Masks and Puppetry Featured at 2010 Cityfolk Festival

The annual Cityfolk Festival offers such a cornucopia of musicians and musical styles and sights and sounds that it can be easy to overlook the festival’s Material Culture exhibit. That’s a mistake because year in and year out, the Material Culture area contains some of the coolest stuff you’ll ever see. Personal favorites from last year were Rebecca Cross’ amazing shibori wall quilts and Mai Lo Vue’s Hmong/Amish quilts, while memorable highlights from past exhibits range from Mary Gaynier’s incredibly intricate paper cutouts to Wayne Henderson’s internationally renowned guitars.

The Material Culture theme for the 2010 Cityfolk Festival (July 2-4) is one that promises to be fun: Masks and Puppetry. The Material Culture exhibit and activities will be curated, as they were last year, by Sara Cogswell. She has lots to work with, as both masks and puppetry offer hundreds of interesting avenues to explore.

Masks have been around forever. The oldest surviving mask—a stone mask found in the Middle East—is roughly 9,000 years old. Whether used for concealment, protection, ritual, performance or just for fun, masks are used in virtually every society in the world, for reasons both sacred and profane. From children’s Halloween masks to the elaborate creations worn by Mardi Gras revelers, from the Lone Ranger to Batman, from religious ceremony to dramatic spectacle, masks are ubiquitous, mysterious, infinitely variable yet still completely human on some elemental level.

Puppetry is an even older art form than masks, dating back some 30,000 years according to some accounts. Puppetry is a storytelling art and medium, and puppets have been used wherever people have told stories. Like masks, puppets of one form or another are found in almost all human societies. Puppetry might well have developed in India, where the main character in Sanskrit plays from 6,000 years ago was named Sutradhara, “the holder of strings.”
Two puppeteers accompanied Hernando Cortez on his first trip to Mexico in 1519 (I find that fascinating for some reason), but the concept of puppetry was already well established in the Americas almost 1,000 years before that, as part of funerary practices. Though puppets are still occasionally used for practical or ceremonial purposes, they are mostly used in modern times for entertainment.

Puppetry today has many varieties, including marionettes, in which figures are manipulated from above using strings; ventriloquism, in which a puppeteer manipulates (or “throws”) his or her voice so that it appears to come from a “dummy”; hand puppets, like the Muppets; bunraku, a Japanese tradition in which up to three people control giant puppets with sticks; British “Punch and Judy” puppetry; shadow, rod and finger puppets; a unique style of water puppetry developed in Vietnam where the puppeteers stand in waist-deep water and the puppets appear to walk and move on the water; and even a Tony-winning Broadway puppet musical, Avenue Q, an R-rated homage to the Muppets that contains the songs “It Sucks to Be Me” and “What Do You Do with a BA in English.”

Sara Cogswell is exploring these themes now and whittling down the list of potential artists. More details will be posted beginning in April. [Photos are from past Cityfolk Festivals. The first is Puerto Rican mask maker Kenneth Melendez. The second is members of Sol Azteca with Son de Madera.]

Jazz Drummer Extraordinaire

Recently gracing the covers of Downbeat and Jazz Times magazines, Matt Wilson has moved center stage among the premier percussionists in jazz. And though he has powered the bands of everyone from Elvis Costello to Wynton Marsalis to John Zorn, it is with his own quartet that he truly comes to life. “I get to express myself in all the contexts I play.” he recently told Downbeat, “I don’t go in with an agenda, I know that I want to make any song feel good and comfortable.” A pure bolt of energy behind the kit, his drumming and bandleading is suffused with the kind of high, good humor that sends everyone home happy. “If you can make people laugh, you can make people cry, though if you are on middle ground you are not doing either. To me, a little bit of all of that is a successful engagement.”

Catch his energy at Herndon Gallery in South Hall at Antioch College in Yellow Springs on Saturday, February 27. Tickets are only $10.

Volunteers' Gifts Keep On Giving

Cityfolk has always relied on the support of our amazing volunteer corps to keep our programs humming, and we're blessed with some of the best volunteers anywhere. And as if their time, talent, and hard work isn't reward enough, the employers of several of our most valued volunteers have recognized their contributions with cash grants to support Cityfolk's work. Northrop Grumman Corporation, Syracuse Research Corporation, and Reynolds & Reynolds have all recently made contributions to Cityfolk in recognition of the volunteer efforts of their employees.


Syracuse Research Corporation employee Larry LeMieux and current and former Reynolds & Reynolds employees Sunni and Mike Russo have been Cityfolk Festival stalwarts for many years, and all three play important leadership roles for the festival that require their involvement much of the year. All three also provide many hours of volunteer service throughout our regular season. It's no exaggeration to say that their contributions would be nearly impossible to replace. And that fact that their involvement has led to generous financial support from their employers is icing on the cake

Edmund Cordray, an employee of Northrop Grumman, has also been a long time supporter of Cityfolk. He and his wife, Leslie Hyll, have been active in the festival and contra dance series for years. In addition, Ed and Leslie helped present Cityfolk's opening concert of this year's season, a fantastic concert featuring the Balkan Cabaret.

