.

north side port sixty miles east of Havana, often shared large houses built around courtyards in poor dock areas. Plantation hands working the sugarcane fields piled into barracones (barracks). These solares, cuarterias and barracones served as musical incubators where residents stacked on top of one another in their dingy rooms frequently gathered in their courtyards to socialize.

The Spanish solved this challenge with African slavery, making the city an important hub in the Atlantic slave trade.

By the end of the eighteenth century, 85,000 slaves worked on the island; 287,000 by 1837. In 1850, 436,000 slaves constituted just under half of the island’s — and around a quarter of Havana’s — population. Around one million African men and women were brought to the island before slavery was abolished in 1886.

African music, dance, polyrhythms and assorted drums of all sizes and shapes conquered the Americas. The sounds of Africa varied according to the region and nation of origin prior to the Middle Passage. They produced unique adaptations throughout the Western Hemisphere depending on the indigenous cultures and the European colonizers Africans encountered on plantations and in cities.

Afro-Cubans living in Havana and the provincial capital of Matanzas, another

Blues, Jazz, Salsa, Samba and Tango emerged from these auditory collisions.

Cuban planters looked farther afield as the slave trade waned. They recruited The Spanish needed as considerable brigades of cheap labor from China, many an island as Cuba to be more than just of whom eventually settled in Havana’s a waystation for Spanish galleons. Over Barrio Chino during the late nineteenth time, the colonizers discovered new century. A vibrant, multiracial street culture sources of wealth: tobacco, sugar and came to thrive alongside — and often rum. All three demanded an endless hidden out of view from — the luxurious supply of labor. However, as the Spanish life of Spanish and creole Habaneros. had depopulated the island — in 1544, the African fieldhands as well as Chinese royal census counted 7,000 inhabitants on laborers and tradesmen brought their own the entire island (5,000 Tainos, 800 black arts to the island. Cuban culture became slaves and 600 Spaniards) — workers “theirs” in a process that accelerated were not easily found. following the end of Spanish rule in 1895.

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Sometimes African musical traditions — most frequently carried by Bantu-speaking people from greater Congo — entered the Americas directly from the continent; often African rhythms and sounds were filtered through Havana before heading along trade routes stretching up and down the eastern coast of the North and South Atlantic. For nearly five hundred years, Havana was the mothership supporting the endlessly syncretic cultures of the Americas.

the complex cultural strands that had wound together in Havana since its founding.

Vocal improvisation, elaborate dancing and polyrhythmic drumming — traits transported directly from Africa — characterize rumba’s complex genres and subgenres. Dance and singing groups germinating late in the nineteenth century caught the attention of U.S. recording companies such as RCA Victor and Columbia Records shortly after the turn-of-the-century. The rumba was As Ned Sublette puts it in his encyclopedic poised to go global when Prohibition closed Cuba and Its Music (2004), “The center of down alcoholic consumption in the United the Spanish maritime system in the New States. North Americans streamed to World — the grandest port, the one with Havana to drink, dance, gamble and have the most dancing – was Havana.”3 Cuba fun any way they could in a criminalized underworld of Havana nightlife that was nurtured its own distinctive mix of African music and dance traditions blended together nothing like home. with Spanish-based formal and folk musical American recording executives and customs. Cuban music, according to impresarios took the rumba north where it Sublette, is “African music’s gown-up child.” connected with radio, cinema and eventually television to forever change the musical Three traditional forms, yambú, guaguancó culture of the United States. By the 1930s and columbia, spawned an endless variety and 1940s, New York was as much a center of indigenous Cuban music including son of rumba culture as Havana, binding these Cubano, baracoa, danzón, and Coros de two capitals of the Americas together once Clave. Much of this music arose in rural more as tobacco, sugar, rum, gangsterism areas. The rumba in particular moved into and slaves had done over centuries before.

Havana and Matanzas slums, drawing on

Street performers at a 2017 festival in Havana.

Photo: pxhere.com. 2017. CC license 1.0

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Houston, 2017 The 2017 hurricane season already had proven brutal. As Harvey and Irma rolled across the Gulf Coast that autumn, reports of urban devastation piled up. In part, the constant attention to smashed cities is an expected consequence of people and, perhaps more important, TV stations concentrating in urban centers. Moreover, cities, as the largest and arguably most complex product of human enterprise, are those places most likely to lose a concentrated battle with Mother Nature.

As cities are made by humans, they necessarily are imperfect.

Such faultiness calls for modesty in thinking about how we go about rebuilding once hurricane season has passed. Could Houston, Miami, Jacksonville and Tampa have been better planned and built? Of course. As cities are complex, humans invariably struggle to bring the totality of urban reality into a single vision. We tend to isolate those aspects of urban life which give us pause, approaching the urban condition with singular solutions and agendas intended to “fix” a particular urban challenge.

This piecemeal approach tends to distract us from the larger objective of nurturing cities as holistic places of promise. As we rebuild our great coastal cities, we should never lose sight of a task larger than securing communities against the ravages

of nature — although such a goal is necessary for any further success. Instead, we should always think of cities as places that nurture human creativity. This has never been more the case than in such cities as Houston and Miami.

According to former Houston mayoral candidate Bill King, 1990s Houston Mayor Bob Lanier used to say, “Houston is one place where nobody cares who your daddy is.” Houston’s genius has been found in its ability to welcome the unwelcome and encourage unbridled creativity. The same can be said about much of South Florida as well.

Americans should appreciate such places because our most “American” metropolis, Chicago, was just such an ungainly city of the future a century ago.

City leaders managed in the course of one or two lifetimes to leverage the Native American portage across the Americas’ lowest continental divide to create one of the globe’s industrial, transportation and financial powerhouses. No shortage of folks showed up to partake in this success, and the city’s population exploded from 500,000 to 3.5 million over the half century beginning in 1870.

Chicago certainly became an emporium for all of the evils and accomplishments

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of the early capitalist industrialization era. Daily life on Chicago’s streets could squeeze the spirit out of a soul.

In response, the city nurtured an aweinspiring social inventiveness that nurtured many of the ideas and individuals that would give life to Roosevelt’s New Deal decades later. We should remain mindful that unvarnished laissez-faire capitalism did not work out so well for Chicago the first time around. Ignoring nature’s laws governing fire, large swaths of the city burned to the ground in 1871.

When the city rebuilt, its leaders gave greater care to effective fire codes and their enforcement. Chicago began to develop a planning structure with Chicagoan David Burnham becoming a spokesperson for making big plans.

The “Great Fire” opened the door for the sustainable growth that exploded in the decades ahead. Indeed, 21st-century Chicago has emerged as a global leader in making cities “green.”

Cities smashed during this hurricane season should not repeat the mistakes of their pasts. No city, no matter how dynamic, can flaunt the laws of hydrodynamics forever. The challenges ahead for all coastal cities are real.

Nonetheless, in rebuilding we should remain mindful of the importance of encouraging freedom to innovate and to create beyond the bounds of formal regulation. Building appropriate infrastructure is but a first step to recovery.

Now that some time has passed, we see that Houston still struggles to accommodate new climatic realities.

Flooding occurs more often than one might have expected a generation ago; infrastructure remains more vulnerable than it should to the forces of nature. Yet, there is promise. In 2018, the city adapted a Climate Action Plan to develop strategies that will help save money over the long run, improve air quality and even reduce the city’s carbon footprint.

Is there reason for skepticism? Of course.

Houston is still capital of the petroleum industry. However, a 500-year flood in 2017 produced by what some claim to have been the largest rain event in North American history has made a difference.

The question now is how the city’s inventiveness can be harnessed to face challenges of the future. The fact that no one is going to ask who someone’s daddy is gives rise for optimism. If Houston’s past is any indication, talent and creativity will matter more than social pedigree.

Urban guru Jane Jacobs once wrote that “societies and civilizations in which the cities stagnate don’t develop and flourish further. They deteriorate.” Fortunately for Houston, Miami and other Gulf Coast communities, cities in which people don’t care who your daddy is can always find new ways to move ahead.

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Aerial photo of flooding from Hurricane Harvey.

Photo: Sgt. Daniel Martinez, SC National Guard. 2017. Flickr.com.

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Lagos, 1970 Lagos is unknowable. The largest and wealthiest metropolitan region in Africa, Lagos is home to the continent’s largest port and urban economy. The region grew from around 800,000 residents at the time of independence in 1960 to 16 million at the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century. Capital of Nigeria from independence until 1991 (when political power transferred to Abuja), Lagos has continued to control the country’s commanding heights. As the country’s financial center, Lagos dominates Nigeria’s economy, enriched in part by its stranglehold over export of the country’s largest commodity, oil, which in turn, has spawned unfathomable corruption, crime and violence. Inept democratic governments have often given way to brutal military dictatorships in a cycle of political degeneration. If Tokyo is the most manageable megacity, Lagos could well be the least.

Spread out among several islands and extending deep into the mainland, Lagos incorporates skyscrapered international business centers, gold plated residential and commercial districts, together with impoverished slums and self-built migrant settlements devouring a massive landscape extending ever further into a peri-urban hinterland. Every sort of contemporary urban neighborhood can be found within its boundaries.

Lagos also is one of the world’s great centers for artistic creativity, most notably in music. This creativity continues despite — or, perhaps because of — the city’s explosive mix of divergent people and wealth.

West Africa is a global center for musical achievement. New styles blending Ghanaian rhythms such as osibisaba, with Caribbean calypso, and North American foxtrot coalesced during the 1920s in neighboring Ghana. Known as Afrobeat, the new music travelled along trade and migration routes, accelerating with the arrival of radio airwaves. By the 1960s, the genre’s animating energy found a new home in Nigeria, adding layers of native harmonies and rhythms together with American jazz and rock-and-roll. The spirit of urban Nigeria infused this new Afrobeat. Fela Anikulapo Kuti pioneered this new style.

Fela grew up in the household of an Anglican minister and school principal and a feminist activist in the anti-colonial movement. His first cousin Wole Soyinka won a Nobel Prize in literature; his two brothers became medical doctors.

Fela set off to London to follow in his brothers’ footsteps before dropping out of medical school to study trumpet at the Trinity College of Music. London at the time was awash with American jazz and the first stirrings of Rock-and-Roll, influences which held great allure. By 1963, he moved his family back to Nigeria,

SHORT ESSAYS ON COMMUNITY, DIVERSITY, INCLUSION, AND THE PERFORMING ARTS

where he reconstituted his London band Koola Lobitos while training as a radio producer with the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation. By 1967 he was travelling to Ghana to explore African sounds, which he combined freely with jazz, funk, salsa, Calypso and traditional Yoruba music.

Fela’s trajectory changed in 1969 when he took his band to the United States at the height of the Black Arts Movement.

Living in Los Angeles for ten months, Fela married Black Panther Party partisan Sandra Smith. His views on race, politics and economics radicalized, as became apparent when his renamed band Nigeria ’70 explored new amalgams of popular music. Once back in Nigeria as The Afrika ’70, Fela and his band changed African popular music.

Fella’s musical innovations remained deeply connected to his political radicalization. Music became a means to a larger end, one of reclaiming African roots from post-colonial certainties. He formed the Kalakuta Republic commune, sharing its compound with fellow band members. The republic, named after the British colonial dungeon in India known as the “Black Hole of Calcutta,” declared its independence from Nigeria. On the musical front, he established the Africa Shrine club in the Empire Hotel, which became one of the most legendary clubs on the continent. There, he held sway producing an ever more Africanized sound drawing on traditional West African chants and rhythms as well as American funk and psychedelic rock.

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The Nigerian Government became increasingly suspicious as his new Afrobeat music gained widespread popularity; and as Fela became more outspoken about corruption and official violence. In 1977, his smash-hit album Zombie popularized music sung in Pidgin English excoriating the abuses of power and dignity by Nigerian governments and bureaucrats. The album set off a firestorm of protest music across Africa.

The Government had enough. One thousand soldiers ferociously attacked the Kalakuta Republic complex, brutalizing Fela and several band members and killing his mother by throwing her out a window. Fela, in turn, became an ever more vociferous critic of General Olusegun Obasanjo’s military rule even, at one point, considering a run for president. Efforts by subsequent governments to silence Fela only enlarged his international notoriety.

Named by Amnesty International as a Prisoner of Conscience, Fela and his music found ever larger stages for their message. In 1986, he performed with Bono, Carolos Santana and many others in the massive “Amnesty International: A Conspiracy of Hope” concert in the United States.

Fela’s radicalization accompanied an incessant search for deeper African roots.

In 1978, he married 28 women from his entourage of dancers, writers, composers and singers as a symbol of African tradition. He began publishing ever more bitter attacks on American and European

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hegemony while gathering a growing musical and political following across Africa.

Fela, who died in 1997, reinvigorated Afrobeat as a signature popular music for the continent while turning Lagos into a destination of music pilgrimage. As rooted as Fela became in a continental African culture, his views and music remained embedded in the deeply complex urban realities of Lagos. By the early 2000s, he became the subject of a Broadway play by Bill T. Jones that ran for 15 months before touring internationally. By the 2010s, Fela was increasingly mentioned along with Bob Dylan and Bob Marley as an originator of popular music promoting powerful social and political messages.

Afrobeat continued to develop as dozens of younger musicians emerged in Lagos, Nigeria, and elsewhere in Africa to carry

Kalakuta Queens--A staged play in honor of the Women of the Kalakuta Republic, the home to Fela Kuti.

Photo: Ozor Amani. Oct. 2018. Wikimedia Creative Commons. CC license 4.0.

the music forward. The genre evolved as electronic instruments joined with ever more complex African rhythms to produce the signature sound of Lagos. Musicians around the world drew on Afrobeat for inspiration, including jazz players Roy Ayers, Randy Weston and Branford Marsalis as well as rock musicians such as David Byrne, Jay-Z and Sting.

The city has hosted many important trans-African festivals including the famous month-long 1977 Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (FASYAC77), attended by over 16,000 musicians. This festival in particular proved seminal in the development of African diaspora sound and political activism.

Afrobeat, Nigerian and Lagos music spread their influence worldwide; and Lagos lives on as a global hotspot for music.

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London, 1730

Georgian London (1714-1830) was a wonder to behold, with religious and civil wars receding in the past, the enclosure movement having transformed rural England, the industrial revolution only beginning, the Great Fire of 1666 and great plagues of previous decades quickly having been forgotten and the Empire continuously growing. London sat at the center of a self-satisfied imperial network spanning the globe. Victories in the Seven Years’ and Napoleonic Wars offset even the unpleasant loss of thirteen Atlantic North American colonies.

All was not well, of course. The dislocations of the enclosure movement raised social unrest with English society becoming ever more violent. Crime provoked constant concern for Londoners throughout the period. Inequality stoked social tensions in an era that rejected meaningful reform. Wealth and power nonetheless flowed toward London, which grew from roughly a half-million to a million-and-a-half residents under Hanoverian rule.

London had long been a center of public amusement, some rather less than refined.

The city’s theater had passed through a golden age under Elizabeth I, as provincial actor William Shakespeare came to town and joined with well-established thespians and playwrights such as Christopher

Marlowe, Ben Johnson, Thomas Watson, Thomas Lodge, Robert Greene, James Burbage, Richard Burbage, George Peele, Thomas Nashe, Robert Greene, Thomas Kyd and John Lyly. As important, an audience drawn to public spectacle and entertainment financed their efforts.

