Guidelines and Applications for ACTA's Three Core Programs Now Available in Spanish
Guidelines and application forms for the Living Cultures Grants Program, the Apprenticeship Program, and the Traditional Arts Development Program are now available in Spanish.
Guías y solicitudes para las Becas para el Programa de Culturas Vivas, el Programa de Aprendizaje, y el Programa para el Desarrollo de las Artes Tradicionales están ahora disponible en español.
YouTube Video Features Excerpts from Teatro de la Tierra's Regeneración
Fresno-based Teatro de la Tierra's recent production, Regeneración, memorializes Mexican revolutionary Ricardo Flores Magón and the 100th anniversary of the Mexican Revolution.
ACTA Launches a Series of Online Dialogues about Cultural Equity
What does cultural equity mean from your point of view? What actions need to be taken to change systems resulting in cultural equity in its broadest sense?
On February 11, 2010, the Alliance for California Traditional Arts (ACTA) hosted a community forum, Building Cultural Equity through the Traditional Arts, facilitated by Jerry Yoshitomi of Meaning Matters LLC, in Los Angeles, raising these questions to a group of traditional artists, arts funders, community leaders, and cultural equity advocates. The result was a rich, broad-ranging discussion about cultural equity from diverse perspectives. Personal stories and challenges were shared, along with questions, and ultimately, a call to action.
Building on this effort, ACTA is now working to expand and deepen this conversation. Over the next four months, we present four different topics related to cultural equity – Leadership, Media, Artistic Marginalization, and Sustainability – one each month. We will post comments and discussion from the community forum in Los Angeles. We then invite you to think about this topic and post your own comments and stories. Our hope is to develop an online community dialogue across California, and beyond – expanding and building on this topic.
The topic for May is Leadership. Please click the Read More link below to follow the discussion as it began in February and post your comments on this topic.
KlezCalifornia: Keeping Yiddish Culture Alive
By Lily Kharrazi, ACTA's Living Cultures Grants Program Manager
Yiddishkeit is the word for a living Yiddish culture.
This past February, 450 people of all ages participated in KlezCalifornia's Yiddish Culture Festival where they were able to study with Klezmer master musicians and teachers from around the world, sing Yiddish songs in a chorus, speak Yiddish at all levels, learn the improvisatory dance that goes with the infectious Klezmer repertoire, attend lectures on a variety of subjects including diaspora history, participate in an open-mic talent show, and explore Jewish interactions with Greek, Roma, Balkan, Ukrainian and American neighbors.
Supported in part by ACTA's Living Cultures Grant Program, this project is produced by KlezCalifornia, a non-profit organization in the Bay Area which was founded in 2003 to foster and build a vibrant region-wide community of people who include Yiddish culture into their lives. Their focus on the cultural heritage of Eastern European Jewry as embodied in its music, literature, and the arts make the word living in this equation anything but hyperbole.
Los Cenzontles Composes Ballad to Arizona: Estado de Verguenza (State of Shame)
San Pablo-based Mexican American folk group Los Cenzontles recently created a corrido about the new immigration law in Arizona. Corridos are a time-honored version of breaking news in Mexico; this corrido expresses the outrage of the Mexican American community in response the new Arizona law.
Estado de Verguenza was composed by Los Cenzontles founder Eugene Rodriguez, recorded and put to video within a four day period earlier this month.
Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival Presents Breath of Life Workshops
By Dr. Leanne Hinton, Professor Emerita, UC Berkeley
In California, where once close to a hundred indigenous languages were spoken, now close to half of them have no living speakers left at all, and most of the rest have just a few. The Breath of Life, Silent No More Language Workshop for California Indians (originally named the Lonely Hearts Language Club) was designed specifically for people who have no speakers to learn their language from. If there are no speakers, then you must hope that someone recorded your language or wrote it down, because then it can still be revived. There are a number of languages around the world that have been brought back into use by learning from documentation – Wampanoag and Miami are two examples from around the United States, and Cornish in the United Kingdom. And here in California, languages like Esselen, Mutsun, Muwekma, Barbareño Chumash, Tongva, and lots of others are all being increasingly brought back into use from a starting point of zero speakers!
In Memoriam: Francisco Aguabella
Master Afro-Cuban percussionist and NEA National Heritage Fellow Francisco Aguabella passed away in his home in Los Angeles on May 7, 2010. He was 84 years old.
With a career spanning over 5 decades, Francisco Aguabella was not only widely respected for his sacred batá drumming, but also for his virtuosity in secular forms of Afro-Cuban drumming. His career also crossed genres, enhancing the music of many jazz, salsa and pop artists.
Read more about Francisco Aguabella in the New York Times.
