INTERVIEWS with ARTISTS

BEN VEREEN

JEANINE TESORI

PSALMAYENE 24

SYLVIA MCNAIR

MICHAEL McELROY

DEIDRE KINAHAN

BOB ARI

PAUL TAZEWELL

PATRICIA ROZARIO

NANCY RHODES

MAIA DANZIGER

EARL “PEANUTT” MONTGOMERY

WILLIE RUFF

DENNIS D’AMICO

GRACE CACHOCHA

KAREN SAILLANT

JENNIFER HORNE

JEANIE THOMPSON

ROBERT PERRY

WAYNE SIDES

JAMIE LEE McMAHAN

“To grasp the full significance of life is the actor's duty, to interpret it is his problem, and to express it his dedication.”
– Marlon Brando

“The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart.”
– Helen Keller

“The theatre should be treated with respect. The theatre is a wonderful place, a house of strange enchantment, a temple of illusion.”
– Noel Coward

“Cultivate an ever continuous power of observation...see the sunlight and everything that is to be seen.”
– John Singer Sargent

“Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.”
– T.S. Eliot

"Every great dream begins with a dreamer. Always remember, you have within you the strength, the patience, and the passion to reach for the stars to change the world."
– Harriet Tubman

“The secret of all natural and human law is movement that meets with devotion”
– I Ching

“You are led through your lifetime by the inner learning creature, the playful spiritual being that is your real self.”
– Richard Bach

“Never underestimate the power of dreams and the influence of the human spirit. We are all the same in this notion: The potential for greatness lives within each of us.”
– Wilma Rudolph

“Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don’t bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.”
– William Faulkner

Articles

Kenny Leon’s True Colors Theatre Company

Bucks County Playhouse

Charleston Stage

Maryland Ensemble Theatre

Chesapeake Shakespeare Company

PURE Theatre Company

Ronald Rand’s “CREATE! How Extraordinary People Live to Create and Create to Live”

Virginia Stage Company

Constellation Theatre Company

League of Professional Theatre Women

Maryland Hall

BlackRock Center for the Arts

Great American Songbook Foundation & Academy

Kennedy Center REACH

Inter Act Art Theatre

“Grand Ball in the Belle Epoch” – Edwardian Period Style Salon

“How do we re-establish a culture of caring? There are many things that we can and do. The arts can help. Becoming educated – but having a good education doesn’t necessarily mean that a person knows how to be a “caring” person. It’s time to re-define what “being human” means. What is it that makes us different from animals? Mainly, it’s when we accept the discipline of “being human.” When we genuinely care about each other.”
- Rita Fredricks

“Use your knowledge, and your heart, to stand up for those who can't stand, speak for those who can't speak, be a beacon of light.”
– Julie Andrews

“...Beneath the surface of an ordinary everyday normal casual conscious existence there lies a vast dynamic world of impulse and dream...”
– Robert Edmond Jones

“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.”
– Samuel Beckett

“Transform the work, yourself, and everybody around you...Kindness is one of the greatest gifts you can bestow upon another. If someone is in need, lend them a helping hand. Do not wait for a thank you. True kindness lies within the act of giving without the expectation of something in return.”
– Katharine Hepburn

“Being an actor is a religious calling because you've been given the ability, the gift to inspire humanity.”
– Sandy Meisner

“Whenever you are reading beauty around you, you are restoring your own soul.”
– Alice Walker

“The only reason to write is from love.”
– Stephen Sondheim

“To create one's world in any of the arts takes courage.”
– Georgia O’Keefe

“The purpose of human life is to serve, and to show compassion and the will to help others.”
– Albert Schweitzer

“A word does not start as a word – it is an end product which begins as an impulse, stimulated by attitude and behavior which dictates the need for expression.”
– Peter Brook

“The power of art is the power of truth.”
– Julian Beck

“The key to the mystery of a great artist is that for reasons unknown, he will give away his energies and his life just to make sure that one note follows another... and leaves us with the feeling that something is right in the world.”
– Leonard Bernstein