Theater, at a time of religious, political, and regal strife, proved a perilous game. While the Tudor and Stuart monarchs rather enjoyed a play or two, the puritanical roundheads in the Long Parliament did not. Parliament closed the theaters in 1642. Charles II, however, embraced spectacle. Once restored to the throne, he took a liking to theater; or rather, at least to young actresses such as Nell Gwyn (who became his long term mistress).

All forms of public entertainment took flight under the Stuarts, with new places of assembly developing at coffee houses, gambling parlors, taverns and men’s clubs. Theaters at Drury Lane (1674-present in various incarnations), Dorset Garden (1671-1709) and Leslie’s Tennis Courts at Lincoln’s Inn Fields (16611674, 1695-1705) supported competing theatrical companies such as The King’s Company and The Duke’s Company.

Performance and rehearsal schedules became regularized and theater became increasingly centered around the Covent Garden market in the city’s new West End.

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Theater took root despite irksome moral opposition to frivolity and an ever-present connection with prostitution.

A noteworthy event transpired on January 29, 1728, when John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera opened to a packed house at the Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theater. A comic balladopera, Gay’s work marks the beginning of London’s robust popular musical theater.

Gay’s play quickly spread through the Empire, spawning distinctive musical theater cultures in Philadelphia and New York.

A short time later in 1731, George Lillo’s The London Merchant similarly reinvented popular tragedy as entertainment for the emerging merchant classes spread across England, the Colonies and the Continent.

David Garrick personifies this growth as well as anyone. His remarkable London acting career began in 1741 when he stepped onto the stage to perform the lead of Shakespeare’s Richard III. Before his death in 1779, the diminutive Garrick had rewritten the rules for English-language acting. He elevated a naturalistic and relaxed

style as preferred over the bombastic and grandiloquent acting that had come before.

Garrick was a faultless agent for bringing to life the drama of the period written by such authors as his contemporary and mentor Dr. Samuel Johnson.

The theater’s success combining licentiousness and satire (often with political intent) alarmed many in power. In 1737, Prime Minister Robert Walpole rushed a hastily drafted Licensing Act through Parliament granting the Lord Chamberlain the power to ban and censor plays.

London, however, was already different from the city it had been a century before. A theater-loving merchantry and professional classes now rivaled the gentry and aristocracy in political and economic clout.

With popular demand and profits running high, few plays were censored (though self-censorship undoubtedly increased).

Meanwhile, illegitimate (unlicensed) performance moved in to fill voids created by state meddling in the highly competitive theater world. The actor Samuel Foote,

Performing arts poster from 1879: “Miss Jane Coombs, School for Scandal.’”

Photo: Metropolitan Litho Studio. 1879. US Library of Congress, Theatrical Poster Division.

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for example, invited his audience to tea, thereby avoiding some of The Licensing Act’s strictest sanctions.

Garrick joined James Lacey in managing Drury Lane, sponsoring works in all genres. He and Lacey supported fresh approaches to staging and costumes. The result was a flourishing dramatist scene.

George I brought his Kapellmeister with him from Hanover to London. Georg Friederich Händel’s presence in London made the city a major center of Baroque music. He integrated English choral and instrumental music into the European mainstream of the times, setting a foundation for the city to become a major European music center. Together with John Rich, he launched opera at the Covent Garden Theatre in 1733, further securing that neighborhood’s prominence as a theatrical center.

Richard Sheridan’s The School for Scandal perhaps best reveals Hanoverian London’s vibrant and innovative theater scene. Sheridan was well schooled in gossip himself. Born in Dublin, he moved to England with his family when he was seven. His playwright-novelist mother had come to town to produce her plays; his father, who had been an actor-stage manager in Dublin, tagged along to help.

Sheridan led a dramatic life of his own, which included famous duels, a stint as owner of Drury Lane’s Royal Theater, and three decades serving as a Whig politician and Member of Parliament. His

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support for the demands of the American colonists made him stand out even more.

Impoverished by ill-health and financial gaffes, Sheridan remained a respected and beloved figure nevertheless. He was buried in Westminster Abbey.

Sheridan’s play tells the tale of Lady Sneerwell, a wealthy widow, and her helper Snake. The two become master rumor-mongers as she moves through polite society, making it ever less polite in her wake. Five acts of convoluted scandal ends with Sneerwell and Snake being exposed as the liars they are. The play has continued to be one of the most beloved comedy of errors in the English theatrical canon, and continues to be played on stage and screen today.

Sheridan, the impresario and politician, humorously captured the mores and behaviors of London society as it became wealthier, more egalitarian and more urbane across the decades of Hanoverian rule. Even greater hijinks lie in store as the dynasty passed authority to Prince Regent George during his father George III’s mental incapacities. The Prince Regent assumed the throne following his father’s death in 1820 and remained as George IV until his own demise in 1830. London by that time had become Europe’s most prosperous (though strikingly inequitable) city and has remained a foremost global theatrical force ever since.

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Montreal, 1970 Quebec came out of World War II stuck in a time warp that placed La Belle Province at odds with much of North America.

Transformation came as the rest of the continent was increasingly incorporated into what would become in a few years the most dynamically mobile continental economy in world history. Even the forces of traditionalism so prevalent in Quebec could not resist.

The opening bell in the culture wars against clerical hegemony sounded in August 1948, with the artistic manifesto entitled Le Refus Global issued by a handful of artists, propelling a new vision for Quebec culture. This proclamation was the brash cry of abstract artists influenced by the French surrealists.

Enraged at the “cassocks that have remained the sole repositories of faith, knowledge, truth and national wealth,” the group took on the title of Les Automatistes. Sixteen of their number composed and self-published a manifesto proclaiming the “untamed need for liberation,” “resplendent anarchy,” and extoling the creative force of the subconscious. Mimeographed in four hundred copies, their platform sold for a dollar a piece at a local Montreal bookstore. This seemingly obscure artistic declaration set the tone for intense cultural debates. Twenty-three year old dancer, choreographer, painter and

sculptor Françoise Sullivan was among the signatories.

Sullivan had grown up in Montreal, trained in classical dance by Gérald Crevier. She studied painting at École des beauxarts de Montréal, where she became friends with painter Paul-Émile Borduas and others among Les Automatistes. In 1945 she moved to New York where she delved into modern dance with Franziska Boas, Martha Graham and Louis Horst.

Returning to her native city in 1948, Sullivan performed with Jean-Paul Riopelle and Maurice Perron in a snow-covered field near Mont-St Hilaire in what proved to be a landmark work in Quebec modern dance: Danse dans la neige (Dance in the Snow).

As Sullivan’s career reveals, Les Automatistes emerged just as the modern age burst forth in Quebec. Economic and political transformation swept away an order dominated by Anglo-economic and Franco-clerical power; new technologies and the arrival of post-war immigrants promoted cultural renewal. Dance would become a major arena for this change; and television would bring it to the forefront of cultural upheaval.

The social, political and cultural forces unleashed by Quebec’s “Quiet Revolution” secularized Quebec identity and nationalism. The arts played a significant

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role in this transformation precisely because the process rested on the expression of public and private identities. The theater community constituted a radicalizing vanguard pushing forward new voices who were striving to decipher the meaning of everyday experiences on stage.

New media similarly shaped cultural life.

Broadcasting in Canada is an expensive undertaking given the country’s vast distances punctuated by relatively few settlements and cities of any size. Initial telecasts began in Montreal and Toronto in September 1952, with the first national service following in 1958. This sprawling public enterprise provided important shared content to all Canadians and offered a counterweight to the powerful American radio and television networks leaking across the border.

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The challenges confronting English language broadcasting in Canada were magnified in the French service. Audiences were smaller and more dispersed; and readily available content proved more difficult to find. The task of creating a distinctly French-Québécois television fell to Radio-Canada in Montreal.

Working within a limited budget, producers turned to the local performing arts community for content. Montreal playwrights and actors created madly popular drama and comedy series such as La famille Plouffe, based on a novel

by Roger Lemelin. Set in a working class Quebec family, this and other shows brought Quebec daily life and language to the screen. Such efforts provided steady employment for Montreal writers, directors, actors and musicians; an important safety

Photograph of Les Automatistes, Montreal 1946.

Photo: Maurice Perron. 1946. Wikimedia Creative Commons.

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net that enabled survival in an otherwise harsh economic environment.

Beyond drama, variety shows came to be a convenient way to fill time by promoting local comedians, musicians and dancers.

Given the previously uncongenial climate for dance, producers found they had to rely on many dance professionals who had immigrated from abroad or who had disguised their Québécois identity behind made up foreign — usually Russian sounding — names. Within a few years, Montreal’s dance scene matured with the rise of new companies ranging from traditional to avant garde.

The emergence of classical, then modern and contemporary dance in Montreal became inexorably linked to broader changes in society that drove political conflict and deep cultural wars. The Quebec transformation to modernity is no less dramatic for being swift and largely peaceful. Accompanying dislocations drove the preeminence of the arts, including literature, theatre, cinema, television, circus, music or dance, as a form of bringing together high culture with street performance.

Dance became embedded in Montreal life — a space in which it had largely been absent — because the dance community constructed a broad range of supporting institutions ranging from studios and schools. Les Grand Ballets Canadiens, Le Ballet Jazz de Montréal, the dance programs at l’UQÀM and Concordia, provincial and federal arts programs, and

arts spaces such as l’Agora de la danse combined to produce a solid foundation on which artistic talent could take flight.

Dance thrived in Montreal because it became rooted in local society by interacting with it.

Each of these features allowed a once disparaged art form to attain pride of place in a single lifetime. They produced precisely the resplendent anarchy Françoise Sullivan and the other petitioner signers of Le Refus Global extolled as a primal source of creativity. Or, as Sullivan herself would note four decades later in a 1988 address at Toronto’s York University, “art can only flourish if it grows from problems which concern the age, and is always pushed in the direction of the unknown. Hence, the marvelous in it.”4 These components — and the visionaries who created them — prepared Montreal dance for the trials of the century to follow. With dozens of dance schools and hundreds of dancers, the world of twenty-first century dance in Montreal is highly organized, complex and dynamic.

Opportunities exist from studios for children just discovering dance to internationally recognized and celebrated companies, choreographers and dancers.

From classical to modern, to avantgarde and experimental, audiences and professionals move back and forth among genres, often interacting with varied subcommunities as they do. Performance dance has become embedded into the warp and woof of Montreal’s cultural life.

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Moscow, 2000

Moscow at the dawn of the twentieth century was Russia’s “Second Metropolis.”

With nearly 2 million people, Moscow was one of the top dozen most populous cities in the world, among the largest half dozen cities in Europe, and the second most populous city in the Russian Empire just behind the capital St. Petersburg. Prodded by a vibrant merchant expansiveness, textile-oriented “calico” Moscow rapidly diversified its economy. The city had become the Empire’s primary magnet for peasants moving to cities.

Moscow was proving itself to be the Empire’ s most dynamic urban center, spawning a vast network of smaller industrial centers on rail lines extending every which way. The gravitational pull from this Planet Moscow reached a couple of hundred miles in every direction; an urban economic network that was home to 10 million, many of whom were integrated directly into Moscow’s economic orbit.

Moscow’s twentieth-century fate probably would have been beyond the imagination of anyone living on Planet Moscow at the time. Moscow grew and grew to become the headquarters and command center for an ideological empire that extended to nearly every continent. The city stood at the center of massive military and prison kingdoms of a previously unknown scale; it became the showcase for all that was

thought to be good about Soviet-style socialism. Both socialism and its capital status transformed the city, creating a culture of absolute power which left little room for accommodation. Clocks from Prague to Pyongyang marked Moscow time. Planet Moscow’s reach extended thousands of miles to embrace well over a billion people. No soothsayer in 1900 could have predicted such a future.

The collapse of the Soviet Union has done little to reduce Moscow’s predominance of the Central Eurasian plain. Contemporary Moscow busily tries to bully its way into the very top of the global urban hierarchy.

The Moscow of today is an urban imperialist in a manner that Muscovites of a century ago would never have dreamed possible. The city has become more than a metropolis or even a megalopolis; it is the center of its own urban solar system.

Beyond mere narration of expansive urban growth, tracing Moscow over the past century-and-a-quarter offers a story of urbanism as a metaphysical phenomenon.

The city always has been about more than making money and housing workers.

Moscow has been an expression of the grandiose dreams of theorists with revolutionary intent.

Moscow stands even today as a grand social experiment. Any number of people come to Moscow to impose their personal

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theories onto an economic, political, social and urban landscape strewn with the wreckage of failed visionary and illusory schemes long past. The impulse to see one’s own prophecies spring to life on Russian soil has long been all too apparent, from the towers of early Bolshevism to the kitsch of Stalinist socialism, from the space-age fantasies of the 1960s and 1970s to the contrivances of post-Soviet generation. No grand scheme — even those which appear to have been imported from Planet Mars — is too small for Planet Moscow.

This has been so, be it Lenin’s proletarian revolution, Stalin’s reengineered society, Khrushchev and Brezhnev’s socialist replacement for America, or the market delusions of turn-of-the-twenty-firstcentury macro-economists. Unreal planning and building projects by architects over the past century have been — and remain — but pallid reflections of the megalomaniacal notions for social engineering held by politicians and philosophers.

Nothing seems human in scale when it comes to Moscow. The Stalinist industrialization of the 1930s led to the most massive wave of migration to one city in the shortest time that had ever been experienced. Even the mundane has been huge. No one should be surprised that Moscow built the world’s largest hotel in the 1960s, only to be torn down less than a half-century later. Moscow’s vast scale befuddles the imagination of mortals. The city is planetary in reach.

Lost behind all these fulfilled and failed schemes and dreams stand people.

Imperfect, every day human beings have built lives of passion and dignity among the wreckage of some of humankind’s most delusional episodes. Muscovites are a special breed. Confronted by bonecrushing brutality, they have repeatedly reinvented their city and themselves, looking for points of advantage at every turn. Their story is one of heroism and stupidity, success and catastrophe.

The real life tale of Moscow is to be found in the miniature as well as the gargantuan. The harsh realities of early twentieth-century Moscow were seen best by looking at the infamous patches within hastily subdivided rooms — the ugol (literally, a “corner”) of communal apartments — in which tens of thousands Muscovites bedded down between factory shift. The skidding stop of a black car in the middle of the night, the stomp up the darkened staircase, and the pounding on the door of an apartment scared into silence brought soul-wrenching life to the Moscow of Stalin’s time. Stories of children eating their first orange on some random May Day during the 1950s told a broader tale of post-war recovery; while furtive encounters with the music of the Beetles on well-worn tape cassettes revealed more about the future of the Soviet Union than mammoth hotels. Lines of old women standing on street corners selling their life’s possessions in the 1990s warned that the workings of the market would not be magical; just as glass disco floors

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with sharks swimming underneath set expansive limits for hedonism.

