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Yerma
Billie Piper deserves all the praise she gets as “Her” in Simon Stone’s YERMA, the Young Vic production now playing at the Park Avenue Armory. By the end she brings herself to a place of so much pain that empathy itself is taxed, and the curtain call feels, her face still trembling with emotion, like…
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Sílvia Pérez Cruz
I had planned, upon hearing Sílvia Pérez Cruz sing at Joe’s Pub, to make my way to another event involving music. But the idea of altering the state in which she, and the guitarist Raül Fernández Miró, had left me was practically unthinkable; the tenor of the experience deserved, as the profoundest of our aesthetic…
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Por el agua de Granada
Before time overcomes the memory, I should say something about the presentation last Thursday by Lara Bello and Erik Kurimski of their new CD of folk songs collected by the Spanish poet García Lorca. What I knew going in was that Bello is the ideal interpreter of the material. I have heard her before in…
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La ruta de Lorca
On June 5, the birthday of the great Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca, I joined LA RUTA DE LORCA EN NUEVA YORK, a walking tour of some of the poet’s haunts in the vicinity of Columbia University. We gathered at the university gate, bearing as our standard a rendering of Lorca’s face, composed,…
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Sonia M’Barek
Some of the most interesting cultural programming in New York is presented by the French Institute Alliance Française, and this month is no exception. WORLD NOMADS 2013: TUNISIA is featuring dance, music, the visual arts, and film from the former French colony, some of it addressing the politics of the Arab spring and issues of…
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Por el agua de Granada
Last week at Terraza 7 Train Cafe I saw POR EL AGUA DE GRANADA … CANCIONERO LORQUIANO, a collaboration of the Spanish singer Lara Bello and the guitarist Eric Kurimski to present renderings of Federico García Lorca’s poems and lyrics. As it happens, Bello is the very first person I would turn to for such…