McGarity-Alegrett is a dual citizen of Venezuela and the United States and is currently studying Interactive Media and Design at Philadelphia University. He recently won the Dr. Diane A. Pfaltzgraff Capstone Seminar Award for his writings on LGBT human rights and social media in Israel. Previously, McGarity-Alegrett worked in AIDS research at Drexel University and taught photography in the Philadelphia public schools. His involvement at COSACOSA has ranged from multimedia design to a starring role as "Judge Mental" in Change ≠ Chance, our 2012 Philly Fringe performances. As an artist and inventor, McGarity-Alegrett draws his inspiration from his travels and is constantly planning new adventures. He has backpacked through Southeast Asia and, most recently, Peru, and he is looking forward to going to Tanzania and Kenya this summer.
"The WPA...helped create a dialogue with those whose voice needed to be heard." "The Works Progress Administration created a lasting legacy in the arts not only through its architectural contributions but through the visual arts as well," said Gerardo José McGarity-Alegrett, animator for the Spare A Dime project and COSACOSA's Technology Specialist. "The history of photography is a great interest of mine, and the WPA had created some of the most important and symbolic images of not only the time period, but of American culture. Lewis Hine, Bernice Abbott, Walker Evans, and Dorothea Lang (to name but a few) helped define the art of documentary photography through support from the WPA. These photographers examined daily life, work ethic, and poverty through their cameras. Photography for the first time was being used as a device for social change and helped create a dialogue with those whose voice needed to be heard."
McGarity-Alegrett is a dual citizen of Venezuela and the United States and is currently studying Interactive Media and Design at Philadelphia University. He recently won the Dr. Diane A. Pfaltzgraff Capstone Seminar Award for his writings on LGBT human rights and social media in Israel. Previously, McGarity-Alegrett worked in AIDS research at Drexel University and taught photography in the Philadelphia public schools. His involvement at COSACOSA has ranged from multimedia design to a starring role as "Judge Mental" in Change ≠ Chance, our 2012 Philly Fringe performances. As an artist and inventor, McGarity-Alegrett draws his inspiration from his travels and is constantly planning new adventures. He has backpacked through Southeast Asia and, most recently, Peru, and he is looking forward to going to Tanzania and Kenya this summer.
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"...it is essential that students learn about their American past..." "To me, it is essential that students learn about their American past, and this specific opportunity for my students allows them direct contact with history specific to their city," said visual artist Steve Teare. "I'm very excited to be a part of the Spare A Dime project and to be in collaboration with COSACOSA." Teare is creating illustrations that will be animated and projected as sets for Spare A Dime. He is also working with his students at Bok Tech High School to create an exhibition of re-imagined Liberty Dimes and WPA-style posters for our performances. Teare describes himself as a late-20s high school art teacher who resides in West Philadelphia while teaching teens in South Philadelphia. He received his Bachelor of Science in Art Education from Temple University. As a visual artist, Teare creates in multiple media, and his work includes comics, illustrations, and paintings. His ongoing comic strip, Back and Forth, appears at phinkwell.com, a web comic collective, and his paintings have been shown in solo and group shows throughout Philadelphia. Teare is also a founding member of the local rock band Flat Mary Road. Listen to their music at flatmaryroad.bandcamp.com/ During the Great Depression, as America revised its ideas of freedom and fairness, the music changed with the times. With the stock market crash of 1929, the upbeat music of the roaring twenties morphed into the Great Depression's expressions of difficulty and despair. The easy-listening sound of the jazz age gave way to the more complex rhythms and orchestrations of Swing Era bands. Most notably, the music of first half of the 1930s is unique for its seemingly endless stream of confessional blues and woeful ballads that forever changed the way Americans thought about their popular music. During the Great Depression, as vast numbers of Americans moved around the country looking for work, music -- both live and recorded -- provided "portable memories," upholding cultural identity and experience in a time of sweeping social change. New technologies and industrial processes allowed for regional musicians outside the mainstream to record and bring their songs to a national audience. Phonographs, jukeboxes, and radio allowed musical styles from all over the country to mingle with each other, combining histories, cultures, and techniques in new ways -- at just the same time as millions of displaced workers began to intersect and interact. As recorded sound entered the world of the movies, many of iconic songwriters (George and Ira Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Cole Porter) left the East Coast for Hollywood. Musicals, comedies, and lavish productions allowed audiences to escape from the reality in which they found themselves. Extravaganzas, like the Gold Diggers series, focused on Americans' obsession with money during the Depression (not to mention with large, spinning Liberty dimes, just like our PIFA project!). Of course, with the founding of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in 1935, music became a governmental priority. Under the WPA's Federal Project Number One, thousands of concerts were brought to the public, as were free music classes. Over thirty new orchestras were created, and American regional and traditional music was documented extensively. COSACOSA's Spare A Dime project pays homage to all the musical genres of the 1930s, both stylistically and structurally. The project's visual arts also reflect the imagery of the time, and next week we'll be posting interviews with our visual and multimedia arts team. You can hear and see it all at PIFA 13! Get your tickets now! "The parallels between...the 1930s and what is happening today are significant" "The parallels between what was happening in the 1930s and what is happening today are significant, both