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transformations and utopian experiments lies a profound truth. Moscow is too large both physically and spectrally to Moscow’s small moments remind us, even share any planet. The city’s unending in cities of cosmic ambition, that living search for a truth that can transcend and breathing human beings produce mere fact provides its own gravitational a textured nuance that distinguishes pull; one constantly challenging notions one community from all others. Beyond of the normal. Planet Moscow’s arrogant stupidity and injustice and pain, the assertion of its existence eventually pulls mundane renders life livable. This is why everyone and everything into the resulting generations of Muscovites have produced maelstrom. It is indeed a pause in the great art, literature and music. universe in which the meta-city constantly Behind visionary paradigms, programmatic becomes reality. scenarios, radical proposals, physical

Main Pavilion, Exhibition of the Achievements of the National Economy, Moscow.

Photo: Ketrin.sv. 2012. Wikimedia Commons.

CC license 3.0.

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Naples, 1760 Ulysses, if Homer is to be believed, was the first mariner to escape the temptations of the Bay of Naples. According to The Odyssey, Ulysses had heard of the bay’s infamous sirens — part women, part bird or nymph-like creatures — who lured sailors to their death by singing so beautifully that no one could sail on without succumbing. Thus, when returning from the Trojan War via the bay, Ulysses plugged the ears of his crew with bee’s wax and bound himself to the mast until they had sailed safely out of range of the sirens’ audible temptation. In response, one of the sirens, Parthenope, angry over their failure to seduce their prey, drowned herself in the sea. The original settlement on the bay was said to have grown on the spot where she washed ashore, claiming her name as its own.

Various communities huddled around the Bay of Naples date, in one incarnation or another, back to the second millennium before the birth of Christ. Ever since, this urban area has remained one of the world’s great cultural fulcrums. “The wonder of the place,” as the novelist and writer on the arts Benjamin Taylor reminds us in Naples Declared (2012), “is that it has not been annihilated by so much history. Ask yourself what New York or Chicago or Los Angeles will be twenty-five centuries from now. Imagination falters.”5 Although Taylor is correct in asserting that

our imagination falters, the Neapolitan imagination rarely has.

Greek colonizers made the town of Parthenope, which was on the site in Naples where the medieval Castel dell’Ovo stands today, a beachhead for further conquest of the western Mediterranean Sea region. Their cities, including the “new town” of Neapolis, sprang up along the bay’s shores as residents paid their devotion to the god of reason, Apollo. Nearby, the mountain we know as Vesuvius reminded them of Nisa, the sacred mountain of Dionysus back home. They traveled up its slopes to organize seductive rites of fertility and renewal. Ancient and Byzantine Greeks dominated the bay’s towns for centuries, creating a local culture that manically swings between Apollonian rationality and Dionysian sensuality.

As the Greeks quickly appreciated, the Bay of Naples promises humans one of the most salubrious habitats on the planet. The bay’s environment, in fact, is so perfect that local residents have rarely been forced to be enterprising. They have merely needed to live off the land and sea as the mild Mediterranean climate, safe harbor, turquoise sky and indigo sea have sustained lush vegetation boosted by a deep layer of rich volcanic soil and an easy growing season.

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Plaza and church of San Francesco di Paola, Naples, Italy, 1890.

Photo: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

In 326 BC, the victorious Romans assumed control over the area. The local Neapolitan Greeks did all they could to make sure that the arriviste Romans remained under their spell despite having been defeated militarily. Naples conquered Rome culturally. Prominent Romans started building large villas for their retirement as they turned the area into an elite resort.

Yet all was not quite idyllic. The inhabitants of this earthly paradise constantly faced the possibility of near-instantaneous annihilation by Mount Vesuvius.

Categorized as a “red” volcano for the lava that periodically spews from its crater,

Vesuvius has erupted cataclysmically over the centuries, as when it eradicated the Roman port cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum in AD 79. A Neapolitan of any century only needed to peer at the menacing mountain looming over the city to be reminded of the transitory folly of human existence.

Under such circumstances, Neapolitans have naturally looked for salvation wherever available. A persistent and living interdependence between Christian and pagan traditions, marks the local culture to this day. It is no wonder that the city has been known widely since the Middle Ages as a “paradise inhabited by devils.”

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The city’s combination of natural appeal and peril has nourished a lively culture marked from the time of its original settlers, the Epicureans, by a distinctive blend of sensuous, joyful hedonism and rigorous, stern sanctity — of paganism and piety. Thus, Naples has been home both to the inventors of pizza and chocolate ice cream, on one hand, and to countless religious orders, on the other.

thought a Greek chorus might have performed. Naples had become a city in which children did not take music lessons; they learned simply by becoming aware of their surroundings.

Neapolitan progenies studied music unreservedly. According to some estimates, by the mid-seventeenth century, Naples was home to seven conservatories and 617 religious institutions, including At the end of the 1760s, Joseph-Jerome 248 churches, offering musical education.

LeFrançais de Lalande told readers At its height, this system produced a of his guidebook for French travelers constant stream of innovative musicians that, as translated in Jeanne Chenault who transformed the musical landscape of Porter’s Baroque Naples (2000), “music the era. The city’s musicians formed what is the Neapolitans’ triumph. Apparently, became known as the Neapolitan School, eardrums are more sensitive, more attuned whose members were avidly sought by to harmony, more sonorous, in this country impresarios and aristocrats from Paris to than in the rest of Europe; the entire Saint Petersburg, from Madrid to Vienna to nation sings; gestures, inflections of voice, London. the way each syllable is emphasized, Since its founding, Naples has been conversation itself, all show and manifest such a city of sudden and disconcerting a sense of harmony and music. Naples juxtaposition of opposites — the sort of is the principal source of Italian music, place that creates and recreates over and of great composers, and of excellent over again the kind of delirious urbanism operas.”6 that constantly bursts forth with invention and creativity. The Naples of delirium and The Neapolitan Dionysian and Apollonian cultural dyad reinforced the local embrace creativity is a place where the devils make the music, and do so gloriously. of music. Song, perhaps more than any other genre, dominated Neapolitan musicality. Verse was sung on the street in a local dialect, in church in Latin, and on an aristocratic stage in some vague approximation of how erudite scholastics

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New Orleans, 1910 Although every city contains its contradictions, as Louis Eric Elie notes in her 2013 book Unfathomable City, New Orleans is “in many ways a segregated city, its populations form blurry, complex checkerboards, whose inhabitants also intermarry, mingle in various ways, and don’t lend themselves readily to being mapped.”7 The city’s improvisational style has influenced every aspect of its life.

To historian Lawrence Powell, for whom New Orleans is the Accidental City, the distinctive local cuisine contains the essential elements that have made New Orleans its own place.

“The kitchens may have been French,” Powell writes, “but the cooks were slaves, tossing in the same kettle culinary

ingredients plucked from three continents.

They received direction from the mistress of the house, but they were the ones who occupied the nexus between town and country. Not only did they cook the food but they purchased the groceries from petty tradesmen and footloose trappers, themselves slaves; and in the process, they skimmed off something extra— “lagniappe,” as later generations would describe it — in the form of income and victuals. . . . In other words, African slaves not only stirred the pot; they filled it too.”8 What was true in the pots and pans that hung over the stoves of this swamp metropolis proved equally true when New Orleanians put down their spoons and knives and picked up musical instruments,

The band, Jumbo Shrimp Jazz performing at the Spotted Cat in New Orleans.

Photo: T. Tseng. March 2014. Flickr.com. CC license 2.0.

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which similarly had been created on three continents. The results, of course, became known to the world as “jazz.” Jazz, to a considerable degree, is the music that emerged more than a century ago from the rough-and-tumble streets of the city’s Storyville neighborhood, a so-called red light district, through the powerful collision of African musical traditions, at times filtered through the Caribbean idiom, with European instrumentation.

This clash has occurred since the city’s founding. French and later Spanish colonial administrators allowed, and even encouraged, African-born slaves and their descendants to congregate on Sundays to form drum and dance circles, trade, and practice the traditions of their homelands on a barren patch of land in the “back of town” that became known as Congo Square. These gatherings persisted into the American period, until a fearful antebellum elite led by local slave owners brought them to a halt. Gatherings nonetheless continued elsewhere in the city, with Congo Square and the nearby Tremé neighborhood remaining focal points for musicians and musical forms that combined African, Caribbean, European and American traditions.

Freddi Williams Evans records the story well in her history Congo Square (2011).

Evans writes, “alongside European-derived dances, some African descendants continued to dance in the ways of their tradition. Several of the eyewitness accounts of Congo Square gatherings, given during the 1840s, indicate that the

dance and the music were African. Dance descriptions written in the 1940s, around one hundred years after the gatherings ceased, show that black New Orleanians continued to employ those rhythms, dances, musical instruments, or cultural practices. The use of handkerchiefs when dancing and the receiving of money for impressive, informal street performances became standards in New Orleans culture. . . . Thus, African-based rhythms that both stimulated and accompanied dance steps undergirded indigenous New Orleans styles. Indeed, the music and the dance continuously influenced each other.”9 Such connections have remained just below the surface of “proper” New Orleanian society for most of the city’s existence. It is doubtful, for example, that more than a handful of the white shoppers making their way down busy Canal Street in 1915 trying to finish their daily errands noticed two teenage “colored boys” playing their hearts out for 50 cents a day on a flatbed advertising wagon. None of these shoppers probably ever thought for a moment that they were listening to a free concert by players who would become two of the most important musicians of the century, Sidney Bechet on clarinet, and Louis Armstrong on cornet.

Music thus flowed over racial, ethic, class and gender divisions, all the more so because it often was played outside in earshot of everyone. The result was jazz, but so much more. The city’s musicians have played pivotal roles in developing at least three more of the

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twentieth century’s most potent musical forms: Gospel; rock ’n’ roll; and, hiphop. Although each of these later genres has multiple claimants for parenthood, there is no doubt that the Crescent City nurtured some of the most seminal figures in each. A cappella quartets such as the Zion Harmonizers moved Gospel from the storefront to established churches during the 1920s and 1930s; and Water Street–born Mahalia Jackson helped to secure Gospel’s acceptance nationwide.

Every African American performer of note during the 1940s and 1950s cut his or her musical teeth in the city, driving jazz- and blues-laced rhythm & blues into what is now known as rock ’n’ roll. More recently, hip-hop and “bounce” (the local dance party music that emerged from public housing projects in the 1990s, hence known as “Project Music”) have taken pride of place.

Underneath all the music — from the drums of Congo Square to the electrified rubber bands at the Magnolia Projects a couple of centuries later — lies the most distinctive element of all New Orleans

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music: a powerful bass line. Bass defines New Orleans music, whether it has been played by African or snare drums, acoustic or electrified basses, tubas or foghorns, or chanted by Mardi Gras Indians. Let the music get “dirty and lowdown” and “muddy as the Mississippi,” and whatever is happening up above doesn’t matter. It’s New Orleans.

The city’s incredibly fertile musical atmosphere — like its cuisine — is no accident. It is a result of a vibrant mixing of cultures (Native American, European, African and Caribbean) within the physical context of shared space (Congo Square, Storyville, Plymouth Rock Baptist Church, the Dew Drop Inn, the Calliope and Magnolia Housing Projects), as multigenerational musical families (e.g., the Marsalises, the Bastiles, the Nevilles, the Harrisons and the Millers) and institutions (including churches, bars, clubs, so-called social aid and pleasure clubs, radio stations, heritage music festivals and everything associated with Mardi Gras) come together to confront the demons arising from poverty and disenfranchisement.

New Orleans street scene, February 2, 2016.

Photo: Shutterstock.com, By GTS Productions.

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New York, 2010 The city that became New York was born as an afterthought embedded in an obsessive drive to colonize the world. European sailors dispatched by various monarchs to beat other rulers to Asia found themselves bumping up against various corners of the Americas ever since Columbus sailed in 1492 (earlier arrivals, such as probable Viking incursions in North America, predate the Age of Discovery). In the 1520s, Giovanni da Verrazzano, an Italian explorer in the service of the French crown, and Esteban Gomez, a Portuguese captain commissioned by Charles I of Spain, both visited the estuary that would become New York Harbor. But it wasn’t until September 3, 1609, that the Europeans came to stay, when Henry Hudson, a British sea captain looking for a western route to Asia for the Dutch East India Company, sailed into the estuary and eventually up what is now the Hudson River, almost as far as today’s state capital of Albany.

Two essential elements in this foundational tale of New York have continued to be central throughout the city’s existence: New York remains an urban enterprise predicated, first and foremost, on commerce; and, to succeed, the city must draw participants of unknowable diversity from wherever they can be lured. In other words, New York has always been a place rooted in a capacity to derive benefit from contacts among individuals or groups that otherwise consider each other personally loathsome. This is no less true today than four hundred years ago even as the cast of characters running through the New York story has changed constantly.

In 1987, two very different reviews of the state of the city appeared almost simultaneously. The first was a report issued by an ad hoc commission on New York in 2000 chaired by Robert F. Wagner Jr., who was the son and grandson of beloved New York politicians and was himself deeply involved in city affairs. The second review was a special issue of the Early Dutch visitors recorded a fecund distinguished Leftist journal Dissent edited landscape overflowing with bounty. by the author and journalist Jim Sleeper.

Humans already had found the area a Although both presented a portrait of congenial place to live for several millennia, what was recognizably the same city, with a number of Native American nations, their differences pointed them in opposite primarily the Lanapes, thriving when directions. Wagner’s report was titled New Hudson first cast his anchor off what York Ascendant, but Sleeper’s journal seems to have been known as Mannaissue bore the title, In Search of New York. hata, for “hilly island.”

SHORT ESSAYS ON COMMUNITY, DIVERSITY, INCLUSION, AND THE PERFORMING ARTS

Both reports appeared at what, in retrospect, was a turning point in the city’s destiny. The city had reached a nadir a few years before with a disastrous brush with municipal bankruptcy in 1975, widespread civil breakdown during a 1977 blackout, and excessively publicized violence on the subway and in parks. In this dire context, Dissent’s contributors told a tale of slow and inexorable urban decline. Their New York had become a tough, nasty place full of paranoia, racial hatred and economic conflict.

All was not lost, according to the ad hoc commission’s report. They viewed the restructuring of the city’s finances in response to near bankruptcy as having improved New York’s ability to respond to economic change. The profound transformation of international financial markets, reflecting the beginnings of what we now know as globalization, they argued, enabled New York to firmly secure its position as the world’s financial capital.

Despite privileging different factors, both Dissent’s and the commission’s reviews identified many similar positive and negative trends. Both accounts lamented the absence of civility in New York life, for example. For the authors of the commission’s New York Ascendant, positive developments were offset by growing income disparities, continued high rates of crime and violence, and a floundering educational system that poorly served both the city’s youth and employers. For the contributors to Dissent, New York was experiencing a remarkable

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mixing of different traditions, especially of Hispanic and African cultures, producing unprecedented creativity on city streets.

A singular event on August 11, 1973 captured what the contributors to Dissent had in mind when they praised New York’s continuing bottom-up inventiveness. On that evening, residents of the high-rise apartment building at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, in the Morris Heights neighborhood of New York City’s impoverished and crime-infested South Bronx gathered for a back-to-school party.

The extraordinarily loud beat emanating from Jamaican-born DJ Kool Herc’s giant amplifiers that evening marked the birth of the late twentieth century’s signature musical genre, hip-hop.

