A Jazz Concert at CIMA
June 15, 2024, 6:00 PM
General Admission: $30, Members: $15; Students: $10
Join us at CIMA for a live concert of jazz music, brought by Peperoncino Jazz Festival.
GERALD CANNON “ART TRIO”
Special Guest JERRY WELDON
featuring
Jerry Weldon – Tenor Sax
Gerald Cannon – Double Bass
Elio Coppola – Drums
Double bass player Gerald Cannon is a real Maestro of this instrument. He is an internationally renowned musician with the unique experience of having played with a wide spectrum of jazz masters such as Art Blakey, Dexter Gordon, Cedar Walton, Billy Higgins, Branford and Wynton Marsalis.
For seven years Gerald recorded and performed as a member of Roy Hargrove’s band at major jazz festivals all over the world. After leaving Roy Hargrove, Gerald held the bass chair for legendary drummer Elvin Jones until his passing in 2004 and, of course, was the bassist and musical director for the McCoy Tyner Trio for almost 14 years.
The Gerald Cannon Art trio is also featuring the great saxophonist Jerry Weldon (also of Italian origin), who played at Lionel Hampton’s side for years and had collaborated with George Benson, Roy Haynes, Jimmy Cobb, Harry Connick Jr. and many others, including Italian drummer Elio Coppola, who is already making his way over the international scene.
A glass of prosecco and light refreshments will be offered.
Persisting Matters: An Artist Talk Series – Michael Rakowitz in conversation with Laura Raicovich
June 13, 2024, 6:00 PM
General Admission: FREE
Please join us for the last episode in this series of encounters and conversations with contemporary artists, this time with Michael Rakowitz and Laura Raicovich.
Persisting Matters is a series of talks that places contemporary artists in conversation with scholars, curators, critics, and the public. The series is developed in the context of CIMA’s 2023-2024 exhibition, Transatlantic Bridges: Corrado Cagli, 1938-1948 (October 12, 2023 – January 27, 2024), and supported by a grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Cagli saw his artistic practice as a tool for anti-rhetorical resistance and critique to power in times of exile, displacement and trauma. Questions of gender, racism, political oppression and resilience through art and community practices were central to his work in the years of his exile from Italy, due to the country’s racial laws. Persisting Matters engages contemporary artists, whose practices explore these pressing subjects in their individual context and prism.
Michael Rakowitz is an Iraqi-American artist working at the intersection of problem-solving and troublemaking. His work has appeared in venues worldwide including dOCUMENTA (13), P.S.1, MoMA, MassMOCA, Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Palais de Tokyo, the 16th Biennale of Sydney, the 10th and 14th Istanbul Biennials, Sharjah Biennial 8, Tirana Biennale, National Design Triennial at the Cooper-Hewitt, Transmediale 05, FRONT Triennial in Cleveland, and CURRENT:LA Public Art Triennial. He has had solo projects and exhibitions with Creative Time, Tate Modern in London, The Wellin Museum of Art, MCA Chicago, Lombard Freid Gallery and Jane Lombard Gallery in New York, SITE Santa Fe, Galerie Barbara Wien in Berlin, Rhona Hoffman Gallery in Chicago, Malmö Konsthall, Tensta Konsthall, and Kunstraum Innsbruck, and Waterfronts – England’s Creative Coast. He is the recipient of the 2020 Nasher Prize; the 2018 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts; a 2012 Tiffany Foundation Award; a 2008 Creative Capital Grant; a Sharjah Biennial Jury Award; a 2006 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship Grant in Architecture and Environmental Structures; the 2003 Dena Foundation Award, and the 2002 Design 21 Grand Prix from UNESCO. He was awarded the 2018-2020 Fourth Plinth commission in London’s Trafalgar Square. From 2019-2020, a survey of Rakowitz’s work traveled from Whitechapel Gallery in London, to Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea in Torino, to the Jameel Arts Centre in Dubai. He was recently granted a commission for a public project on the topic of Archaeology and Migration Flows for the Municipality of The Hague. Rakowitzis represented by Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago; Jane Lombard Gallery, New York; and Galerie Barbara Wien, Berlin; Pi Artworks, Istanbul; and Green Art Gallery, Dubai. He lives and works in Chicago.
