Baraka Sele is Assistant Vice President of Programming and Curator of the World Festival at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center. She has also held senior positions at 651 Arts Center, the Yerba Buena Arts Center and the Houston International Festival.

In this interview Baraka talks about her curatorial process, why it is essential to look at the performing arts as a business, and why you should go to the Fes World Festival of Sacred Music in Morocco.

This interview is part of an ongoing series with the Association of Performing Arts Presenters.

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Yoshiko Chuma is the artistic director and choreographer of The School of Hard Knocks. Her work takes many forms, including theatrical dance performances, street theater, and large-scale outdoor projects, as well as intimate performances in homes and community centers. Chuma’s post-modern performances have received BESSIE awards and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

In this interview, Chuma describes her creative process (not unlike fitting together LEGOs), how she finds commonalities in seemingly radically different cultures, and how her journey from post-war Japan to New York shaped her as an artist.

This interview is part of an ongoing series with the Association of Performing Arts Presenters.

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Twelve years have passed since the opening night of Jonathan Larson’s musical Rent at the New York Theater Workshop in 1996. After twelve years of success and awards, one of the longest running musicals on Broadway has now premiered in Buenos Aires. The venue couldn´t have been a better choice: Ciudad Cultural Konex, a former oil factory turned into a cultural center in the heart of the Abasto neighborhood, where famous tango singer Carlos Gardel spent part of his childhood.

Director James Murray and producer and executive director Andy Ovsejevich talked with KadmusArts about how and why they decided to produce the musical in Buenos Aires, what the creation process was like, and how they dealt with the translation and adaptation of the script and lyrics. In closing, they shared with us an upcoming production at Konex: Puccini’s opera, La Boheme.

Cast Photos from the Ciudad Cultural Konex Production of Rent:

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Margaret Lawrence is the Director of Programming at the Hopkins Center for the Arts at Dartmouth College. The “Hop” presents each year 100 or more live performances in music, theater and dance, plus well over 200 film screenings and other events. Most recently, Class Divide, a three-year programming initiative, seeks to examine the issue of class through the arts.

In this interview, Margaret talks about the multiple roles that the Hopkins Center plays within the local community, how to forge relationships with artists, and the whys and hows of commissioning new works.

This interview is part of an ongoing series with the Association of Performing Arts Presenters.

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