Puerto Ricans and African Americans had been coming together for years in the city’s poorest neighborhoods. Protean musicians such as the towering Machito began to perform with Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker; activist writers such as Jésus Colón, Piri Thomas, and the young “Nuyorican” poets, including Felipe Luciano and Victor Hernandez Cruz, explored new ways to express racial and national pride. Often sharing neighborhoods, these artists drew from each other as well as from their oftenshared African roots.

Lin-Manuel Miranda was born a dozen years after DJ Kool Herc launched hip hop. He was born in Manhattan of Puerto Rican heritage, and grew up in Inwood, a blue-collar neighborhood near the island’s

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northern tip cut off from downtown by subway switching yards. The area had evolved from being the home of Jewish and Irish immigrants to the home of Hispanic, often Dominican, newcomers.

Miranda graduated from Hunter College High School and went off to Connecticut’s idyllic Wesleyan University where he combined the hip-hop of his home turf with a solid grounding in Wesleyan’s more traditional student theater company. While a sophomore at Wesleyan, he began working on a musical based on a book by

Quiara Alegría Hudes that told the story of the lives of his generation in the now largely Dominican American neighborhood of Washington Heights. That show, In the Heights, moved from Connecticut to OffBroadway, and on to Broadway by 2008.

In the Heights was just the beginning. In 2015, Miranda’s hip-hop interpretation of Ron Chernow’s authoritative biography of Alexander Hamilton broke every mold on Broadway, starting out with its two-month run at the Public Theater. As Miranda understood, Hamilton’s story is the same immigration tale that has been playing out on the streets of Manhattan since the eighteenth century. Four decades had passed between DJ Kool Herc’s 1973 back-to-school celebration in the Bronx and Lin-Manuel Miranda’s rapping Hamilton, Washington and Jefferson on Broadway. A new blend of cultures once again had come together on New York’s streets to storm the castle of respectability.

Tensions between high-brow and lowbrow have marked New York ever since the Dutch arrived and declared Native American Manna-hata to be their own New Amsterdam. The city has grown and thrived from the fusion of diversity and a shared desire for commercial success. The city still bursts forth with an elemental human energy generated by the engagement of newcomers with traditions that have long been in place.

New York City street dancer. May 2016.

Photo: Robert Jones. 2016. Pixabay License.

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Odesa, 1920 Traveling throughout my adult life to the part of the world once known as the Soviet Union opened up a multitude of wondrous opportunities. The region is full of natural beauty, exciting cities and largerthan-life personalities. Yet even in the Carnivalesque wreckage of the region’s collapsed political system, nothing quite compares to the city of Odesa. Odesa is not just a place, of course. It is more of a state of mind, or, at the very least, websites for a virtual Odesa that exists in the imaginations of the thousands of former residents who have moved to places as varied as Moscow, Tel Aviv, Sydney, Toronto and Brooklyn.

A “real” Odesa exists as much in the ironic short stories of the Odessa Tales by Isaac Babel, who was arrested and shot by Stalin’s NKVD, as it does in the compelling stage productions of Babel’s grandson, Andrei Maleev-Babel, who teaches acting in Florida. Odesa, in other words, is not just a city with a promenade with a famous staircase overlooking the Black Sea; psychically, it also extends from Siberia to Sarasota. It does so because, throughout its brief yet extravagantly tawdry history, Odesa has inspired people to create.

In her 2008 study Kaleidoscopic Odessa, anthropologist Tanya Richardson drew on the city’s complexities to explore how diversity and place combine to nurture innovation. Richardson wanted to understand how the city’s presumed peculiarities — its mix of nationalities, tolerant attitudes, cuisines, dialects, joie de vivre and sense of humor, southern temperament, resourcefulness and entrepreneurial spirit — defined a distinctive Odesan sense of place and history. For her, the various components of Odesa had been formed by the interaction of multiple lenses, which shifted as if through the prism of a kaleidoscope.10

The Odesan kaleidoscope began spinning from the very beginning. The city took shape in the mind of a Neapolitan soldier of fortune, José Pascual Domingo de Ribas y Boyons (Osip Mikhailovich Deribas), before it assumed physical presence. De Ribas was the child of a Spanish consul and his aristocratic Irish wife. He entered into Russian service in the 1770s after a brief stint in the Neapolitan army. While he was serving on the staff of Catherine’s lover and imperial strategist, Grigorii Potemkin, de Ribas caught the attention of his superiors by watching over Officially, Odesa was established in 1794. and covering over the multiple offenses of Catherine the Great’s frontier settlement the dissolute American rear admiral John and Black Sea port swiftly became a randy Paul Jones, who had come to Russia in mix of nationalities and cultures. It has search of fortune. remained so ever since.

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Following the ultimate Russian victory over the Ottomans, de Ribas convinced Catherine and Potemkin that a patch of land near the mouths of four major European rivers — the Danube, Dniester, Dnieper and Bug — would make an excellent location for a city. On May 27, 1794, Catherine ordered that a port be built on the site. Following the Russian practice of identifying settlements in the empire’s recently acquired lands in the south — an area that became known as New Russia (following the pattern of New England, New France and New Spain) — de Ribas’s town was to be named after a classical Greek hero. In this case, the name Odysseus was feminized to Odesa in order to honor the empress.

De Ribas set out to create a newer and more orderly version of his hometown Naples. However, Odesa’s sketchy origins, relying on a multitude of fortune hunters and adventurers representing any number of the corners of the late-eighteenthcentury world, made coherence difficult to achieve. In some ways he succeeded, as the city grew outward along a logical grid. Nonetheless, there was nothing well-ordered about the people who filled it up. The new city’s residents came from a variety of backgrounds, having been pulled together by a presumed opportunity to get rich quickly.

Catherine’s grandson, Alexander I, replaced de Ribas as Odesa’s “city chief” (gradonachal’nik) with a French aristocrat,

Armand Emmanuel Sophie Septimanie du Plessis, the duc de Richelieu (a greatnephew of the famous Cardinal Richelieu).

De Richelieu was on the lam at the time, fleeing revolutionaries in Paris. He is still fondly remembered, and his statue stands atop Odesa’s iconic Potemkin Stairs, an urban ladder of 200 (now 192) steps leading from the city’s docks to its central districts.

As the governor of New Russia, de Richelieu transformed Odesa into a city of Russia’s least-respected “estate” (soslovia, social class), the petit bourgeoisie (meshchane). Arriving semiskilled workers, tradesmen, shopkeepers, former serfs, Jews and other outcasts came seeking a new life, and they found it.

The meshchane were much taken with themselves, even if others were not, and their love of reading and hearing about their lives fostered new forms of Russian literature, theater, song and media.

Throughout its history, Odesa has prompted a constant re-juxtaposition of different historical, cultural and political fragments of past and present. It is a community that seems to encourage a turning of the kaleidoscope as residents seek new meaning in endless layers of cultural, religious, ethnic, political and class differences. The city itself encourages a melding, reconciliation and mutual borrowing of diverse cultural expressions and traditions to produce ever-new amalgams.

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In his 2011 urban biography Odessa, Charles King captures the city’s “taste for the witty and the absurd; a veneer of Russian culture laid over a Yiddish, Greek, and Italian core; a boom-and-bust economy; a love of the dandy in men and the daring in women; a style of music and writing that involved both libertine abandon and controlled experimentation; and an approach to politics that swung wildly between the radical and reaction.”11 Odesa

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was and remains in King’s words, a city that “has continually sought to unleash its better demons, the mischievous tricksters that are the vital muses of urban society and the restless creators of literature and art. But it has often loosened its darker ones instead, those that lurk in alleyways and whisper of religious loathing, class envy, and ethnic revenge.”12 This stunning combination of human achievement and malfunction marks the city to this day.

Odessa Opera and Ballet Theater 1900-1914.

Photo: Romanov Empire Historical Society Media Collection, Odessa Collection. 1900-1914.

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Osaka, 1700 Osaka is a classic commercial city that seemed to grow organically almost from its beginning in the sixth century. Inventive and agile, Osaka merchant houses established Japan’s first credit system.

Osaka’s banks dominated Japanese commercial life to such an extent that, as early as the 1670s, they developed complex credit mechanisms and methods of exchange. The city’s immense Tennōji market sold rice, sake, salt, dyed textiles, straw matting, salted fish, paper, castmetal goods, bamboo and various woods to be transshipped to villages around the Inland Sea. Over time, Osaka came to dominate the emerging national rice market and cornered the market on cotton, both raw and ginned, and cottonseed oil, which lit lamps all across Japan. Osaka’s financiers and tradesmen busily made their town “the kitchen of the country.”

Osaka’s townspeople (chōnin), merchants, artisans, retailers and small-scale producers all jumbled together, and their families seemed coarse, crude, vulgar, greedy and increasingly prosperous by the standards of Kyoto court and Edo political life. They were notoriously direct and cultivated a most unrefined taste for a sort of “gaudy excess.” This distinctive approach to living is reflected in Osaka’s unique tradition of puppetry, in its distinctive local humor, and in its local dialect with an accent that brands an Osaka native even today.

Master storyteller Takemoto Gadyū joined with enterprising Osaka puppeteers intent on cashing in on the genre’s wildly lucrative popularity. In 1684, Gadyū set up a new theater in Osaka bringing together puppets, Jōruri storytelling and shamisen accompaniment. Jōruri tales date back to Princess Jōruri, a lover of an illustrious fifteenth-century general. Stories of her exploits became widely popular as they combined the eternal subjects of military glory, love, sex, betrayal and conflicting loyalties. By adapting Jōruri tales to the puppet stage, Gadyū’s company won passionate fans, garnering box office revenues that attracted some of the finest musicians and narrators of the day.

Gidayū’s distinctive style of chanting, which involved reciting the lines in a pure form so as to remove their emotional content, placed a high value on the technique of delivery rather than on the words and their meaning. This approach became so well known that his name eventually served as the appellation for all Jōruri puppet narration and continues to be highly valued by puppet and Kabuki actors and audiences today.

Gadyū had plenty of competition during his lifetime, with a popular narratoractor and his former student, Toyotake Wakatayū, joining with a playwright, Ki Kaion, to establish their own puppet theaters, as did other, perhaps less memorable performers. After Gidayū’s

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death in 1724, inventive puppet makers, such as the Toyotake Theater puppet master Yoshida Bunzaburō, advanced the art further by perfecting team puppetry, whereby figures were manipulated by three men. This new technique promoted fluid and complex movement, especially by an increasingly expressive complex head, kashira, of which there are now some seventy types. The additional operators allowed the puppets to grow in size throughout the eighteenth century, to as tall as four to five feet.

The opening of Gidayū’s puppet theater coincided with the fortuitous arrival of another young performer, Sugimori Nobumori. The son of a samurai family, Nobumori became a master-less rōnin following his father’s death and set out to make his way in the world. He eventually landed in Kyoto and began writing and performing. Assuming the pen name Chikamatsu Monzaemon, after the Chikamatsu Temple in today’s Shiga Prefecture, he grabbed the opportunity to write for the new increasingly popular puppet theater. This decision drew him to Osaka, where he teamed up with Gidayū.

Chikamatsu’s personal decision transformed Japanese theatrical and literary art, as he established himself as Japan’s premier playwright and one of its leading poets. Writing first for the puppet stage, he later added Kabuki scripts to his repertoire. Chikamatsu is the confirmed author of more than 130 plays in both genres, and may have written many more plays by the time of his death in 1725 (less than three months after Gidayū’s demise, in October 1724).

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Gidayū and Chikamatsu were the leading lights of an explosion of artistic creativity on the Osaka stage, as actors, musicians, writers and narrators scrambled to keep up with an insatiable audience who were seeking outlets for their ever-increasing prosperity, and who were embedded in a commercial culture that encouraged congenial group gatherings. Their students expanded the puppet and Kabuki repertoires, carrying their traditions into the eighteenth century. Gidayū and his fellow performers, promoters and writers established a vibrant theatrical form drawing on and refracting the delirious energy of Osaka itself.

Osakan puppet theater is known more widely today as “Bunraku,” after Osaka’s Bunraku-za Theater, which was founded

by Uemura Bunrakuken in 1872. Through these various transformations, Osaka and the performing arts that it nurtured remain noteworthy for a fierce spirit of independence.

For all its prosperity, Osaka has long been a tough town full of dirt and intrigue, success and failure, skilled financial magicians and ordinary street criminals.

The city struggled to adjust to the enormous transformations taking place as Japan reentered the world following the 1853–54 visits of Perry’s “Black Fleet.” The city harbored remarkable achievers throughout the entire Tokugawa period. Yet Osaka’s traders, craftsmen and manufacturers were fundamentally in trouble long before the new Meiji government (1868-1912) set out to “modernize” Japan.

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Osaka eventually made a successful transition to become a major industrial center, reinventing itself from a “sea of roof tiles” to a “forest of smokestacks.” Japan’s “Venice” — much of its trade had moved along an intricate network of canals — would become a city of furnaces, factories and commerce, the center of the modern spirit of feverish activity in manufacturing and commercial enterprise. The city exploded from a town of about 350,000 residents to approximately 2.2 million during the half century beginning in 1870.

For a brief moment in the early 1930s, the Osaka region surpassed Tokyo in the size of its population.

Osaka could not escape the fate of a Japan hurdling toward the precipice of

Bunraku puppets at National Bunraku Theatre, Osaka Japan.

Photo: Brikski. 2006. Flickr.com. CC License 2.0

war. World War II destroyed the city, with recovery taking at least two decades. The increasingly centralized postwar Japanese state posed a particularly pernicious challenge for Osaka. Political and economic power has come to rest ever more squarely in Tokyo, drawing all but a few symbolic corporate headquarters and much-needed financial capital away from Osaka.

Osaka remains a place apart; a town of directness and impatience with rules that place the city as much at odds with contemporary Japanese culture as when its vibrant chōnin culture gave birth to Bunraku puppetry.

SHORT ESSAYS ON COMMUNITY, DIVERSITY, INCLUSION, AND THE PERFORMING ARTS

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Paris, 1860

Paris during Napoleon III’s Second Empire appeared on the surface to be one of Europe’s most commanding modernizing cities. Under Prefect George-Eugène Haussmann’s unrelenting reconstruction of the city center, Emperor Louis-Napoleon reimagined his capital as a city of grand boulevards, elegant townhouses and ultramodern infrastructure. Together, Louis-Napoleon and Haussmann achieved their up-to-date vision with remarkable success. Paris became the city that would long be celebrated throughout the remainder of the nineteenth century down to the twenty-first.

Behind Haussmann’s facades lurked a more multifaceted city, one in which scarcity and ignominy played hideand-seek with vainglory. Charles-Louis Napoleon seemingly inherited his uncle Napoleon Bonaparte’s grandiose sense of self. Exiled following his uncle’s demise, Charles-Louis became embroiled in family intrigues intent on returning a Bonaparte to the French throne. He left London for Paris immediately following the collapse of the French government in early 1848 and eventually won election as President of the new Second Republic by year’s end.

Prevented by constitutional prohibition from running for re-election, CharlesLouis dissolved the Second Republic and proclaimed himself Emperor Napoleon III of the Second Empire.