“In the long history of man, countless empires and nations have come and gone. Those which created no lasting works of art are reduced today to short footnotes in history's catalog. Art is a nation's most precious heritage. For it is in our works of art that we reveal to ourselves, and to others, the inner vision which guides us as a Nation. And where there is no vision, the people perish.”
– President Lyndon B. Johnson

“If you take the trouble to really listen (to the music) with your soul and with your ears - and I say soul and ears because the mind must work, but not too much also - you will find every gesture there. And it is all true, you know.”
– Maria Callas

“An artist must be free to choose what he does, certainly, but he must also never be afraid to do what he might choose.”
– Langston Hughes

“Each of us have a gift given us freely by the universe. And each of us with every breath gives something back.”
– Kim Stanley

“We all bear within us the potentiality for every kind of passion, every fate, every way of life. Nothing human is alien to us. If this were not so, we could not understand other people, either in life or in art.”
– Max Reinhardt

“All kinds of art serve to the greatest of the arts - the art of living on earth.”
– Bertolt Brecht

“The advancement and diffusion of knowledge is the only guardian of true liberty.”
– James Madison

Kennedy Center REACH Reflecting Pool (photo: Elman Studio)

REACH Opens at John. F. Kennedy Center

by Janice Berliner

This past September, the highly anticipated, the REACH, opened at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., with more than a thousand artists performing and more than five hundred free events during a two-week festival. Under three new sunlit pavilions and more than a hundred and thirty thousand square feet of new landscaped green space at the nation’s cultural capital, the REACH welcomed art lovers to its doors with sixteen full days of creativity in action, providing artists and audiences with the opportunity to experience art.

Kennedy Center REACH Ariel View (photo: Richard Barnes

The REACH represents the future of the arts, celebrating their essential role in American life and their unique ability to break down barriers, bringing people and communities together. Designed by pre-eminent architect, Steven Holl, as a home for non-traditional programming with an emphasis on active participation and access, the open informal spaces of the new expansion will draw visitors directly into the creative process to inspire new connections and collaborations between creators of multiple genres and disciplines.

The REACH Opening Festival featured themed days with programs ranging from master classes and workshops to participatory performances, interactive installations, hands-on learning activities, DJ sets and dance parties.

Local and national headliners included: Arrested Development, De La Soul, Kronos Quartet, Roomful of Teeth, The Second City, Thievery Corporation, Debbie Allen, Yalitza Aparicio, Bootsy Collins, Renée Fleming, Judah Friedlander, Robert Glasper, Angélique Kidjo, Alan Menken, Tiler Peck, Carrie Mae Weems, Mo Willems, and Dan Zanes, many of whom connected with audiences through performances, residencies and workshops for the creative spirit in us all.

Kennedy Center REACH Justice Forum

Kennedy Center President Deborah F. Rutter announced “The REACH Opening Festival as a celebration of incomparable artistic diversity. Inviting full participation, immersion, and discovery – the perfect way for people to experience what the REACH has to offer.”

Patrons at Kennedy Center REACH: (photo: Nicholas Karlin)

To kick off the opening, more than two hundred artists and the D.C. community took part in “The Future is Now and I am It: A Parade to Mark the Moment,” a campus-wide show of solidarity and pluralism conceived and curated by MacArthur Award–winning visual and performance artist Carrie Mae Weems and local D.C. nonprofit The MusicianShip.

The National Symphony Orchestra and conductor Thomas Wilkins joined soloists from Washington National Opera’s Domingo-Cafritz Young Artist Program, the Heritage Signature Chorale, and Stanley Thurston’s three hundred-voice, D.C.-based Community Chorus for an uplifting open-air performance of Beethoven’s monumental Ninth Symphony.

Bootsy Collins, Rock & Roll Hall of Famer and legendary bassist for James Brown and Parliament-Funkadelic, and The Chuck Brown Band offered a joyful celebration of Go-Go, and Underground Comedy presented some of the city’s best comedians and emerging talent in a Standup Showcase.

Welcome Pavilion at Kennedy Center REACH (photo: Richard Barnes)

The seminal trailblazers of the Kronos Quartet gave a pop- up concert in Skylight Soundscapes, a specially commissioned installation series by Kennedy Center Composer in Residence Mason Bates and Haitian-American composer Daniel Bernard Roumain.