Laura Raicovich is a New York City-based writer and curator. Her recent book, Culture Strike: Art and Museums in an Age of Protest, was published by Verso Books. With a group of artists, musicians, and culture workers, Raicovich opened The Francis Kite Club, a public social club, in NYC’s East Village in 2023. She is also editor and curator of Protodispatch, a digital publication featuring artists’ takes on the local and global conditions that make their work necessary; she initiated the forum with Mari Spirito and Protocinema in 2022. In 2020, Raicovich co-founded Urban Front, a transcontinental consultancy addressing the challenges facing cities through a hyper-local, progressive, cultural and activist lens. Prior to these projects, Raicovich served as Director of the Queens Museum and Interim Director of the Leslie Lohman Museum of Art; she was a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow at the Bellagio Center, and the Tremaine Curatorial Fellow for Journalism at Hyperallergic.
This series is developed through a grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
Light refreshments will be provided.
Nanni Balestrini Study Day
June 12, 2024, 10:00 AM - 06:00 PM
General admission: $15. Members and Students: Free
Keynote speaker: Prof. Gian Maria Annovi, University of Southern California.
The exhibition Nanni Balestrini: Art as Political Action – One Thousand and One Voices, curated by Marco Scotini and on view in New York at the Center for Italian Modern Art (CIMA) through June 22, 2024, is dedicated to Nanni Balestrini (1935-2019), an Italian experimental visual artist, poet, and novelist known for his revolutionary artistic practice and passionate involvement in the social-political movements of the 1960s and 1970s.
With this Nanni Balestrini Study Day, CIMA’s Research Fellows join prominent and emerging scholars to investigate the themes at the center of the exhibition within and outside of established critical frameworks.
The conference will take place in person at the Center for Italian Modern Art, and will include a keynote address followed by scholarly panels.
Program
9:30AM — Coffee and Registration
10:00-11:00AM — Keynote Address
Gian Maria Annovi (University of Southern California), Lyric Machines: Genealogy and Afterlife of Nanni Balestrini’s Avant-Garde Poetry
11:00AM-11:30AM — Coffee Break
11:30AM-1:00PM — PANEL 1 – Spaces of Sounds of the Long 1968
– Emanuela Garrone (National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art, Rome), The Gruppo 63 and the GNAM
– Federica Parodi (Yale University), Translating Walls, Locating Bodies: Nanni Balestrini’s I muri della Sorbona
– Sara Colantuono (Brown University), Tam Tam to Autoritratto: Truth and Resonance in the Sonic Experiences of the Years of Lead [ZOOM]
– Andrea Capriolo (University of Udine), ‘MaconDolore MaconDolcezza: Hopes and Illusions of the Youth of the Movement at the End of 1977 [ZOOM]
1:00PM-2:00PM — Lunch Break
2:00PM-3:30PM — PANEL 2 – Cutting-up Reality: Interpretations and Legacies of the Collage Technique
– Nora Siena (Cornell University), Rethinking Positionality to Neutralize Posture: Nanni Balestrini and the Cut-Up Technique Before, During, and After 1969
– Marica Antonucci (New York University in Paris), Nanni Balestrini, Collage, and the Aesthetics of Operaismo
– Meriel Tulante (Thomas Jefferson University), Sebastiano Vassalli: Legacies of the Gruppo 63 and the Neoavanguardia
– Anna Szirmai (CIMA Fellow, Central European Research Institute, Budapest), Parallel Approaches: Collage as Visual Poetry in Eastern Europe
3:30PM-4:00PM — Coffee Break
4:00PM-5:30PM— PANEL 3 – Muses Remixed: Nanni Balestrini across Media
– Nicola Cipani (New York University), Balestrini’s Musa Obliqua: Reading Tape Mark I
– Alessandro Giammei (Yale University), Close Reading Distant Writing
– Julia Okołowicz-Szumowska (University of Warsaw), Una mille centomila voci per comunicare. A Subversive Counterpoint of Nanni Balestrini and Luigi Nono
– Francesca Zambon (CIMA Fellow, Brown University), On Blackouts as Repression and Resistance: From Balestrini’s Blackout to Contemporary Territories of Struggle
Words in Freedom and Protest: the Typographic Collage between Political Action and Formal Experimentation
June 04, 2024, 6:00 PM
General Admission: $15, Members & Students: FREE
Inspired by the current exhibition Nanni Balestrini: Art as Political Action—One Thousand and One Voices, Jennifer Farrell, curator of modern and contemporary prints and drawings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, will explore some of the ways artists have engaged collage, letterforms, and language, broadly considered, and in the process, challenged artistic conventions, as well as cultural, social, and political structures. The talk will examine the various histories of this engagement with linguistic codes from early 20th century European avant-garde movements to the work of more contemporary artists.