Self-proclamation proved more easily declared than achieved. Faced with lingering opposition, Louis-Napoleon grew ever more authoritarian. Various foreign adventures took their toll, with his despotic regime eventually collapsing in 1870 following the debacle of the FrancoPrussian War. Early during his rule, Louis-Napoleon tried to curry favor of the working class through social reform, including the establishment of a state insurance fund, granting factory workers the right to organize, the extension of education to girls and women, the construction of a national rail network, the establishment of major banks, the reduction of tariffs and the expansion of economic life. He systematically asserted the power of the state over that of the Roman Catholic Church. In the process, he watched over the transformation of France into an increasingly prosperous, integrated, largescale capitalist society.

The Second Empire’s profound contradictions nurtured a deeply cynical society, one which stirred the arts to respond. Many today recall the period as much for its famous artists — such as Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet and Camille Pissarro, and writers, including Alexander Dumas, fils, Gustave Flaubert, Charles Baudelaire and Émile Zola — as for imperial folly and controlling state regulation. Theatrical and musical life

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similarly flourished as all of the arts responded to the uncertainties of a society undergoing profound political, social and economic change. In an ever-morecentralized France dominated by Paris, such creativity naturally took hold in the capital.

Outsiders often feel the tempo of change more readily than embedded communities; and this was the case with the Parisian musical theater. The operetta became the era’s signature night out on the town, shaped foremost under the virtuosity of German immigrant Jacques Offenbach.

Operettas share many characteristics with opera and modern musical theatre; yet it is quite distinct as something of a weigh station between both. Like opera, operettas place music and singing front and center in on-stage storytelling. Unlike opera, breaks and transitions among musical numbers are spoken rather

than sung. Like the musical, acting is more important than in opera. Unlike the musical, character development remains spare, storylines less intricate. Derived from French comic opera, operettas focus on light humor. In the case of Second Empire French operetta, performance became a vehicle for social satire denied the printed page by regime censors.

Offenbach’s immigrant story is similar to that of many of the creators of American musical theater a century later. Born in 1819 into the family of a cantor at a synagogue in Cologne, Jacob changed his name to Jacques upon entering the Paris Conservatoire as a child protégé cellist at the age of thirteen. He dropped out of school after a year of study to pursue a successful recital career.

His performances took him to London, where he appeared before Queen Victoria and fell in love with the French

Caricature of the Audience at “Les Bouffes Parisiens.” Photo: Emile Bayard. 1860.

Wikimedia Commons.

SHORT ESSAYS ON COMMUNITY, DIVERSITY, INCLUSION, AND THE PERFORMING ARTS

stepdaughter of the British concert manager John Mitchell, Hérminie d’Alcain.

In 1844, he converted to Catholicism and married Hérminie, whose birth father had been the Spanish ambassador to France and a Carlist general.

Hérminie inspired Offenbach’s first successful tune, “À Toi” (To You), leading American master lyricist Alan Jay Lerner to quip in his 1986 celebration of the American musical, The Musical Theatre, that “marital love, as an inspiration, seems to be more rare than one would imagine.

To my knowledge, only two popular composers actually wrote love songs to their wives, Irving Berlin and Harold Rome.” The couple, Lerner continues, “had five children and lived happily ever after, despite an occasional wander by Jacques from the straight and narrow.”13 Offenbach enjoyed success as a performer and composer before and after returning to Cologne for two years following the July Revolution of 1848 in France. In 1855, as Paris prepared for an international exhibition that was sure to attract tourists, he found himself perfectly suited for the contemptuous world of Second Empire Paris.

Offenbach attracted backers to lease and remodel the diminutive wooded Théâtre Lacaze just off the Champs-Élysées.

According to city regulations, the theater’s limited seating capacity required that there be no more than three actors with speaking parts appearing on stage at one time (this restriction was later modified to permit four speaking characters at a time).

Converting the venue to the Théâtre des Bouffes-Parisiens, Offenbach fashioned

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miniature one-act comedies bringing together music, speaking and pantomime.

His first play, Les deux aveugles (The Two Beggars), was an instant hit.

Offenbach produced more than forty works satirizing his times over the next six years. Emperor Louis-Napoléon and Empress Eugénie revealed that they had joined the ranks of his admirers by constantly praising his shows to their American dentist, Dr. Tom Evans. At the time of his death in 1880, the composer was at work on one of his most influential works, The Tales of Hoffman, which was among more than a hundred operettas, countless songs and orchestral works that he left behind. His music offered a sharp contrast to the emerging cult of Richard Wagner’s portentous style. Both composers lampooned one another, with differences between French and German musical styles setting them apart as much as their personal graces.

Offenbach’s fame and creative influence spread as he travelled and performed throughout Europe and the United States during the height of his fame, influencing such other seminal figures as Richard Strauss (the younger) in Vienna and William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Seymour Sullivan in London. Once carried to the New World, the operetta transmogrified into the more spare genre of the American musical play. By century’s end, Offenbach’s works inspired groundbreaking musical theater from Moscow to San Francisco. Second Empire Paris’s munificent cultural environment made it all possible.

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St. Petersburg (Leningrad), 1960 Some cities maintain a core personality that transcends every conceivable change in political regime, economic structure and population. They retain an essential personality when home to millions as when they played host to only a few thousand residents. St. Petersburg, Russia, is such a place.

Marveling at how, in the span of barely two generations, Russia’s age of underdevelopment produced one of the world’s great literatures, Marshall Berman increasingly found himself drawn to one particular street, the Nevsky Prospekt, for an explanation. Writing in his 1982 masterpiece pondering the meaning of modernity, All That Is Solid Melts into Air, Berman remarked, “Finally, the Nevsky was the one place in Petersburg (and perhaps in all Russia) where all the existing classes came together, from the nobility whose palaces and townhouses graced the street at its starting point near the Admiralty and the Winter Palace, to the poor artisans, prostitutes, derelicts, and bohemians who huddled in the wretched fleabags and taverns near the railroad station in Znaniemsky Square where the Prospect came to an end. The Nevsky brought them all together, whirled them around in a vortex, and left them to make their experiences and encounters what they could. Petersburgers loved the Nevsky, and mythologized it inexhaustibly,

because it opened up for them, in the heart of the city.”14 Berman is writing about Nevsky Prospekt at its height under the Romanovs when the boulevard served as the Russian Empire’s grande alllée. But this street continued to play an elemental role in Russian cultural life long after power and majesty had departed for Moscow. It did so because it remained an essential place of contact among the great city’s various contradictory components. It seems the Nevsky has always provided meeting places for all sorts of “poor artisans, prostitutes, derelicts, and bohemians.”

Recalling his student days in his 2003 memoir, Provoking Theater, written with John Freeman, Kamas Ginkas, a groundbreaking Jewish-Lithuanian theater director who helped to define Russianlanguage theater over the past half century, remembers the Nevsky’s Saigon Café as standing at the center of artistic inspiration. Having been celebrated in cultural histories of the late Soviet era, the Saigon was just the sort of place where those on the edge of society reshape all that is around them. This shabby and unexceptional, but well-located, low-end Soviet eatery was home to precisely the sort of urban and often vodka-fueled delirium that undermines urban propriety and cultural authority.

SHORT ESSAYS ON COMMUNITY, DIVERSITY, INCLUSION, AND THE PERFORMING ARTS

As Gimkas evokes the place, Saigon, really was not even a café, and its name was not the Saigon. That is just what people called it. It was a dinky street-corner place, maybe 30 square meters, with no seats or tables, where they served lousy coffee. It was basically just a dirty little hole. You stood at these elbow-high counters to drink your coffee, which cost a couple of kopeks, or you brought along something stronger of your own. It was on the corner of Liteiny and Nevsky Prospekt. If you look down Nevsky toward the Admiralty, it would be at your left on the farthest corner from the center. It was around for a long time, into the late 1970s, before it eventually fell apart. This semi-underground place attracted alcoholics, unemployed people, dissidents, crazies, and geniuses. It brought together all of Leningrad’s outsiders with an intellectual and bohemian bent. The KGB naturally knew all about it. Its agents were always there listening to what was going on. Everything avant-garde in Leningrad was connected to this spot in one way or another. It was a place where all the rejects of the Soviet era congregated.15 Those “rejects” included not just the student Gimkis and his theatrical friends from Georgy Tovstonogov’s nearby Bolshoi Drama Theatre around the corner, such as the epochal actor Innokenty Smoktunovsky. They counted the creators of the city’s influential underground music

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culture, Boris Grebenshikov, Viktor Tsoi and Sergey Kuroykhin, who dropped by, as did such seminal writers as Sergei Dovlatov, Yevgeny Rein and the future Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky. Before its destruction in the 1980s, the distinctly seedy Café Saigon was arguably among one of the most creative patches in a country that covered one-sixth of the Earth’s land mass, just as the Nevsky had been a century before when its denizens invented Russian literature.

Alas, this spot is now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the site of a highend bathroom fixtures store, having been gentrified to the point of destroying even a scintilla of inspiration. St. Petersburg and Russia have lost a valuable resource.

For much of its history, Nevsky Prospekt has been a powerful mixing bowl of urban life. Today’s social scientists “problematize” these places of group interaction as “zones of contact.”

First used by Mary Louise Pratt in the early 1990s, “contact zones” are the spaces in which “cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power.”16 Pratt observes that “commonly regarded as chaotic, barbarous, lacking in structure,” such zones are often full of improvised relationships and “co-presence” that mark the coming into contact of peoples “geographically and historically separated...usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict.”17

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Nevskii Prospekt. 2013.

Photo: Alex Fedorov. 2013. Wikimedia Creative Commons. License: CC BY-SA 4.0.

Like wetlands in the natural environment, mixing bowls of urban diversity often appear to outsiders to be little more than wastelands. They are the first places to be rebuilt, redesigned, reconceived and reconstituted when “reformers” think about “improving” a city. Yet this is a terrible mistake. Whether described as a “compelling arena of incoherence,” “zone of contact,” or an “inter-zone,” such neighborhoods are where creative cities create. Like wetlands, zones of contact are

among the most productive corners of the urban environment, and such communities must be revitalized from time to time for them to continue to enrich the city at large. Shabby and unexceptional though they may be, places like Leningrad’s Café Saigon are among the richest and most productive corners of urban life and help explain why a city such as St. Petersburg has remained creative across its many incarnations as St. Petersburg, Petrograd, Leningrad and St. Petersburg once again.

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San Francisco, 2018

The bright California morning sun lit up an azure sky on a typical San Francisco weekday morning late one recent January as dozens of ferryboats came and went from the city’s famous Embarcadero. A chill in the air proved just enough to require light coats and jackets. The streams of commuters disgorged by the boats perhaps sported fewer neckties than their counterparts back east trekking through Manhattan’s Grand Central Station that morning. They nonetheless moved with no less purpose into the surrounding forest of Financial Center office towers.

A main branch of streaming humanity flowed up Market Street, thinning out block by block as a handful peeled off into this or that workplace lobby. Just past Freemont Street, the determined calm of commuters making their morning journeys crumbled. A beefy bald man just past his prime was walking against the flow in a jacket pockmarked by union insignia. He shouted at the top of his lungs for “millennial scum” to return home. This was “our city,” he bellowed. “You rich leeches, get the F@#% out of our town.” Suddenly, California didn’t seem quite so mellow. So this is what Silicon Valley has done to The City.

San Francisco has been a quirky place ever since the famous California Gold Rush that passed through its docks.

The city always seemed to have space

for eccentricity and misfortune. It was a working-class town for much of its existence, as all ports are. The views were more spectacular, the weather more benign, perhaps; but life was life.

The Tenderloin District south of Union Square could hold its own with the Bowery back in New York for down-on-their-luck troubadours and grit.

As in Manhattan, those who have, passed in close proximity to those who have not. This was just the way of the world in a town dominated by commerce and waterfront. The unions represented on the shouter’s jacket told as much about the city’s history as the bankers and corporate lawyers gathering a few hours later over lunch at Nob Hill’s Pacific Union Club.

San Francisco has been an immigrant haven (though survival for many new arrivals, especially the Italians and Chinese, required accommodation to native bigotry).

American blacks were never particularly welcome, though they too found ways to survive. Gays famously came to town, especially following America’s wars in the Pacific as the Navy and other armed forces discharged those caught in the closet at the first port on national shores.

San Francisco was the sort of town that anyone could claim as home.

The cyber revolution changed all of this.

Suddenly, people who thought themselves

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smarter — and, hence, superior — to everyone else had more money than social ethics. They too appreciated the city’s beautiful views, its embrace of the good life and its underlying urban charm. They began to buy up everything and anything in sight. Perhaps they didn’t really want to price everyone else out; they just wanted their own and, if others were displaced, so be it.

Over time, like New York, San Francisco has become a less interesting place. Main shopping districts offer the same upperend chain stores as any top-of-the-line suburban shopping center. GPS guides drivers down streets which look more and more like anywhere else. The forces of homogenization continue to devour anything in their path.

The shouters in the streets know precisely whom to blame. All those self-proclaimed betters now find themselves vilified by passing strangers on busy streets. The shouters hardly are alone. On November 14, 2018, to cite just one example, freelance journalist Laura McCamy made pretty much the same point when she wrote in the nothing-if-not-respectable website Business Insider, When I moved to San Francisco in 1987, the inclusive City by the Bay was home to artists, dreamers, queers, and weirdos. I made friends, got a job, and learned never to call the city “Frisco.” In San Francisco, the unconventional fit in. I felt right at home. A little more than a decade

later, my Bay Area home started to change. Tech companies and their employees began to run roughshod over San Francisco and the East Bay. Real estate prices soared, and the eclectic Bay Area culture that I love started to disappear. Poets and revolutionaries have been pushed to the margins while tech companies turn the Bay Area from a magnet for all types of creative thinkers into a mecca for just one thing: tech.18 Revolutions devour themselves. There is growing evidence that many young San Franciscans are themselves overwhelmed by rising prices and battered by social dislocation. They represent a generation that has become acutely aware of inequality and injustice. Millennials often reject the prejudices of their parents and grandparents.

Individually, they might well agree in sorrow with the shouter that his city is lost; collectively, they embrace a diversity their very presence eviscerates. A recent movie about the city carries the title, The Last Black Man in San Francisco. What a sad turn for the home of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Bookshop, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Jefferson Airplane’s “Summer of Love,” Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry, and Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City.

The San Francisco Arts Commission, a leading city government arts organization, framed the challenge well in its 2014-2019 Strategic Plan: “We believe the arts create inspiring personal experiences, illuminate the human condition and offer meaningful

SHORT ESSAYS ON COMMUNITY, DIVERSITY, INCLUSION, AND THE PERFORMING ARTS

ways to engage with each other and the world around us. We imagine a vibrant San Francisco where creativity, prosperity and progress go hand in hand.�19

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ways to achieve what was so special in the past. Until then, the shouters will continue to verbally assault the crowds heading to work along Market Street.

For San Francisco to remain a creative center, the time has arrived to find new

View of Embarcadero in San Francisco. 2017.

Photo: Bob Collowon. 2017. Wikimedia Creative Commons. License: CC-BY-SA-4.0.

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São Paulo, 1968 By the 1960s, São Paulo had grown into the largest city in the Americas with one of the largest urban economies in the world.