During the Festival, each day had a special theme including: ‘Spotlight on Theater,’ where local and national theater communities came together for a day of inclusive, interactive, and innovative storytelling.

Marc Bamuthi Joseph, spoken-word artist, joined composer-violinist Daniel Bernard Roumain for “The Just and the Blind,” a multimedia treatment of racial profiling and the prison-industrial complex. West Philadelphia poet and playwright Dave Harris, an alumni of the Kennedy Center’s American College Theater Festival, attended a reading of “Everybody Black,” his award-winning 2019 play satirizing approaches to Black history.

Kennedy Center REACH Studio

Aaron Posner and Karen Zacarías, Helen Hayes Award–winning D.C. playwrights led a conversation about community and the creative process, and New York’s celebrated Broadway Collective offered acting, singing, and dancing master classes for young musical theater lovers.

Broadway Collective Workshop Class, (photo: Broadway Collective)

In a special session, Esperanza Spalding, singer, songwriter and bassist, and Kennedy Center honoree Wayne Shorter held a workshop for their new jazz opera, “Iphigenia,” which is scheduled to premiere at Kennedy Center.

Alan Menken, Oscar, Tony and Grammy winning artist, whose hit scores range from Broadway’s “Little Shop of Horrors” to Disney’s “Aladdin” and “Beauty and the Beast.” Presented ‘Songwriting’ on a special day devoted to classical music and Broadway.

The resident National Symphony Orchestra presented musical master classes: ‘How to Listen’ by pianist and Kennedy Center Artistic Advisor for Chamber Music Joseph Kalichstein, and ‘On Musical Arrangement’ with National Symphony Orchestra Principal Pops Conductor Steven Reineke.

Conductor Steven Reineke also conducted the National Symphony Orchestra in “Broadway Under the Stars: The Music of Alan Menken” featuring Megan Hilty, Adam Jacobs, Norm Lewis, Patina Miller and the composer himself. Mr. Kalichstein joined the gifted young musicians of the Abeo Quartet presenting chamber favorites by Dvořák and Debussy.

The day’s remaining highlights included “Skylight Soundscape Takeover” by Brooklyn’s National Sawdust, and a series of TED-style ‘Classical Talks,’ with musicians of different genres and backgrounds sharing their experiences.

Kennedy Center REACH Deck

DC Lovers Rock, a West Indian-style sunset dance party brought the entire sixteen-day festival to a euphoric close. Various DJs competed for the crowd in an authentic Jamaican Sound Clash, with performances headed by Bob Marley collaborator Junior Marvin, Cuban Hip Hop duo Las Krudas, and dancehall legend Sister Nancy.

On the grounds of Kennedy Center REACH: “Brushstroke” by Roy Lichtenstein, 1996-97, painted aluminum, 32’ high, lent by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden

Robert Glasper, four-time Grammy-winning pianist and producer, led a special performance residency with accounts of his Miles Davis tribute, “Everything’s Beautiful.” The Kennedy Center Youth Council also presented youth-focused and youth-led events in an all-day Teen Takeover. Artists’ scultures and installations including Deborah Butterfield, Sam Gilliam, Roy Lichtenstein, and Joel Shapiro were on display both indoors and out during the Festival.

On the grounds of Kennedy Center REACH: “Milk River” by Deborah Butterfield, 2019, painted bronze, 87” high, Gift of Samuel G. Rose

The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and REACH is located at 2700 F Street, NW Washington, DC 20566, (202) 416-8000, reach.kennedy-center.org

"It is a law of life that man cannot live for himself alone. The world's problems are also our personal problems. Health is achieved through maintaining our personal truth in a balanced relation of love to the rest of the world. No expression is more emblematic of this relation than the creative act which we call art, and none more than the theatre. The theatre, to be fully understood and appreciated, must be seen as a manifestation of this process of interchange between society and the individual. It must be judged as a continuous development of groups of individuals within society, becoming richer, acquiring greater force and value as it grows with the society. Only in this way can the theatre nourish us." - Harold Clurman