Jennifer Farrell is a curator in the Department of Drawings and Prints at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she is responsible for modern and contemporary prints and artist’s books. Among her exhibitions at the Met are Modern Times: British Prints, 1913-1939; World War I and the Visual Arts; Workshop and Legacy: Stanley William Hayter, Krishna Reddy, Zarina Hashmi; and Ragnar Kjartansson: Death is Elsewhere. Her publications include Get There and Decide Promptly: The Richard Brown Baker Collection of Postwar Art (which received the Sotheby’s Prize for a Distinguished Publication in the History of Collecting in America, awarded by The Frick Collection); The History and Legacy of Samuel M. Kootz and the Kootz Gallery; Lucian Freud: Etchings; Suzanne McClelland, STrAY: Found Poems from a Lost Time, World War I and the Visual Arts, and Modern Times: British Prints, 1913-1939. Previously, she held curatorial positions at the Yale University Art Gallery, the University of Virginia, and the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program and taught at schools that include Yale University, the School of Visual Arts, and the American University of Paris. She earned a B.A. from Smith College and a Ph.D. from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and attended the Whitney Independent Study Program.
Light refreshments will be offered
Arte al Femminile: Women in Italian Visual Poetry
May 22, 2024, 6:00 PM
General Admission: $15, Members & Students: FREE
In conjunction with CIMA’s current exhibition on Nanni Balestrini and the political dimensions of art in the 1960s and 1970s, this event will explore the work of Italian women artists involved in visual poetry during those decades, along with the social, political, and historical context in which they operated.
Art Historian and Curator Leslie Cozzi (Baltimore Museum of Art) will examine a number of women artists that used language in their visual work to engage with questions of gender and to subvert patriarchal narratives and structures.
CIMA fellows Francesca Zambon and Anna Szirmai will complement the case studies presented with a brief historical overview of second-wave feminism in Italy, and with an exploration of innovative approaches in art, such as asemic writing.
Leslie Cozzi, Curator of Prints, Drawings and Photographs at the Baltimore Museum of Art, oversees the museum’s collection of post-1900 works on paper. Her recent exhibitions include Matsumi Kanemitsu: Figure and Fantasy; Darrel Ellis: Regeneration; A Modern Influence: Henri Matisse, Etta Cone, and Baltimore; and Valerie Maynard: Lost & Found. She has published and lectured widely on contemporary Italian art and feminism. Her Ph.D. dissertation, “Protagonismo e non: Mirella Bentivoglio, Carla Accardi, Carla Lonzi, and the Art of Italian Feminism in the 1960s and 1970s,” was awarded a 2010-2011 Fulbright research fellowship as well as the Zora Neale Hurston essay prize by the University of Virginia’s Women and Gender Studies program. Prior to her arrival at the BMA, Dr. Cozzi was the 2017-2018 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation/National Endowment for the Humanities Post-Doctoral Rome Prize Winner in Modern Italian Studies at the American Academy in Rome.
Light refreshments will be offered
Persisting Matters: An Artist Talk Series – Tammie Rubin in conversation with Ellen Tani
May 14, 2024, 6:00 PM
General Admission: FREE
Please join us for a new episode in this series of encounters and conversations with contemporary artists, this time with Tammie Rubin and Ellen Tani.