The city had long been home to a rich blend of immigrants, including the largest Arab, Italian and Japanese Diasporas found anywhere, with large Jewish, Portuguese, and other communities added into the mix. Migrants from across Brazil poured into the city intent on grabbing a share of its wealth. Local elites had leveraged wealth from coffee production to build a powerful manufacturing sector.

Financial and other service industries followed together with international corporations. Major universities thrived as did a vibrant performing arts scene.

By many indicators, São Paulo seemed poised to join the ranks of the world’s most successful cities. Unfortunately, the city and country’s political systems were unprepared to make such a leap. Caught between weak democratic institutions and a penchant among the country’s military officers to run everything on their own, Brazil lurched from one political crisis to another, always on the threshold of the darkest excesses of military rule.

During the late 1960s, students, writers and musicians from across Brazil gathered in São Paulo. As they interacted with one another and explored the larger world of international pop music, many came to embrace Oswald de Andrade’s

1928 Manifesto Antropófago (Cannibal Manifesto). According to Oswald, Brazil is at its most creative when it takes in and cannibalizes other cultures, creating a new blend of music, art and literature that represents a uniquely Brazilian improvement on the original. Brazilian — and global — popular music was about to change.

Several young musicians began circulating in the same community, performing on their own and together, blending popular Brazilian rhythms with Western pop and rock. Some of the most talented — Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil Tom Zé — had moved from Bahia. Others, such as arranger Rogerio Dupat and the members of Os Mutantes, were Paulistas from birth. Accompanying poetry became an essential element in the mix, producing songs which spoke of political discontent accompanied by infectious Brazilian rhythms.

In keeping with Oswald’s notions of musical cannibalization, these Tropicálistas combined the musical legacies they brought with them. Veloso, Gil and Zé were steeped from birth in Bahia’s deep African musicality; Dupat trained in Paris with Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez. Os Mutantes’ founding brothers Arnaldo Baptista and Sérgio Dias Baptista instilled their psychedelic sound with a profoundly Paulista urban vibe. Together

SHORT ESSAYS ON COMMUNITY, DIVERSITY, INCLUSION, AND THE PERFORMING ARTS

they launched a cultural movement, Tropicália, defining the essence of Paulista sensibility. Collectively, they influenced music, art, literature and popular fashion.

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some churchy organ chords and a few rings of a bicycle bell, we’re off on one of pop’s great magical mystery manifestos. Ringmasters Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil’s title track, performed by Os Mutantes, mocks bourgeois modes of consumption, with arranger Rogério Duprat importing George Martin’s psychedelic bridges and “Penny Lane” trumpetry. Where Tom Zé’s “Parque Industrial” (“Industrial Park”) lampoons the Anglo-Americanization of Brazilian tradition, Veloso and Gal Costa’s sublime “Baby” embraces its consumerist fantasies just as warmly.

It’s an album powered by pastiche, parody, and ye olde poptimism— though the powers of darkness, namely Brazil’s military dictatorship, loom in the background. Are those screams of joy or pain at the end of the hip hymn ‘Hino do Senhor do Bonfim’? Are those bombshells theirs or ours?20

Their landmark collaborative album Tropicália: ou Panis et Circencis (Tropicália: or Bread and Circuses) (1968) offered the movement’s manifesto. Recorded by Os Mutantes, Gilberto Gil, Caetano Veloso, Gal Costa and Tom Zé with arrangements

by Rogerio Duprat and lyrics by Torquato Neto, the rebellious message is visible on the album cover before a single track has been played. Holding the cover in hand, eyes fall on musicians sitting in carnivalesque grandeur. The cover seems to pay a mimicking tribute to the album jacket for the Beetles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band that had been issued just a few months before. Track after track expands on the movement’s anarchistic vision. After a half-century, the album remains widely considered among one of the greatest Brazilian albums of all time, with several tracks consistently The generals who seized power in a earning similar rankings among Brazilian 1964 coup d’etat were less charmed. songs.

Following the increased radicalization of American rock critic Richard Gehr, writing the Tropicália sound, the soldiers moved June 19, 2017 for the Pitchfork website, to crush the movement. Pro-regime vividly describes the album’s charmed nationalist supporters began disrupting journey: Tropicália concerts, providing an excuse to shut them down. The military arrested The title announces the provocation Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil and of this art-pop masterpiece: “Panis sent them into exile in London. Other et Circencis” (“bread and circuses”) performers faced punishment, sometimes is presented here as the boring going to jail, other times fading into alternative to the promise of joy obscurity. and rebellion embodied in the Tropicália movement. And so, after

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The Tropicálistas would have the last laugh. Rock musicians in North America and Europe discovered and celebrated the urban sounds coming from Brazil.

Veloso and Gil gained instant notoriety and popularity from their perch in London. They returned to Bahia in 1972 and reentered Brazilian cultural life. Gil eventually went into politics, ultimately serving as Minister of Culture between 2003 and 2008. Others enjoyed long and successful careers in the years to follow.

With democratization in the 1990s, the Tropicália sound—and Tropicálista musicians—enjoyed a resurgence of popularity in Brazil and abroad. Their success validated Oswald’s cultural

cannibalism as the herald for a wave of postmodernism in all Brazilian arts as well as internationally flowing into a broad global anti-authoritarian counterculture.

São Paulo, like other megacities, feels like a planet unto itself. The city is a post-modernist palimpsest that becomes whatever one wants it to. Writing in his study of Japanese Brazilians, A Discontented Diaspora (2007), historian Jeffrey Lesser observes that São Paulo is a city where “identities did not just repeat and move, they simultaneously sprinted and ponderously ran the marathon.”

Such contradictions are the mark of unbounded creativity, as the Tropicálistas demonstrated so well.

Founding member of Tropicalia movement, Gilberto Gil playing guitar.

Photo: Pat Smith. 2007. Wikimedia Commons. CC License 2.0.

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Toronto, 2010

Toronto is widely praised as one of the world’s most successful examples of urban multiculturalism. With just under half of the city’s population having been born abroad, Toronto ranks second only to Miami among immigrant gateway cities.

Immigrants continue to arrive seeking the city’s promise of opportunity with dignity.

The diverse Toronto of today would have seemed unthinkable just a lifetime ago. At the end of World War II, Toronto retained its reputation as “America’s Belfast.”

A deeply provincial industrial colonial outpost, Toronto throughout the first half of the twentieth century seemingly lacked the dynamism of its as-yet-flourishing rust belt partners across the border to the south, such as Rochester, Buffalo, Cleveland, Toledo and Detroit. As industry grew, thousands of working class families, often Irish Catholic, were relegated to substandard, at times self-built homes in such neighborhoods as “Cabbagetown.”

Toronto similarly played a distant second fiddle within Canada to the country’s older historic financial and mercantile center, Montreal.

A robust, largely East European Jewish immigrant community proved to be the first harbinger of change when it arrived during the early years of the twentieth century. Toronto’s initial Jewish residents were dirt poor having traveled more or

less directly from the harsh shtetls of the Russian Empire. They were greeted unkindly by both Protestant and Catholic Torontonians, a hostility exemplified by the infamous August 1933 Christie Pits Riots that erupted when National Socialist wannabe Swastika Clubs attacked “foreigners” at a baseball game between Jewish and Italian community teams.

World War II transformed the city forever. The war solidified the presence of Toronto’s financial institutions while expanding the city’s industrial base. By the end of the war Toronto had become one of the chief shop floors for the British war effort. The war similarly nurtured a nascent communications sector that would grow to rival similar centers across North America.

Immigrants were beginning to make their presence felt in new ways. More successful members of the Jewish community began to move to the small, independent, wealthy enclave of Forest Hills. The floodgates of Italian immigration were about to open, luring tens of thousands impoverished by war. English Canada began to integrate into a booming continental postwar American economy untouched by the ravages of war.

How is it, then, that a child born in postwar Toronto now wakes up on any morning a lifetime later as a resident of

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one of the most successfully diverse cities in the world?

Immigrants continue to fuel the city’s metropolitan growth. Toronto has grown at a faster rate than any North American Observers from afar often assume that city over the past half-century other than the Canadian multiculturalism model of Los Angeles. The Greater Toronto Area citizenship must hold the answer to these presently has a population over six million; questions. Such federal policies, which and, the larger Southern Ontario Golden were enshrined in law with the passage of Horseshoe within which it sits exceeds the 1988 Multiculturalism Act, undoubtedly nine million residents. played a supporting role.

According to the 2011 Canadian census, Changing federal immigration policies there are nearly as many Torontonians of have had considerable impact in this Chinese ethnic origin (12 percent) as there transformation. Postwar reductions in are of English heritage (12.9 percent); and immigration restrictions opened the more than those who identify themselves door for poor Italians to fill the seemingly as “Canadian” (11.3 percent). Religious endless construction and industrial diversity has become just as striking, jobs created by an exploding Canadian with Catholics constituting the largest economy. The Italian immigrant offspring group (28.2 percent), followed by those generation took full advantage of the city’s with no religious affiliation (24.2 percent) expanding universities to move into the and Protestants as a distant third (11.9 middle class. percent).

The Italians were followed by other groups fleeing deprivation in Europe. A significant Hungarian community formed following the failed 1956 uprising against Soviet domination. Greeks fleeing their own internecine conflicts followed, as did Portuguese immigrants somewhat later.

The federal government lifted racial quotas on immigrant selection in 1967, converting to a point calibration based on skills and educational achievement. Prior to this change, 90 percent of Canadian immigrants came from Europe. The majority of current immigration is from outside Europe. As the largest port of entry into the country, Toronto immediately felt these dramatic demographic shifts.

If Canadian federal policies fostered the context for metropolitan transformation, Ontario provincial and Toronto municipal policies have proven critical for insuring that diversity would become an asset rather than a liability. More often than not regional and local officials were driven by the exigencies of an increasingly modern economy that required a workforce that was mobile, educated and literate. This was the era when British actor Peter Ustinov famously quipped that Toronto was “New York run by the Swiss.”

Enthusiastic praise for Toronto’s fruitful transition from “America’s Belfast” to one of the world’s most successful multicultural

SHORT ESSAYS ON COMMUNITY, DIVERSITY, INCLUSION, AND THE PERFORMING ARTS

cities is rightly celebrated. However, commendation should not obscure some very real limits to multicultural comity. Two structural challenges in particular, those of race and inequality, deserve attention.

By 2017, approximately 400,000 Torontonians self-identified as “black.” This community is comprised of individuals from several countries, speaking multiple languages and practicing varied religions. Many are highly successful and the community as a whole has made substantial contributions to the city, region and country. However, black people across all of these differences share a belief that racism is common in Toronto.

A fulsome celebration of multiculturalism similarly obscures solidifying patterns of

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inequality. Poverty remains significant, persistent and growing throughout the Toronto metropolitan region.

Over the course of the past threequarters of a century, Toronto has made a remarkable transition from being a grungy industrial “American Belfast” to one of the continent’s most successful and diverse “Global Cities.” This accomplishment holds many lessons for other communities.

First, change on the scale of a city is incremental, with new norms and expectations building up as coral expands a reef. There are no comprehensive policy responses that address all the challenges of growing diversity; nor are there any single levels of power that make a difference on their own.

Second, the Toronto experience demonstrates the prominence of longterm and sustained investment in providing quality education for all residents from primary school through graduate and professional education.

Third, there must be a recognition that the task of sustaining a vibrant and productive multicultural community is never complete.

Enduring challenges of race and inequality remain despite all of Toronto’s impressive achievements.

Whatever these challenges may be, contemporary Toronto demonstrates the wisdom of its own official motto: “Diversity Our Strength.”

Toronto’s Chinatown 2009.

Photo: Chesiyuan. 2009. Wikimedia Common. GNU Free documentation license.

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Venice, 1620 Venice has always been a city apart.

Cut off from the European mainland by tricky wetlands, Venetians elevated their access to the sea and their seamanship to secure incredible wealth through trade and commerce. Unlike other European city states of the early modern era, Venice was a Republic. The key executive position of Doge rotated among elite families who established a tightly controlled oligarchy over all aspects of Venetian life. The Republic was, in important ways, one of Europe’s first secular authoritarian regimes.

Music and art always have been important to the city. Both were put in the service of legitimating the regime while simultaneously providing expressive outlets in a society that was tightly organized from above. Following the Fall of Constantinople in 1453, Venice’s control over trade with the East waned. Europe’s major trade routes steadily shifted to the Atlantic, taking economic supremacy and political power with them. By the turn of the seventeenth century, Venice faltered and began redefining itself as Europe’s pleasure capital. The city leveraged gambling, courtesans, luxury goods, music and drama, and festivals to preserve its economic well-being. One new art form, opera, led the way.

Opera emerged from the attempts of late-sixteenth-century Florentines and their

neighbors in other commerce-dominated Northern Italian principalities to recreate the music of the ancient Greeks. Although recent historiographical research has altered some of the details in the story, it is clear that new theatrical forms combining drama, dance, song and instrumental music came together in Northern Italy just before 1600 as something that was qualitatively new. This innovative performance style which eventually would become known as “opera” emerged in response to debates over the extent to which the emotional impact attributed to ancient Greek drama was related to the music provided by the chorus.

Many of opera’s originators, including Galileo’s father Vincenzo Galilei, desired to break out of the limitations of medieval polyphonic choral music and looked to imagined Greek roots for validation of the new style.

This pioneering form of vocal dramatic theater was strikingly new, like many of the royal regimes of the time. Opera was associated as well with Greek and Roman classicism, the core of legitimacy in European culture. Young Absolutist rulers across Europe hoped that such legitimacy would attach itself to their own sovereignties. Opera offered important armament for consolidating state power.

Initially, opera’s words were more important that its music. The poet Ottaavio

SHORT ESSAYS ON COMMUNITY, DIVERSITY, INCLUSION, AND THE PERFORMING ARTS

Rinuccini began writing the librettos for increasingly sophisticated intermedi during court theatrical performances in the latter years of the sixteenth century.

The intermedi at a performance of La pellegrina during the May 1589 wedding of Ferdinand I de’ Medici and Christine de Lorraine marked a departure as small musical skits interspersed throughout the evening constituted a single, integrated story bringing together verse and music for the first time.

After experimenting with a number of alternative performance forms blending music and drama under the patronage of prominent Florentine Jacopo Corsi, Jacopo Peri set Rinuccini’s verse to music to retell the ancient legend of Daphne. In so doing, Peri and Rinuccini produced what many historians consider to have been the first opera. Other similar works followed Peri and Rinuccini’s Dafne, including their own Euridice, which was written two years later in honor of the wedding of Maria de’ Medici and Henri IV, King of France. The first opera to be performed in Rome, Emilio de’ Cavalieri’s La rappresentazione di Anima e di Corpo, was staged in the Oratorio di Santa Maria in Vallicella as early as February 1600.

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that would eventually rise to challenge royal and aristocratic domination across the continent. The genre’s connection to commerce was nowhere more evident than in Venice.

Claudio Monteverdi is credited with consolidating the new performance art during the first decades of the seventeenth century. He was born in Cremona, and had won fame as a composer and performer of madrigals working in the court of Vincenzo I of Gonzaga. The 1607 performance of his Orfeo in Mantua’s Ducal Palace is considered by many to mark the initial consolidation of opera as a distinct art form. Monteverdi moved to Venice in 1613 to become the conductor in residence at the Basilica of San Marco, where he wrote operas and liturgical music that are still performed today.

