Performing Communities 3

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

Hernán 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 Kyōgen Theater

Mark and Susan Marie Rhea and Irish Theater

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

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).

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.

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-20- albums/

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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