Persisting Matters is a series of talks that places contemporary artists in conversation with scholars, curators, critics, and the public. The series is developed in the context of CIMA’s 2023-2024 exhibition, Transatlantic Bridges: Corrado Cagli, 1938-1948 (October 12, 2023 – January 27, 2024), and supported by a grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Cagli saw his artistic practice as a tool for anti-rhetorical resistance and critique to power in times of exile, displacement and trauma. Questions of gender, racism, political oppression and resilience through art and community practices were central to his work in the years of his exile from Italy, due to the country’s racial laws. Persisting Matters engages contemporary artists, whose practices explore these pressing subjects in their individual context and prism.
Tammie Rubin is a ceramic sculptor and installation artist whose practice considers the intrinsic power of objects and coded symbols as signifiers, wishful contraptions, and mythic relics. Her artwork weaves together familial, historical, and literary narratives of Black American citizenry, migration, autonomy, and faith. Rubin has received residencies at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Penland School of Craft, and Pottery Northwest. She is the 2022 Tito’s Prize winner and a 2024 USA Fellow in Craft.
Rubin exhibits widely; selections include Project Row Houses, Houston, TX; the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; AGBS Christian-Green Gallery at the University of Texas at Austin, Mulvane Art Museum, KS; George Washington Carver Museum, Austin, TX; Indianapolis Art Center, Indianapolis, IN; The Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, TX; Women & Their Work Gallery, Austin, TX; Rivalry Projects, Buffalo, NY; and Ruiz-Healy Art, San Antonio, TX. Rubin is represented by Galleri Urbane, Dallas, TX., and C24 Gallery, New York, NY.
Rubin’s artwork has received reviews in online and print publications such as Artforum, The Brooklyn Rail, Oxford American, Art in America, Glasstire, Austin Chronicle, Sightlines, fields, Conflict of Interest, Arts and Culture Texas, and Ceramics: Art & Perception. She is a member of ICOSA Collective, a non-profit cooperative gallery. Born and raised in Chicago, Rubin lives in Austin, Texas, where she is an Associate Professor of Ceramics & Sculpture at St. Edward’s University.
Ellen Tani is an art historian and curator whose research in the history of modern and contemporary art is informed by feminist, critical race, and disability theory. She is currently Assistant Professor of Art History at Rochester Institute of Technology. A collaborator at heart, she co-developed the AREA Code Art Fair in Boston I 2020, and has held curatorial positions at the ICA Boston and the Bowdoin College Museum of Art. Most recently, she co-curated the exhibition RETROaction in 2024 with Charles Gaines, Kate Fowle, and Homi Bhabha at the New York and Los Angeles locations of Hauser & Wirth Gallery. Her research has been supported by the Clark Research and Academic Program, the Getty Research Institute, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University, and the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African and African American Studies at the University of Virginia. Her scholarship has appeared in Art Journal, Panorama, and American Quarterly, and her current book manuscript explores the career of conceptual artist Charles Gaines.
This series is developed through a grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
Light refreshments will be provided.
Stile Olivetti: Between Art and Design
May 10, 2024, 4:00 PM - 9:00 PM
General Admission: $15, Members & Students: FREE
Conceived by CIMA and Joseph Tedeschi, Stile Olivetti: Between Art and Design brings together Olivetti scholars and enthusiasts for an afternoon of study, dedicated to an Italian company that shaped the history of office machines, labor practices, product design and communications, and cultural patronage. The event will include lectures, a film screening, and a hands-on workshop with historic Olivetti typewriters.
PROGRAM
4:00 PM: Greetings from Gaetano di Tondo, President, Associazione Archivio Storico Olivetti
4:10 PM: Beniamino de’ Liguori Carino, Fondazione Adriano Olivetti: The Olivetti Universe
4:20 PM Fabio Mongelli, Director, Rome University of Fine Arts: The Importance of Education at Olivetti
4:50 PM Emanuele Cappelli, Cappelli Identity Design, Olivetti and Design: Typewriters, Typefaces and Brand Communication
5:20PM: Lindsay Caplan, Brown University, Olivetti and the Arts: Computers as Model
6:00 PM-7:00 PM: typewriting workshop with original Olivetti typewriters, facilitated by Joseph Tedeschi.