Monteverdi established opera as an art that could express the complexities of the human condition, and he secured Venice’s claim as its most important center. He and his colleagues in Venice transformed opera by turning what had been the plaything of dukes and princes into a genuinely public art. Venetian performance under their guidance favored grand spectacle over intellectual contemplation. In this regard, Monteverdi produced operas intended for a broader audience than the small circle of aristocrats who could fit into a ducal drawing room.

Opera, however, proved to be politically paradoxical. On one hand, it was kept afloat by wealthy patrons who were looking for confirmation of existing social and political hierarchies; on the other Following the opening of Venice’s first hand, opera houses were commercial opera house in 1637, Monteverdi and operations, reflecting the economic ethos of an emerging proto-capitalist bourgeoisie his colleagues began to write for stages

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that were constructed expressly for the presentation of musical drama. Such purpose-built theaters, initially purely a Venetian phenomenon, spread across Europe. These theaters took the form of amphitheaters with balconies arranged around the theaters’ outer edges. This form created the effect of having the audience seated at the windows of palazzos overlooking the city’s numerous public squares. As Daniel Snowman tells the story in his masterful The Gilded Stage: A Social History of Opera (2009), the rudiments of an opera house came about by covering a Venetian piazza with a domed roof.

Venetian opera’s connection with public demand cultivated a distinctive form of musical drama that would sell tickets.

The city’s indigenous performance style favored formal arias in an elegant bel canto style. This preference promoted a more individualistic form reflective of

republican life, as opposed to greater dependence on choral and orchestral music embracing communal virtue. Plots became progressively more complex to hold commoner attention; the trappings of classical Greek mythology so important to the young Absolutists elsewhere fell by the wayside. Theatrical display beginning with elaborate stage machinery cast a spell on commoner audiences looking for spectacle and amusement.

Venice, a city of some 180,000 souls at the time, supported nine commercial opera houses by the end of the seventeenth century. As the city’s fortunes faltered, opera’s animating creativity moved with time to Naples, Paris, Vienna and London. Opera has remained a favored Venetian past time that continues to enliven local life. Meanwhile, the peculiarities of Venice’s urban form and political structure altered opera forever.

Teatro la Fenice in Venice Italy.

Photo: Alejandro. 2017. Flickr.com. CC license 2.0 image.

SHORT ESSAYS ON COMMUNITY, DIVERSITY, INCLUSION, AND THE PERFORMING ARTS

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Vienna, 1800

Vienna was a large city in 1800, but hardly the largest in Europe. The city was just under 272,000 souls in 1793 living, for the most part, within city walls that could be traversed in well under a half-an-hour.

Greater London at the time was home to somewhere around a million residents; Paris, about 600,000. Amsterdam, Milan, Moscow and St. Petersburg were about the same size; Naples was nearly twice as large. Once a frontline city in Europe’s wars with the Ottoman Turks, Vienna had remained relatively peaceful since the Austrians and various allies broke an Ottoman siege in 1683 and drove the Turks back towards the Balkans.

Vienna had been resident city to the Habsburgs and, as de facto capital of the Holy Roman Empire, attracted a steady stream of newcomers. The city’s diversity was particularly evident within its musical community, which long included a significant Italian presence. The Italians were so omnipresent, in fact, that factions formed at court around “Italian” and “German” musical cultures.

Writing about the 1824 premiere performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in his book First Nights (2000), Thomas Forrest Kelly notes, “Vienna, as a cultural and artistic crossroads, had a rich influx of musicians from countries such as Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland,

Germany, and Italy. The orchestra certainly consisted of players who used a variety of bows and reflected the styles of many different teachers. Even among those who regularly played together in the theater orchestras, such a diversity of styles was entirely normal.”21 The court dominated musical life in seventeenth century Vienna. Proudly Roman Catholic, the Hapsburgs celebrated major events in the religious calendar with operas and concerts.

Major family events similarly gave cause for musical celebration. Opera lavishly legitimated their regime by celebrating virtues and values that were thought central to the Hapsburg dynasty. Religious music constantly carried the court through overlapping cycles of court life. Under Emperors Leopold I, Joseph I, and Karl VI (1657 – 1740), music in various forms stood at the core of court life.

The imperial household supported between 44 and 98 musicians during these years as well as an extensive company of designers, constructors, composers, librettists and managers to support their work. Employment was for life, with stipends often continuing after age-related infirmities set in. Performances of operas were private to the court, with this large musical entourage moving among the Hapsburgs’ formal residences

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with the season. Landing a position as a musician at the Hapsburg court of the era was a sought-after position with several noteworthy musicians, composers and librettists finding their niche during these years including Giovanni Bononcini, Antopio Drahi, Johann Joseph Fux, Pietro Metastasio, Giovanni Pierluigi Palestrina and Apostolo Zeno.

In 1723, the court relocated to Prague for a four-month celebration of Karl’s coronation as King of Bohemia. The extravaganza included several productions of opera, masses and coronation events, all designed to produce extravagant splendor. Prague, however, was a very different sort of city not having an indigenous court life at the time. That city’s lively musical scene necessarily embraced public performances at theaters

and venues sustained by patrons far out of courtly bounds. Prague’s aristocratic artistic sponsorship offered an alternative model at a time when the constant drumbeat of war and imperial expansion placed ever more stringent constraints on courtly budgets. Imperial finances would only weaken further once Europe — and the Hapsburgs with it — descended into the Napoleonic War. The ever parsimonious reforming Empress Maria-Theresa trimmed courtly ceremonials and household budgets for the extravagant spectacles of decades past. Musicians turned their attention to alternative financial patrons and, as they did, aristocratic support for culture expanded. Public concert halls and musical venues began to appear ranging from well-used music rooms in the city’s

Gesellshaft der Musikfreunde (Society of Music Friends) in Vienna.

Photo: Miguel Mendez. 2012. Flickr.com. CC License 2.0.

SHORT ESSAYS ON COMMUNITY, DIVERSITY, INCLUSION, AND THE PERFORMING ARTS

burgeoning family bastions to theaters such as the Burgtheater and Teater am Kärntnertor. Music increasingly took printed form, vastly extending its reach, while a growing press breathlessly covered the music scene, educating novice listeners in the process.

By the time Mozart arrived in town in 1781, Vienna’s musical life already was changing. Mozart’s personal trajectory reflected the broader pattern. Much to the horror of his father, the brash young composer fled steady employment with the archiepiscopal court in Salzburg to become a freelance musician in Vienna.

As David Wyn Jones writes in Music in Vienna: 1700, 1800, 1900 (2016), “There had been a fundamental change in musical patronage, a considerable weakening of the near-monopoly in which the court operated early in the century to a more pluralist environment in which the aristocracy, later joined by the bourgeoisie, played leading roles. Music at the imperial palace could still serve the old certainties of political and religious authority on occasions, but its presence within the court was now more likely to be as a form of diversion, and private devotion rather than presentation.”22 Music was changing as well. Bartolomeo Cristofori’s newfangled pianoforte had, over the course of the eighteenth century, replaced the harpsichord as European music’s lodestone. The new instrument, which involved felt-covered hammers striking strings rather than levers plucking

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them, opened up new horizons. The years surrounding 1800 were ones of rapid musical invention; and, the Viennese stood at its center.

By the early years of the nineteenth century, musicologists would begin to speak of a “Vienna School” surrounding Joseph Haydn (1732-1809), Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791), Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) and Franz Schubert (1797-1828). Together with their students, fellow musicians and publishers, the Viennese four re-invented European music. They collectively turned the Baroque into more Classical forms (such as quartets, oratorio, symphonies and concertos). None of the four were native Viennese (although Schubert was born in a nearby suburb). They came together with musicians from across Europe, to join in what many saw at the time as Europe’s most inventive musical scene.

“Papa” Haydn in many ways stood at the center of the Viennese musical transformation. Haydn’s parents sensed their son’s talent early on and moved from the village of Rohrau along the Hungarian border to Vienna to expand the opportunities to develop his musical skills. By 1740, at the age of eight, Haydn joined St. Stephen’s Cathedral choir. He later struggled as a freelancer before landing a position as Kapellmeister for Count Morzin. These duties led him to his life-long patrons, the Esterházy family.

Securing the rights to his own music from his patrons in 1779, Haydn moved beyond

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the opera and religious music required by the Esterházys to compose quartets and symphonies. In doing so, he established the standards for what became central genre within the European classical canon.

He travelled to London, became a figure at court in Vienna, and one of the city’s most celebrated citizens. Along the way he befriended Mozart and tutored Beethoven.

The premiere of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony at the Teater am Kärntnertor on May 7, 1824 marks a culmination of the revolution begun by Haydn. With the city’s musical tastes shifting toward the Italians, the composer initially planned a Berlin premier. However, friends, supporters, patrons and performers signed a petition for a Vienna début. The colossal symphony was both unlike anything played before and built around smaller more customary components.

The theater’s Kapellmeister Michael Umlauf shared the stage with Beethoven and several performers taking note that they followed Umlauf’s directions as the

deaf composer gesticulated wildly with his baton. Beethoven was still conducting when the music ended. The overflowing hall erupted in applause which Beethoven did not hear. Contralto Caroline Unger gently turned him around to even wilder acclaim. European performance music would never be the same again.

Eventually shifts to a rising middle class enabled another great era of Viennese music to coalesce around 1900. Vienna’s identity as Europe’s music capital had long been secured as a new generation of composers emerged such as Johannes Brahms, Anton Bruckner, Gustav Mahler, Arnold Schoenberg and the Strauss Family. No matter how sour the politics and enfeebled the Austro-Hungarian state became, musicians continued to flock to the city to test their talents against other masters, discerning audiences and astute patrons. Throughout the decades leading up to the First World War, Vienna remained an inventive hotspot for European concert music.

Vienna at sunset.

Photo: Alex Poison, shutterstock.com

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Washington, 1920

Washington, D.C., from its founding at the turn of the nineteenth century, has been about the pathologies of American race relations. Originally carved out of two plantation states — Maryland and Virginia — which together accounted for more than half the slave population of the United States at the time, slavery and the slave trade became a constant feature of local life from the very beginning. Given its location midway along the Atlantic coast, the city developed into a major depot and auction site for slave traders.

Intense political disputes and social unrest eventually led to the outlawing of the slave trade within the Federal capital as part of the Compromise of 1850.

Manumission was relatively easy within the District, with residence by free blacks thereafter being permitted. As a consequence, Washington was just one of three cities at the outbreak of the Civil War, together with St. Louis and Baltimore, in which a majority of the black population was not slave. Life for free blacks, however, was never easy. Law and custom confined employment for African Americans primarily to trade and services as the apprenticeships so necessary for entry into many sectors of the labor market remained tightly controlled to keep blacks out. An increasingly robust and autonomous African American community set down roots.

Following the Civil War, the neighborhood around the intersection of 7th and Florida became a hinge among different segments of one of the largest and most economically diverse urban African American neighborhoods. To the north stood the intellectual mecca of Howard University, with the professionals’ haven of LeDroit Park located almost directly to the east. To the south, 7th Street served as the focus for a vibrant African American working class community. U Street, African-American Washington’s burgeoning high street, extended to the west. Numerous major African American institutions in the city were within a mileor-two radius of this critical corner. The magnificent 1,500 seat Howard Theatre, which opened its doors in 1910, stood at the center of it all.

Whites always were present, in part because many lived nearby, in part because they passed through while moving around town, in part because they attended Big League ballgames at Griffith Stadium, and in part because they were patrons of the area’s many music and dance clubs. Whites owned and ran businesses in the area. Lingering pockets of German and other immigrant social clubs, and a few residents, were left over from the era prior to the hardening of segregation. Greek immigrants opened shops in the area. Jewish merchants

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created a particularly vibrant commercial district as one moved south towards the busy Northern Market that stood at 7th and O Streets. By the 1930s, a small Chinatown developed around 7th and H Streets as Chinese homes and businesses were destroyed to make way for the Federal Triangle government office complex following World War I. White businesses served a large African American clientele in a complex relationship that ranged from close friendship to tense hostility. Many of the businesses destroyed during civil unrest following the 1968 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., were white owned, often by Jewish proprietors. Jewish and African American 7th Street co-existed prior to the civil unrest of 1968 much as black and white Washingtonians lived segregated lives that rarely touch one another throughout the first half of the 20th century. Beyond immigrant merchants and their families, white visitors to 7th Street near Florida Avenue remained, for the most part, just that: largely outsiders who came to watch a baseball or football game, to listen to music, to be otherwise entertained, or to make a profit.

This crossroads brought together distinct worlds of an African American working class that made 7th Street their home, and a U Street which became the domain of an African American middle class. Jim Crow segregation increasingly meant that Washington’s African Americans had to fend for themselves. African American

businesses and non-profit community groups offered commercial and civic services unavailable from the larger white city, published magazines, produced plays, opened restaurants, designed theaters, built hotels and apartment buildings, sold automobiles, created YMCAs and other institutions to offer community services.

The imposition of Jim Crow segregation in the city beginning in the late 1870s prompted fragmentation along the twin pressure points of class and race both within the national African American community, and within Washington, D.C. African American elites sought to distinguish themselves from poorer rural migrants. Skin color, personal and family histories, education, and wealth became markers separating the “talented tenth” from the rest of the African American community. Simultaneously, as they were increasingly spurned by whites of similar socio-economic and educational accomplishment, African American elites gained a consciousness of themselves as black.

On the surface, everyone appeared to live their lives within their own group as much as possible. The music and literature emerging from the neighborhood suggests that a far more complex chemical reaction was taking place out of sight. Herein lies Washington’s important contribution to American culture: the supercharging of “high” bourgeois values with the vibrant “low” working class culture of the streets.

SHORT ESSAYS ON COMMUNITY, DIVERSITY, INCLUSION, AND THE PERFORMING ARTS

Whites rarely went to see a movie at the big cinemas along U Street; they didn’t have to do so as they had larger, more luxurious movie houses of their own downtown. Similarly whites didn’t venture into African American neighborhoods for meals. Whites sought out music in African American clubs because they offered a sound that did not exist in white Washington. For many, the crossroads of 7th and Florida offered music that was different, better and unavailable closer to home.

The complexity of the communities and people colliding around the corner of 7th Street and Florida Avenue inspired some of the most profound and enduring voices of early 20th century America.

The neighborhood’s deep contradictions created a tense conflict among norms and attitudes that melded into an explosive creative mix of class and background.

Three local cultural figures — the poet Langston Hughes, the novelist Jean Toomer, and the composer Duke Ellington — capture the area’s invention. Hughes, Toomer and Ellington were more or less contemporary products of the nation’s nascent African American middle class, with personal stories tied by family to the neighborhood as well as to its churches, schools and community life. Hughes’s 1927 poem “Fine Clothes to the Jew,” Toomer’s novel Cane, and Ellington’s

Washington’s Howard Theater, 2015.

Photo: Blair A. Ruble. 2015.

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homage in his memoirs to Holliday’s pool hall depict the rough-and-tumble life of 7th Street with its rich and juicy language and musical tradition, bringing poor black outsiders into “mainstream” American literature and music for all time.

Washington generally, and the junction of 7th and U Streets NW in particular, provided the space — both physical and metaphysical — in which it all happened.