economically and socially," said Jay Fluellen, Musical Coordinator and pianist for Spare A Dime at the 2013 Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts. "Some of the same struggles people of the United States faced then are being faced again today. Music is the perfect vehicle for illustrating these connections; Spare A Dime references a previous time while vividly portraying ideas in a modern context. I am looking forward to bringing the completed work to life." Fluellen is a Philadelphia-born composer, music professor, educator, accompanist, pianist, singer, and organist/choir director. He has a doctorate in music composition from Temple University in addition to certification in music from Eastern University. Fluellen is currently a teacher with the School District of Philadelphia at Parkway West High School. He has taught college level courses in music composition, written and aural theory, music history, piano, and conducting at major institutions including Lincoln University, Morgan State University, and the University of the Arts. Numerous organizations have commissioned his compositions, including Network for New Music, Opera Philadelphia, Relâche, Settlement School of Music, and Singing City. Since 1997, he has been an organist/choir director at the historic African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas. Fluellen has received the Christian R. and Mary F. Lindback Foundation Distinguished Teaching Award given to high school teachers in the School District of Philadelphia. In 2011, Fluellen’s Of Journeys and Refuge, a work commissioned by the Bucks County Choral Society for choir and jazz ensemble, was premiered featuring his own quintet in the performance. In 2012, the African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas Chancel Choir, under Fluellen's direction, was featured in concert with the Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia as part of their third annual Big Sing. "...the arts matter and can improve our lives just as much as new buildings or roads." "The story of the WPA is amazing, and I've always been fascinated by it," said Rodney Whittenberg, Production Coordinator for the Spare A Dime project. "That the government took the initiative to put people back to work -- even though, in some circles, it was extremely unpopular -- showed both courage and foresight. The infrastructure that we have in this country today -- interstate highways, airports, bridges -- would not be possible without the WPA. Even more amazing, and so modern, so early 20th century, is that art was considered valuable work and that artists were an essential part of the project. Can you imagine trying to do that today -- give millions in government money to actors, musicians, writers, and painters to create new work? I think it speaks to the more well-rounded education of the last century. Everyone, whether wealthy or working class, understood that the arts matter and can improve our lives just as much as new buildings or roads." Whittenberg is an Emmy award-winning composer, filmmaker, and entrepreneur. He is founder of Melodyvision, a full service music, audio, and video production company specializing in original compositions for film, television, and advertising. In the past twenty years, Melodyvision has met with critical acclaim for both film and recording, most recently winning Best Sound Design for film The Toll Taker at the 2012 Terror Film Festival. Melodyvision's lastest initiative, Pre-Concert.com, is an innovative tool for presenters and venues to highlight upcoming performances. Wittenberg is an active member of The National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences and is a former governor of the Philadelphia Chapter. For thirty years, Whittenberg has educated the next generation of musicians about guitar, bass, songwriting, and band at major institutions throughout the region, including Drexel University, Lincoln University, and the University of the Arts, where as a student he studied jazz guitar and music composition. Currently, Whittenberg is teaching audio production at Philadelphia University. "Have grace in chaos. Find strength in unity. Work for the greater good." COSACOSA Director Kimberly Niemela composed the Spare A Dime song cycle based on the stories and experiences of Philadelphia area residents during both the Great Depression and our current "Great Recession." "The stories we collected were so timeless, so universal, that the writing came easily," she said. "The messages of Spare A Dime are simple. Have grace in chaos. Find strength in unity. Work for the greater good. These lessons are, as FDR said, the only path to peace -- within ourselves, 'in the community, and in the world.' Life really does turn on a dime, so we have to learn to recognize ourselves in one another. And we're not just connected by the whims of chance, but by our shared needs and hopes for ourselves, for our families, and for our neighborhoods. Working in community, we see this truth every day; our constituents live this truth every day, and now the Spare A Dime project tells it -- indeed, sings it -- on a grand scale." Niemela's work in film, poetry, and sound has been performed/exhibited in a variety of venues, including, in New York, Central Park and El Museo del Barrio and, in Philadelphia, the Painted Bride Art Center and Taller Puertorriqueño. Her public art designs have been widely acclaimed and featured twice in the international award series Designing the World's Best Children's Hospitals. Niemela has received grants from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts/ American Film Institute Media Arts Fellowship. She has served as a consultant to numerous community-based programs nationwide, including CTCnet/National Learn and Serve's Youth Visions for Stronger Neighborhoods initiative and for the National Endowment for the Arts/Global Alliance for Arts & Health consulting service. Before founding COSACOSA in 1990, she served as Director of the Walt Whitman Association and as General Manager of the Yellow Springs Institute, an international residency center for artists and scholars. Niemela graduated Phi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude, with a Bachelor of Arts in music from the University of Pennsylvania. She also holds a Bachelor of Science in chemistry from Carnegie Mellon University. Numerous professional journals, including Nature, published the results of her decade of medicinal research. Get to know the artistic team and our work in progress.