7:00 PM-7:30 PM: Light refreshments
7:30 PM: Film screening, Paradigma Olivetti (dir. Davide Maffei, 2020, 88 minutes). In Italian with English subtitles
About the speakers:
Architect Fabio Mongelli is a member of the National Council of Art Higher Education (Afam). He is the Chairman of the Board of Private Institutions of Higher Education in Art (Cians) He is the Director of Rome University of Fine Arts. He is a member of the Design Board of the Ministry of University and Research. He was Ambassador of Italian Design 2020. He was an Adviser of the “Quadriennale di Roma” (2019/2023). He has completed many projects and exhibitions, supporting the technical and planning aspects of these projects with the theoretical and educational aspects of Architecture, Design and Art. He has planned and has been in charge of the art direction of the Museum of the “Pietro Vannucci” Academy of Fine Arts of Perugia, that has proclaimed him Honorary Member of the Academy.
Emanuele Cappelli is the Founder and Creative Director of the Cappelli Identity Design studio, with over 25 years of experience in the sector with international clients. Brand & Graphic Design teacher at various institutions and universities in Europe, the United States, Peru, Ecuador, Chile and the Middle East with over 20 years of academic experience. He is a TEDx speaker and disseminator on the themes of the Dynamic brand, also through membership of the World Design Organization. His vision of design became a monograph in 2022 entitled: Dynamic brand. The brand’s new communication methodology, published by Skira and distributed throughout the world. His passion is Olivetti.
Lindsay Caplan is an art historian who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century art. She is Assistant Professor in the History of Art and Architecture Department at Brown University and the author of Arte Programmata: Freedom, Control, and the Computer in 1960s Italy (University of Minnesota, 2022). She has published on the intersections of art, technology, and politics in exhibition catalogues, edited volumes, as well as venues such as Grey Room, ARTMargins, Piano B, The Scholar & Feminist Online, Outland, Art in America, The Brooklyn Rail, and e-flux journal.
Joseph Tedeschi is an attorney who lives and works in NY. He studied at Harvard and completed his legal studies at New York University law school. Joseph serves on the Board of Directors of the Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts NY and is a Director of the YY Dance Company, founded by his wife and choreographer Yue Yin. He is a member of CIMA and a collector of vintage typewriters.
In collaboration with:
With the in-kind support of Joseph Tedeschi
Under the patronage of:
Persisting Matters: An Artist Talk Series – Hilary Harkness in conversation with Ksenia Soboleva and Jerry Saltz
May 07, 2024, 6:00 PM
General Admission: FREE
Please join us for a new episode in this series of encounters and conversations with contemporary artists, this time with artist Hilary Harkness, art historian Dr. Ksenia Soboleva and art critic Jerry Saltz.
Persisting Matters is a series of talks that places contemporary artists in conversation with scholars, curators, critics, and the public. The series is developed in the context of CIMA’s 2023-2024 exhibition, Transatlantic Bridges: Corrado Cagli, 1938-1948 (October 12, 2023 – January 27, 2024), and supported by a grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Cagli saw his artistic practice as a tool for anti-rhetorical resistance and critique to power in times of exile, displacement and trauma. Questions of gender, racism, political oppression and resilience through art and community practices were central to his work in the years of his exile from Italy, due to the country’s racial laws. Persisting Matters engages contemporary artists, whose practices explore these pressing subjects in their individual context and prism.
Hilary Harkness (b. 1971) meticulously fuses Old Master tactics with a distinctly contemporary sensibility to explore power dynamics, war, and gender through an intersectional lens. Her work explores interpersonal dynamics through a lens that allows power struggles inherent in sex, race, and class systems to play out on an uncensored stage. Harkness earned her BA from UC Berkeley and her MFA from Yale University. Her work has been featured in exhibitions at The FLAG Art Foundation, New York, NY; Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, Spain; American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, NY; Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, Portland, OR; and The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, CT; among others. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Yuz Museum Shanghai; Mead Art Museum, Amherst, MA; and the Seavest Collection, New York, NY; among others. In 2017, she received the Henry Clews Award and participated in the inaugural Master Residency Program at the Château de La Napoule in France. She has lectured widely at leading academic and cultural institutions. In 2014, she co-curated Roy Lichtenstein: Nudes and Interiors at The FLAG Art Foundation. Harkness’s first solo exhibition with PPOW Gallery, Prisoners from the Front, was on display in fall 2023.
