When Aleksandar Nikolic first listened to the music of Astor Piazzolla as a student at the classical Music Academy in Bratislava, Slovakia, his passion for this newfound music led him to devote his career to tango. Aleksandar plays both the accordion and its close cousin, the bandoneón, and is a founding member of Beltango, a tango quintet based in Belgrade. He is also the President of the Belgrade Tango Association, which every September organizes the Belgrade Tango Festival.

In his first visit to the world capital of tango as a participant in the Buenos Aires Tango Festival, Aleksandar talks with us about his passion for tango, the Belgrade Tango Fest, and Beltango’s participation in Tango Camp 2007.

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Erica Pazur studied at the School of Performing Arts in Buenos Aires and at the National University Institute of the Arts (IUNA). Her training includes musical theater, improvisation, melodrama and clown and buffoon acting techniques. In 2006 her clown skit “The Music Stand” was presented at multiple Austrian international festivals, including the opening peformance of the Festival der Traume in Innsbruck. She also acted in the 38th edition of the International Encounters for Cultural Diversity, and has just been invited to participate in the 2007 International Theater Festival of Sibiu in Romania. Four of her short plays were presented at the Theater Festival of the Punilla Valley, which takes place every summer in the province of Córdoba, Argentina.

In this interview Erica talks about her clown, buffoon and melodrama skits, and about how she created her musical short play “The Box”, which is based on the myth of Pandora’s Box, with music composed by a Greek musician.

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Director, performer, author, master teacher — Michael Fields has taken on these roles and many more over the years. He is a founding member and the Producing Artistic Director of the Dell’Arte Company, an internationally recognized Master Teacher of Physical Performance Styles, and Producing Director for the Mad River Festival. He also chairs the California State Summer School for the Arts Theatre Department. He has co-authored 14 Dell’Arte productions, and directed many other productions nationally and internationally. As a member of the Dell’Arte performing ensemble, he has been a recipient of San Francisco Critics Circle, San Diego Critics Circle and Los Angeles Drama-Logue awards. He has served as president of ITI/USA, and as a Theatre Communications Group board member.

Michael talks with us about the origins of Dell’Arte and the Mad River Festival, and how they have evolved over the years.

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Ethan Zuckerman has been dedicated to the creation of online spaces for dialogue since his work in the founding of Tripod, one of the pioneering web communities. In 2000, he founded Geekcorps, a non-profit technology volunteer corps, which pairs skilled volunteers from US and European high tech companies with businesses in emerging nations. Since 2003, he has been a fellow of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. He is also the cofounder (with Rebecca MacKinnon) of Global Voices Online, a non-profit global citizens’ media project, based upon an international network of bloggers.

Ethan talks with us about how different voices from all over the globe are coming together online around common themes and goals.

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