Our choir of "voices raised" celebrates work and democracy. The Spare A Dime song cycle tells the stories of six archetypal American characters during the Great Depression, both before and after the founding of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) sings his perspective, too, through songs based on iconic speeches of the time. Punctuating key moments in the performance are appearances by Spare A Dime's rousing Chorus of Liberty. In the first half of the piece, in the midst of one character's despair, this ebullient group appears on stage with a giant, spinning Winged Liberty dime. The Chorus sings Suns of Liberty, a celebration of/admonition about ever-present (though often hard to maintain) ideals of freedom and democracy. In the second act, Chorus members take on the role of civil society sloganeers with Work is Progress, a song recounting many WPA poster sayings and describing the full diversity of WPA employment opportunities. At the end of Spare A Dime, the Chorus of Liberty -- and their giant dime -- join the rest of the cast for the final numbers of the show. You can join Spare A Dime, too, at PIFA 13! Get your tickets today! Rise or fall, we'll always be together, indivisibly. In COSACOSA's Spare A Dime, the character of The Mother is facing eviction, based on a story told to us by a resident of Opportunities Tower senior living apartments in North Philadelphia. During the Great Depression, her unemployed parents struggled to keep the family housed and under the same roof. They resisted dividing up the children among other relatives and managed, against all odds and through all manner of odd jobs, to keep the family together. The Mother's plight also resonates with so many stories we heard from folks living on the edge today. As one North Philadelphia mother facing foreclosure said, "To be evicted on my own is frightening; to be evicted with my child is beyond what I can imagine. My mind just shuts down." In the first half of the song cycle, the Mother sings Dimestore Lullaby as she puts her baby to bed. More that just a simple "good night" wish for her child, the song expresses The Mother's desire to escape the overwhelming reality in which she finds herself. In the second half of Spare A Dime, The Mother sings Indivisibly, a song about interconnectedness and our responsibility to each other. Indivisibly merges, appropriately, with FDR's reprise of Life Turns on a Dime to end the show. By the last census count, nearly 22% of America children live in poverty, disproportionate to 15% of Americans living in poverty overall. In Philadelphia, the poverty rate is even higher and on the rise: nearly 40% of children now live in poverty, as do 28% of residents overall. Although there are no governmental statistics on poverty in the Great Depression, just imagine how much worse it must have been with no social safety nets in place. Records do show that homelessness grew enormously during the Depression. In 1931, public and private agencies had to provide emergency lodgings for over 1 million people. By 1933, over 4.3 million people were in emergency shelters. (Each night in America today, over 600,000 people are still homeless.) The New Deal shifted much of the responsibility for providing for people in crisis and living in poverty to the federal government. We've now posted about all the Spare A Dime individual characters, but there is one other presence that plays an important part in our production: The Chorus of Liberty! Tune in tomorrow to learn more -- and to hear more, get your tickets to Spare A Dime at PIFA 13 today! The seeds of hope necessarily cultivate, sustain, and nurture our lives. WWI and the roaring 20s brought increased demand for American grain worldwide. The government encouraged farmers to grow more and expand their land holdings. With food prices on the rise, they willingly complied, taking out large mortgages for new land and new equipment. Even when, after the other nations of the world recovered from the war and were able to grow their own food, grain prices fell, American farmers continued to borrow money; credit was easily had. Once the Depression came, farm foreclosures became everyday events. In the Midwest, the farmers' dire economic situation was exacerbated by the Dust Bowl. FDR's New Deal attempted to remedy these problems through multiple programs. The WPA provided jobs for those who had lost their lands. The Civilian Conservation Corps restored farm lands devastated by dust storms. The Farm Security Administration experimented with resettling sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and submarginal landowners into group farms on viable lands. Those farmers who were able to retain ownership of their land survived the Great Depression growing their own food and trading goods for other supplies they needed, like our Spare A Dime character The Farmer. Our Farmer survives on hard work and hope. She sings about those two essential qualities of American life in Promised Land, (the duet with The Immigrant described yesterday). In the second half of Spare A Dime, she sings Voices Raised, an anthem to both individual rights and mutual aid. The Farmer is based on Director/Composer Kimberly Niemela's paternal grandmother, a first generation American who raised ten children on a Pennsylvania farm during the Great Depression. She is also an homage to Philadelphia's determined urban growers, especially those in COSACOSA's partner communities of Passyunk Square and Nicetown-Tioga. As one North Philly elder told us, "You have to nurture hope just like seed for it to become what it's supposed to be." Join us at PIFA 13 and help nurture the hopes of communities all over our city! Tomorrow's post is our final character profile: The Mother! |
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