Raffi Marhaba, “El Kofeyye Arabeyye,” courtesy of Artists Against Apartheid On October 7, 2023, a group of Palestinian freedom fighters from the military wing of Hamas, the de facto government of Gaza, changed the world forever. In Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, a prison break and hostage-taking mission turned into a spectacle of carnage—after . . .
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Margaret Cerullo (photo: Hampshire College) The excitement in Mexico and abroad about North America’s first woman president has dominated the headlines—almost to the exclusion of who Claudia Sheinbaum is, and what she stands for. How did she win, and how will she confront the enormous challenges facing Mexico, perhaps none more dramatic . . .
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A review of The Girl Before Her by Line Papin (Kaya Press, 2023) The road to the laundromat is iced all over and the wind is ruthless, blowing me back to the winter in Massachusetts, to the field of sunflowers, their eight-foot stalks almost depleted of moisture, their beehive heads bent over by snow, . . .
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I’ve always admired the way Alison C. Rollins’s poetry bridges urgency and experimentation. In her hands, objects from the archive are transformed into poetic vectors to imagine other worlds, other possibilities. I’ve also been following and admiring her recent experiments with creating physical objects from this poetic process. When we received her exquisite . . .
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S.L.Cassar, Smyrna after the Great Fire. 1922. Public Domain. The centennial of the Great Fire of Smyrna is in 2022. “Today [Monday, 11 September 1922] I saw with my own eyes the Turks taking bombs, gunpowder, kerosene and everything necessary to start fires, in wagonfuls here and there through the streets,” the . . .
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Warfield Place, Northampton 12 July, 2021 Editor’s note: Below are opening remarks delivered by Kanshin Ruth Ozeki, novelist, Zen priest, Smith College professor, and resident of Warfield Place, followed by an abbreviated description of the ordination ceremony, and concluding with remarks delivered to the trees by Kosen Greg Snyder, senior Zen priest, co-founder of . . .
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(Photo: “M.R. Cursing the Darkness—Solstice 2020,” Videography: Daniel Warner.) Defined as a wave, yet it has no shore. It comes to a world created, in the third verse of the scriptures. To ignite it was needed: “And God said, Let there be light.” (Three syllables in Hebrew, yehi ‘or.) From then on . . .
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Photo: Nikolai Aistov as the Rajah, Julia Sedova as Gamzatti and Pavel Gerdt as Solor (ca. 1902). Courtesy of the Marius Petipa Society. We have recently seen a conflict over a Depression-era mural on the wall of a public school in San Francisco. It came under attack by the student body for . . .
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Classic Sin: Ballet, Sex, and Dancing Outside the Canon Photo: Valerie Robin and Fabrice Calmels in Gerald Arpino’s Light Rain. Photograph by and courtesy of Herbert Migdoll. What makes a ballet a classic? Is it earning a permanent place in the history books, or is it being worthy of the Herculean investment of . . .
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Against Orthodoxies Photo: Piet Mondrian, Composition with Red, Yellow, Blue, and Black, 1921, oil on canvas, 59.5 cm x 59.5 cm.[1] I discovered George Orwell’s post-Hiroshima, early Cold War essay “Politics and the English Language” as I prepared to enter a doctoral program in dance.[2] It taught me that original thinking was going to . . .
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