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Yekaterinburg, 1980

Yekaterinburg — which would become Russia’s fourth-largest city with nearly 1.5 million residents at the beginning of the twenty-first century — was established in 1723, late in the reign of Peter I (“the Great”). The settlement was created just on the Asian side of the Ural Mountains, somewhat more than 900 miles east of Moscow, in what is today Sverdlovsk Province. The city was named after Saint Catherine, to honor Tsar Peter’s wife, Ekaterina. It drew settlers from across the Russian Empire, growing slowly and achieving the status of a town only in 1796. It eventually emerged as a major mining and manufacturing center, prospering from the exploitation of rich mineral deposits throughout the Urals region, and enriching great industrial dynasties. The arrival of the Trans-Siberian Railroad in the late nineteenth century secured Yekaterinburg’s status as one of Russia’s most important industrial centers.

As one of the first cities in the world specifically created for industry, Yekaterinburg quickly attracted a diverse population of workers and specialists.

Local mine and factory owners were less concerned with the details of imperial policies than they were with using engineering knowledge to make their businesses profitable. Consequently, they employed people who could do the job, no matter how much they were discriminated

against elsewhere. The city became a place where smart outsiders could thrive.

Even today, local residents often claim that they judge someone only by how hard he or she works.

Imperial Yekaterinburg developed into the sort of melting pot of empire that promotes unrefined inter-ethnic, interconfessional, inter-professional and inter-class exchange. Many factors promoted a frontier-like sensibility of live and let live, among them being the fact that Yekaterinburg was not as large as it was economically important. The best and brightest throughout the Urals region focused their attention on how to get things done. Intellectual, ideological, political, artistic and even architectural fashions arrived somewhat later there than in the cosmopolitan artistic centers of European Russia; and when they arrived, they often became grounded in the realities of everyday life.

During the Soviet period, Stalin’s Great Leap Forward, beginning with the inauguration of the First Five-Year Plan in 1928, stimulated further growth. The city became home to numerous heavy industrial plants, including the “largest machinery plant in a European economy,” the giant Uralmash works. The city exploded, with tens of thousands of new residents streaming in to fill the factories

SHORT ESSAYS ON COMMUNITY, DIVERSITY, INCLUSION, AND THE PERFORMING ARTS

that were springing up all around. Renamed Sverdlovsk after Bolshevik leader Yakov Sverdlov, the new industrial city dominated all that had been there before.

Sverdlovsk escaped German occupation during World War II, becoming a major evacuation destination for important factories and educational and cultural institutions from cities further west, including Moscow and Leningrad. The postwar city grew to become home to slightly more than 1 million people, a focal point for Soviet military industrial production, which drew on both the city’s many factories and its numerous research facilities.

As home to the sorts of pragmatic intellectuals needed to produce giant machinery and weapons of mass destruction, the city generated a vibrant and innovative cultural life. Indeed, Brezhnev-era Sverdlovsk emerged as one of the Soviet Union’s most creative centers for rock ’n’ roll music, rivaled only

by Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg). It’s distinctive “Urals Rock” movement, led by such bands as Urfin Dzhyus, Chaif, Nautilus Pompilius, Nastya, Trek, Agata Kristi and Smyslovye Galliustinatsii, transformed late Soviet and post-Soviet Russian popular music.

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The first Soviet rock ’n’ roll bands appeared in Estonia and Latvia, and eventually in Moscow and Leningrad, during the early 1960s. The new music took off by mid-decade with the arrival of the Beatles over shortwave radios and, eventually, contraband cassette tape recordings. By the 1970s, Soviet rock bands had found their own worldview. The genre swept the country, with homegrown groups such as Mashina Vremini (Time Machine), Akvarium (Aquarium) and Zvuki Mu (the Sounds of Mu) grabbing large followings.

A quasi-underground Soviet rock scene thrived in the dark shadows of official institutions, such as those attached to the city’s massive factories — in restaurants and workers’ clubs, in palaces of culture, and on festival stages often controlled by Young Communist League (Komsomol), trade union and factory officials. Rock music and video salons became a meaningful source of income for official institutions as well as for their officers.

Ever more portable recording technologies allowed musicians to spread their sound across the Soviet Union so that, by the 1980s, a robust, complex and varied rock music culture had taken root, ranging from ubiquitous disco groups to punk and everything in between. Soviet rock During the late 1950s, as the harshest survived a round of repression unleashed elements of the Stalinist police state began in 1984 by disgruntled cultural overlords to recede following the Great Leader’s who had taken advantage of the rapid death in 1953, a distinctive Soviet youth turnover of Communist Party general culture at odds with official ideology began secretaries following Brezhnev’s death to emerge. Jazz dominated initially, though in late 1982. Rock nonetheless became the early sounds of rock ’n’ roll soon the driving force behind youth culture in reached the USSR.

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many large Soviet cities, especially so in Yekaterinburg.

Yekaterinburg’s rock scene remained distinctive in important ways. By the early 1980s, a number of talented and creative bands had emerged in the city, which combined a pop sound with sharp critiques of social problems. Vyacheslav Butusov’s Nautilius Pampilius in the 1980s and the Samoilov brothers’ Agata Kristi in the 1990s brought together the gloomy longings of a “lost generation” with songs of love and social protest. The group Chaif (from the local slang word for “pleasure,” derived from the Russian word for tea) — perhaps the longest-running group, dating back to the 1980s and still continuing on stage for a third of a century and more — proudly declared its connection to its native city, both in song and in charitable activities.

These bands, and others like them, were the creations of the “technical intelligentsia” that dominated the city.

Some band members were trained architects; others were conservatory graduates. Yulia Chicherina, a descendant of Lenin’s and Stalin’s commissar of foreign affairs, Georgii Chicherin, spent her childhood years as a serious music student and later formed the popular local band named Chicherina that continues to perform around Russia today. Bands like hers combined philosophical thought, social criticism, musical sophistication and a drive for a rollicking good time to create songs that distinguished the “Urals Rock” sound from other Russian rock styles.

They have helped to define their city’s special sense of self.

View over the Iset River in Yekaterinburg, Russia.

Photo: Andrijbulba. 2007. Flickr.com. CC License 2.0.

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SHORT ESSAYS ON COMMUNITY, DIVERSITY, INCLUSION, AND THE PERFORMING ARTS

Performing Community 1:

Short Essays on Community, Diversity, Inclusion, and the Performing Arts CONTENTS Chapter 1- Performing Community Engagement The Sound of Music Is The Sound of Community Resilience Making Community Work: the Importance of the Performing Arts The View from the Bus: Rethinking Cities through Performance Dancing towards Revolution in Kyiv Theater and the Heart of a City: Moscow’s Teatr.doc’s Confrontation

with Authority Porgy & Bess at 80: Rethinking Russian Influence on American Culture Performance and Power from Kabuki to Go Go Acting Out Gentrification: Theater as Community Engagement “Beauty and the Beast:” A Tale of Entrepreneurship and Community Misty Copeland to Dance Swan Lake at DC’s Kennedy Center Chapter 2- Diversity, Inclusion, and Community Building The Devil is a Local Call Away: Cities, the Arts, and Misunderstanding “Decay” As Urbanization Accelerates, Policymakers Face Integration Hurdles After Baltimore, We Must See Community as a Process Fight not Flight: Lessons from Detroit Odessa: Ukrainian Port that Inspired Big Dreams How Cities Can Foster Tolerance and Acceptance Chapter 3- Planning for Inclusion and Creating Community Rethinking Engagement in Cities: Ending the Professional vs. Citizen Divide Innovation through Inclusion: Lessons from Medellin and Barcelona Detroit: Planning for a City of the Future Diversity by Design Discovering the Power of Community in Unexpected Places Available at: https://www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/performing-community

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Performing Community 2: Short Essays on Community, Diversity, Inclusion, and the Performing Arts Chapter 1- Communities and Change Living Diversity: Documenting Arlington, Virginia’s Inclusive, Safe, Resilient, and

Sustainable Communities

Washington’s Rose Park and the Lessons of Welcoming Public Space Feasts for Eyes Too Blind to See: Destroying Communities in the Name

of Ideology Washington’s Changing Neighborhoods: Looking East From Collards to Kale: Redefining Washington’s West End Small is Beautiful: A Washington Tale of Little Red Rockers and Ducks Washington, D.C. The Anxious City 10 Steps to a More Genuine D.C. Experience Chapter 2- Mobility, Community, and Equality A Public Management Train Wreck: The Lessons of Unaccountability and the

Washington Metro CARPETing the City with Transit: Essential Elements for Promoting

Mobility and Equity with Sustainable Development Returning to Plato’s Cave: How the Light of Smart Technology Brings

Us Back to Old Debates Summer of Washington’s Capital Discontent: Lessons from the Past Chapter 3- The Arts and Community Making Feel that Funky Beat. The Sound of Converting Dreams of Community into Reality Hometown D.C.: America’s Secret Music City

SHORT ESSAYS ON COMMUNITY, DIVERSITY, INCLUSION, AND THE PERFORMING ARTS

Down By the Riverside: Jazz Over the Volga How Naples Became Europe’s Great Musical Machine Building Community through Theater; Lessons from the Setagaya Theater The Cirque Comes to Town. Learning about Culture and Cities from Montreal Bringing New York to the Broadway Stage

Available at: https://www.wilsoncenter.org/ publication/performing-community-2-short-essayscommunity-diversity-inclusion-and-the-performing

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Performing Community 3: Short Essays on Community, Diversity, Inclusion, and the Performing Arts Introduction Profiles of Artistic Visionaries and Community Creators Dmitry Bertman and Opera Paul Carr and Jazz Zeljko and Natasha Djukic and Dramatic Theater Lawrence Edelson and Opera Vanessa German and Spoken Word Opera Hernรกn Jacinto and Argentine Jazz Andrew Kingsley and Andrew Vaught and Social Impact Theater Nikolai Kolayda and Playwriting Larissa Koniuk and Bicycle Opera Brent Lindsay and Amy Pinto and Community-Specific Theater Hugo and Rebecca Medrano and Hispanic Theater David Alan Miller and Contemporary Classical Music Mansai Nomura and Kyล gen Theater Mark and Susan Marie Rhea and Irish Theater

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Ari Roth and Transformational Theater Albert Schultz and Civic Theatre Daniel Soulières and Performance Dance Grace Srinivasan and Paula Maust and Baroque Music Paata and Irina Tsikurshvili and Physical Theater C. Brian Williams and Stepping

Conclusion to Performing Communities 1, 2 & 3 Making Cities Work as Holistic Communities of Promise

Available at: https://www.wilsoncenter.org/article/performing-community3-short-essays-community-diversity-inclusion-and-the-performing-arts

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About the Author Blair A. Ruble is a Distinguished Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. He previously served as the Center’s Vice President for Programs.

Prior to becoming Vice President for Programs, Dr. Ruble was the Director of the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies as well as of the Center’s Comparative Urban Studies Program, and was Director of the Program on Global Sustainability and Resilience.

Dr. Ruble’s The Muse of Urban Delirium appeared in early 2017, and presently is being translated for a Ukrainian language edition. This work examines how new forms of performing arts emerge at moments of uncertain social identity in cities undergoing rapid transformation. Dr. Ruble’s previous book, Washington’s U Street: A Biography (2010), explored the tentative mixing of classes and race in the most important neighborhoods of the nation’s capital. This volume was reissued in paperback (2012) and in a Russian language edition (2012).

Other book-length works include a trilogy examining the fate of Russian provincial cities during the twentieth century: Leningrad. Shaping a Soviet City (1990); Money Sings! The Changing Politics of Urban Space in Post-Soviet Yaroslavl (1995); and, Second Metropolis: Pragmatic Pluralism in Gilded Age Chicago, Silver Age Moscow, and Meiji Osaka (2001). Second Metropolis has been published in Russian (2004) and Ukrainian (2010) translation. In addition, Dr. Ruble authored Creating Diversity Capital (2005) examining the changes in such cities as Montreal, Washington, D.C., and Kyiv brought about by the arrival of transnational communities. This work has appeared in Ukrainian translation (2007).

Dr. Ruble’s more than twenty edited works with several partners include: Jazz in Washington (2014), Urban Diversity (2010); Cities after the Fall of Communism (2009); Composing Urban History and the Constitution of Civic Identities (2003); Urban Governance around the World (2001); Preparing for the Urban Future (1996), and Russian Housing in the Modern Age (1993).

Dr. Ruble received his MA and PhD degrees in Political Science from the University of Toronto (1973, 1977), and an AB degree with Highest Honors in Political Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1971).

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Endnote 1 Andrea S. Goldman, Opera and the City: The Politics of Culture in Beijing, 1770-1900 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), 3-4.

2 Jeremy Cronin, “Creole Cape Town,” in A City Imagined, ed. Stephen Watson (Johannesburg: Penguin Books, 2005), 45–54.

3 Ned Sublette, Cuba and Its Music. From the First Drums to the Mambo (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2004), 58.

4 François Sullivan, “Dance and Hope,” in Canadian Dance: Visions and Stories, ed. Selma Landen Odom and Mary Jane Warner (Toronto: Dance Collection Danse Press, 2004), 16.

5 Benjamin Taylor, Naples Declared: A Walk Around the Bay (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2012).

6 Jeanne Chenault Porter, ed., Baroque Naples: A Documentary History, 1600–1800 (New York: Italica Press, 2000), 108.

7 Louis Eric Elie, “Here They Come, There They Go,” in Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas, ed. Rebecca Solnit and Rebecca Snedeker (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 25.

8 Lawrence Powell, The Accidental City: Improvising New Orleans (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012), 120.

9 Freddi Willians Evans, Congo Square: African Roots in New Orleans (Lafayette: University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press, 2011), 107.

10 Tanya Richardson, Kaleidoscopic Odessa: History and Place in Contemporary Ukraine (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 7.

11 Charles King, Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011), 18.

12 Ibid, 19.

13 Alan Jay Lerner, The Musical Theatre: A Celebration (New York: Da Capo Press, 1986), 14.

14 Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982), 193-195.

15 Kama Ginkas and John Freedman, Provoking Theater: Kama Ginkas Directs (Hanover, NH: Smith & Kraus Pub, Inc, 2003), 213-214.

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16 Mary Louise Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone,” as republished in Reading the Lives of Others, ed. David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky (Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press, 1995), 180-195.

17 Mary Louise Pratt, Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992), 6-7.

18 Laura McCamy, “I’ve lived in the Bay Area for 30 years, and I’m convinced that tech companies have ruined it,” Business Insider, November 14, 2018. https://www.

businessinsider.com/the-bay-area-is-being-ruined-by-tech-companies-2018-6 19 San Francisco Arts Commission, Strategic Plan, 12. https://www.

sfartscommission.org/our-role-impact/about-commission/strategic-plan

20 Richard Gehr, “The Story of Tropicalia in 20 albums,” Pitchfork, June 19, 2017. https://pitchfork.com/features/lists-and-guides/the-story-of-tropicalia-in-20albums/

21 Thomas Forrest Kelly, First Nights: Five Musical Premiers (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 157.

22 David Wyn Jones, Music in Vienna: 1700, 1800, 1900 (Woodbridge, UK:The Boydell Press, 2016), 76.

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