• Half the Sky Festival • The Great Women of Woodlawn Cemetery
• Casita Maria celebrates the Best of the Bronx • Skip, Jump, or Hop to the Pop-Up Shop
• From Mambo to Hip Hop Screened at Andrew Freedman’s Lost Paradise Home
• The Very First Guide To Community Tourism in New York City

Dear Citylorists,

Please enjoy our Tours and Tales April-May 2012 e-letter!

Shoshana Tubi

• There’s Nothing Sweeter than a Woman’s Song – Half the Sky Festival: The Sweetest Song • All of us at City Lore are excited to let you know about the wonderful Half the Sky Festival highlighting Brooklyn women in traditional performance and organized by the one and only Kay Turner. The Sweetest Song, on April 28th, is an a cappella vocal concert emceed by noted singer and folk music scholar Ethel Raim featuring outstanding singers including Eva Primack (Balkan), Irka Mateo (Dominican), Uriye Hanim (Crimean Tatar), Shobana Ram (Indian), Amanda Seigel (Yiddish), Shoshana Tubi (Yemeni) and others. Hear a broad range of women’s music genres including wedding songs, love songs, lullabies and work songs. Please click here for more information.

Presented by BAC in cooperation with Center for Traditional Music and Dance (CTMD).

Also check out more Half the Sky events on City Lore’s calendar:
• The Home Altar – Kay Turner discusses!
• A Woman Upfront Benefit – Concert by women bandleaders
• High Strung Women – Highlighting string music in Brooklyn
• Folk Feet Females – African, Brazilian, Hawaian Dance in Brooklyn
• Yiddish Folk Songs – Beyle, Lifshe, Bronya and more
• Jazz Women Fusing Forms – French-Moroccan Malika Zarra and more
• Cinderella in the Arab World – Storytelling at its best

Actress Polina Porras channels Alva Vanderbilt Belmont at Belmont’s mausoleum during the Halloween tour in 2011. Photo by George Zavala.

• The Great Women of Woodlawn Cemetery • What do Nellie Bly, Irene Castle, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Antoinette Perry have in common? They are all great women who were ahead of their time and are all buried at Woodlawn. Join City Lore folklorist, Elena Martínez, along with several poets, including acclaimed, Sandra Maria Esteves, as we pay tribute to some of the great women of Woodlawn. Please click here for more information.

• The Best of the Bronx: Casita Maria & Dancing in the Streets present South Bronx Culture Trail "There is No Place Like Casita" – Alumni & Community Celebration • Join our friends in the South Bronx to celebrate Casita Maria Center for Arts & Education, an organization that empowers youth and their families by creating a culture of learning through high quality social, cultural, and educational opportunities. This event highlights the South Bronx’s cultural legacy and aims to ignite a cultural renaissance by honoring, showcasing, and promoting its legendary artists; nurturing the next generation of artists; and engaging younger generations and the public at large with the astounding cultural history of the South Bronx. There will be food and dancing to a live band including Bobby Sanabria and featuring Casita Maria alumni such as Orlando Marín and Angel Rodríguez. Also on hand will be another alumnus, legendary DJ Grandwizzard Theodore, who is credited with inventing the hip hop musical tradition of scratching. Please click here for more information.

Graffiti art by Too Fly

• Skip, Jump, or Hop to the Pop-Up Shop • An art shop and gallery space in the Bronx curated through July 28th by Circa ‘95, a hip hop music and media group comprised of Patty Dukes (writer, actress, emcee and social entrepreneur) and Reph Star (emcee, producer, and mixed media visual artist). Reph and Patty will be curating the space for the next several months and welcoming in artists and musicians to create and share their work. The Bronx Music Heritage Center Laboratory is a storefront incubator and forum to share Bronx music, as well as host concerts, screenings, galleries, roundtable discussions, and artist--in-residences--all to use the arts to transform communities.

When: Wednesdays and Fridays 1:00pm–6:00pm
Where: Bronx Music Heritage Center Lab, 1303 Louis Nine Blvd Bronx, NY 19459, #2 or 5 trains to Freeman Street.
For more information: Please visit Circa ‘95 website.

• City Lore in collaboration with No Longer Empty present: How Place and Space Influence Latin Music in NYC – Screening of From Mambo to Hip Hop: A South Bronx Tale at the Andrew Freedman Lost Paradise Home • Now you can get a chance not only to watch From Mambo to Hip Hop, City Lore’s now classic doc about the creative life of the South Bronx, but to see the remarkable art installation by No Longer Empty, at Andrew Freedman’s home in the Bronx, which from 1924 to 1984 was a rest home, believe it or not, for rich people who had lost all their wealth. This unique art installation highlights the grandiose vision of an idealistic man who opened his heart, and his wallet, to care for those who had fallen from paradise. The panel will have a special emphasis n the development of Latin music and its relationship to the Bronx and the panel will delve into questions like "How does the loss or performance spaces affect a music genre?"

Screening will be followed by a panel discussion with:
Elena Martínez, Folklorist and co-Producer, From Mambo to Hip Hop; Moderator
Berta Jottar, Filmmaker and researcher on rumbas in Central Park
Felipe Luciano, Former Young Lord and broadcaster
Bobby Sanabria, Grammy-nominated bandleader

Please click here for more information. If you won't be able to make it to the program this time you can always purchase a copy of From Mambo to HIp Hop DVD at City Lore Store online!

This event is in conjunction with the No Longer Empty exhibit, This Side of Paradise.

• The Very First Guide To Community Tourism in New York City, by Sheryl Lee and Nicole Edwards • Your phone rings – it’s your nephew or your aunt or your cousin, and they’re coming to visit. They want to see the "real" New York, but all that comes to mind at the moment is to take them to the top of the Empire State Building. You know a million other places, but they seem much more difficult to access somehow. This very dilemma inspired The Very First Guide to Community Tourism in New York. This useful online listing of tours includes places that City Lore loves and celebrates from Casa Amadeo and Casita Rincon Criollo in the Bronx to Hassidic neighborhoods of Brooklyn and Manhattan’s Chinatown.

Check out City Lore’s new education video, Making Connections, taking you on a musical journey from Africa through the Caribbean to PS 11 in Queens.

Please forward this email to your friends and encourage them to join City Lore’s email list!

Enjoy the City! and – if you engage in social media, please like us on Facebook, subscribe to our YouTube Channel and follow us on Twitter!

Steve and Abby

City Lore is part of a cultural coalition called CATCH, to promote the City’s cultural heritage. Check out the web sites of our wonderful partners, the Center for Traditional Music and Dance, the Latino Children’s Theater, SEA, and the World Music Institute.