Dr. Ksenia M. Soboleva is a New York based writer and art historian specializing in queer art and culture. She holds a PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, with a dissertation on art, AIDS, and lesbian identity in the United States. She is currently working on a book project titled Friendship as a Way of Art: Queer Identity and Visual Citation. Soboleva is a regular contributor to the Brooklyn Rail and BOMB magazine, and her writings have appeared in various exhibition catalogues and artist monographs. She teaches at the New School and NYU.
Jerry Saltz is the senior art critic at New York magazine and its entertainment site Vulture. He is the winner of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in Criticism and 2019 National Magazine Award. Before joining New York in 2007, Saltz had been art critic for The Village Voice since 1998 and was twice nominated for the Pulitzer Prize during his tenure there. He is an author of NYT Best Seller How To Be an Artist among other books. A frequent guest lecturer, he has spoken at the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim, the Whitney Museum, and many others, and has appeared at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, the Rhode Island School of Design, the Art Institute of Chicago, and elsewhere.
This series is developed through a grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
Light refreshments will be provided.
Downtown Culture Walk 2024
May 04, 2024, 11:00 AM - 06:00 PM
General Admission: Free (suggested donation: $10) – No reservation required
As a member of the SoHo Arts Network (SAN), CIMA is pleased to participate in SAN’s Downtown Culture Walk, a self-guided walking tour highlighting the non-profit art spaces in SoHo and surrounding neighborhoods. SAN seeks to further growth of the arts through collaborative public programs set to explore the neighborhoods’ rich cultural histories.
On May 4, members of SAN will open their doors from 11am to 6pm (hours vary) for Downtown Culture Walk, inviting participants to discover and enjoy our creative community. Walkthroughs, open hours, and other programming will be offered throughout the day for free or reduced admission.
Participating SAN members include: apexart; Canal Projects; Center for Architecture; DIA; Grey Art Museum, New York University; Judd Foundation; Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art; Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation; Museum of Chinese in America; Soho Photo Gallery; Swiss Institute; The Drawing Center, and The Renee & Chaim Gross Foundation.
More information, including a map of all participating organizations and programming schedule, is available HERE.
About the SoHo Arts Network
The SoHo Arts Network (SAN) is a working network of non-profit art spaces in and around SoHo. Founded in 2014 by a small group of non-profit arts organizations, the network celebrates the rich history of our unique creative community and collectively shares our distinct cultural contributions with neighborhoods residents and visitors.
Sciara – Prima c’agghiorna: a theater performance at CIMA
May 01, 2024, 07:00 PM - 08:00 PM
by Luana Rondinelli
Directed by Giovanni Carta
With Luana Rondinelli and I Musicanti (Gregorio Caimi – chitarra, Enzo Toscano – violoncello, Debora Messina – singer)
Production I Musicanti
Running Time 73 min
The compelling human and judicial story of Francesca Serio, the first woman to denounce the mafia and mother of Salvatore Carnevale, the trade unionist barbarously killed by the mafia on May 16, 1955.
IN ITALIAN WITH ENGLISH SUPERTITLES
General Admission: Free
RESERVE YOUR FREE TICKET HERE!
English translation and English supertitles have been provided by Alice Amodeo and Alessandro Barbera (translation), Teresa Cassi and Valentina Somaschini (supertitles), students of Civica Scuola Interpreti e Traduttori Altiero Spinelli – Milano as part of a tutored educational program led by In Scena! Italian Theater Festival NY.