We're grateful for the generous support of these companies, but we can never show enough appreciation to Larry, Sunni, Mike, Ed and Leslie, and the hundreds of other volunteers that make Cityfolk's programs possible.

Take Flight

Learn new contra dance and waltzing skills or hone your current technique at Flight of Fancy Dance Day, a day of workshops leading up to an evening dance on Saturday, February 27 at Michael Solomon Pavilion in Kettering. This will be the third Dance Day, which grew out of a desire to give local dancers an opportunity to learn more, as well as to build the dance community here through fellowship. Workshops focusing on contra dance and waltz moves will be followed by Song Sharing and a potluck dinner. Practice your new knowledge at the evening dance, which starts with waltzing and switches to contras and squares.

This year’s event features caller Seth Tepfer of Atlanta, who is known for his boundless energy, warm enthusiasm, and ability to get everyone moving and having a great time. The featured band is the Cosmic Otters from Chicago (pictured here), who have a reputation for dance music that’s lush, driving, responsive to the dancers, and grounded in a solid choice of tunes. Rounding out the day’s talents are the band Changeling from Yellow Springs, caller Kathy Anderson, and the singing talents of The Conrads from Springfield, Ohio.

Contra dancing is a fun and dynamic style in which dance patterns are performed by couples in two lines. A live caller provides instruction before each dance begins and prompts dancers as the dance begins and throughout the dance when needed. Live bands provide the beat. There is no right or wrong way to dance, but there is a hard and easy way to execute every movement. The easiest way is always the best, most enjoyable, and lives to become traditional. Dancers are encouraged to dress comfortably, especially shoes! It is not necessary to bring your own partner; there are plenty of folks to switch off and dance with. All people are welcome, whether beginning or more experienced, singles or couples. Join us and see what the fun's all about!

YouTube Spotlight: Matt Wilson Quartet

A non-stop bolt of energy, Matt Wilson is one of modern music's supreme percussionists. He's been showcased with everyone from Elvis Costello to Charlie Haden's Liberation Music Orchestra. But it is with his own bands that he truly comes to life, a showman who knows how to electrify a crowd. A special edition of his quartet will be featured on February 27 at an intimate performance at Herndon Gallery on the Antioch College campus.

Wilson has is own YouTube channel, which features the best videos of him at work.

Charismatic Percussionist to Take the Stage

Percussionist Chen Zimbalista has astounded audiences on several continents with his explosive, unclassifiable percussion concerts. When he performs at UD's Boll Theatre on Wednesday, February 10, he'll be joined by the equally accomplished jazz drummer Lewis Nash.

Critical response to Zimbalista and his performances has been positive and enthusiastic, with one Los Angeles critic wondering why Zimbalista isn’t a well-known superstar in this spectacle-loving country of ours. The Los Angeles Times adds that “Zimbalista is a young, muscular, intense dynamo with charisma to burn and a precise technique that knows no stylistic bounds. He’s also a showman…Why can’t all drum solos be like this?”

“Chen Zimbalista is a throwback to the days when ‘entertainer’ wasn’t a pejorative term,” notes a glowing concert review in San Francisco Classical Voice. “He radiates energy onstage, tells stories, indulges in audience participation, choreographs the beginnings and ends of pieces in true showman style, mines a wide variety of musical genres from around the globe, and exemplifies the old Italian art of sprezzatura, making nearly impossible technical challenges seem easy.”

Lewis Nash has been hailed by prominent jazz critic Gary Giddins for being “resourceful, inventive, subtle and infallibly tasteful” and “the great drummer of his generation.” He is widely acclaimed by critics, fans and musicians alike for his superior musicianship, peerless musical empathy, endless versatility and wide-ranging creativity—pretty much everything one might hope for in a musician.

Congratulations to Grammy Winners!

Last night, several performers who have appeared on Cityfolk's stages through the years won Grammy Awards. We were also delighted to see that one of the acts booked for the 2010 Cityfolk Festival won...scroll to the bottom to learn who it is!

Daniel Ho and George Kahumoku, Jr won Best Hawaiian Music Album for Masters of Hawaiian Slack Key Guitar - Volume 2

Mamadou Diabate won Best Traditional World Music Album for Douga Mansa

Béla Fleck won Best Contemporary World Music Album for Throw Down Your Heart, Tales from the Acoustic Planet, Vol. 3: Africa Sessions

Alison Krauss and Natalie McMaster appear on Yo-Yo Ma & Friends: Songs of Joy & Peace, which won Best Classical Crossover Album

Los Texmaniacs won Best Tejano Album for Borders y Bailes. Come down to the 2010 Cityfolk Festival on July 2-4 to hear their power for yourself!