About the performers:
Luana Rondinelli is an actress, playwright and director. Born in Rome and raised in Marsala, she graduated from the theater school of the Municipality of Marsala, directed by maestro Michele Perriera. She continues her training at “Ribalte”, the acting school led by Enzo Garinei and participates in multiple laboratories. In 2011 she founded the Accura Teatro company and is an author-actress and director of Taddrarite: a play against violence against women, winner of the critics’ prize at the international contest Etica in Atto 2013, and of the Rome Fringe Festival 2014 for best show and dramaturgy. The show was then performed in the USA at the San Diego International Fringe Festival 2016, and at “In Scena! Italian Theater Festival” 2015 in New York. She obtained other awards for Giacominazza, a text she wrote and acted, awarded as best original writing at the national theater festival Riflessi di Catania, and for which she was later awarded best character actor and best dramaturgy at the City of Leonforte Award; and for A Testa Sutta written for actor Giovanni Carta, obtaining the Fersen Prize for dramaturgy in the same year in which she was part of the jury of the Mario Fratti Prize of New York. These successes anticipate the long work carried out on the writing and creation of Penelope – The Odyssey Is Female, which was awarded the 2018 Anima Mundi Prize for dramaturgy female, assigned to Rondinelli at the Piccolo Teatro Grassi in Milan, before her summer debut on the stage of the Dionysiaca of the Calatafimi Segesta Festival. In the summer of 2019, the Teatro Stabile of Catania commissioned her to write a text for 350th anniversary since the largest eruption of Etna: ETerNA a’ vucca l’amma directed by Nicola Alberto Orofino. In January 2020, she directed three renowned actresses Donatella Finocchiaro, Claudia Potenza and Antonia Truppo, in the new version of Taddrarite for which she was awarded a special mention for theater at the Prize Aphrodite. She also directed Jerico Innocenza Rosa starring actress Valeria Solarino. Luana Rondinelli is also the author of and performer in the show Sciara prima c’agghiorna inspired by Franco Blandi’s book Francesca Serio, the mother with I Musicanti directed by Giovanni Carta, produced by Gregorio Caimi.
The group I Musicanti was started by Gregorio Caimi, a Sicilian guitarist born in Marsala, on the western tip of Sicily. Land of wind and salt which geographically belongs to the Euro-continent, but which is just over a hundred kilometers from the North African coasts. The Arab influence can be read in the very name of Marsala, which derives from: marsa “port” and āliyy “large”, a legacy of the Islamic period. This African, Arab and Mediterranean proximity in a broader sense means that Marsala has been a “port” in which different people, cultures, religions and traditions have continuously mixed and amalgamated. The essence of this flavorful mix, this embrace of flavors and stories, of melodies and stories, of movements and visions find fulfillment in the art of “I Musicanti”. In 2002, Gregorio brought together a group of Sicilian musicians with different training, musical culture and characteristics, once again mixing sensitivity and stories that gave life to “I Musicanti”. Their music expertly mixes the Sicilian musical tradition with those coming from different countries of the Mediterranean and Africa, giving life to an intense and rich style, capable of speaking to the depths of the human soul, to involve and excite, especially when performed live. “I Musicanti” represent an example of a mix of musical styles, modern sounds and instruments, archaic musical minds. Having performed for over twenty years, they have accomplished an artistic maturation that from ethno folk has reached, thanks also to the artistic partnership with the composer and arranger Alfredo Giammanco, the modern and global sounds of world music. This is precisely the field of research of “I Musicanti”: making the Mediterranean tradition one’s own and at the same time bringing together the different experiences (jazz, rock, folk, etc.) of the musicians who are part of it, aiming for universality of the message, without ever losing sight of the identity. That of “I Musicanti” is therefore a project of folk music projected into the contemporary world.
About In Scena! Italian Theater Festival NY:
In 2013 Kairos Italy Theater, the preeminent Italian theater company in New York City, together with the Italian KIT Italia, created In Scena! Italian Theater Festival NY, the first Italian theater festival to take place in all five New York City boroughs and beyond. The festival’s first edition was part of the 2013 Year of Italian Culture in the United States and it was supported by the Embassy of Italy in DC and Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò at NYU that, soon after, became one of the organizers. The festival has since become an annual event. www.inscenany.com
