Monkey King at the IDEAL School of Manhattan
On December 14th, Diane and multi–instrumentalist Jeff Greene (Port o’Monkeys, TriBeCaStan) gave a special performance of the Monkey King Epic (a/k/a Journey to the West for the students at the IDEAL School of Manhattan. Zoe Shanyan, one of the teachers who saw the performance shares these words with us: Diane Wolkstein has grabbed all of our students’ attention during her 45 minutes story–telling. It is really difficult because not only were the audience as young as 4...
Read MoreRachel & Matti: My Love, My Friend
If you wish to be transported, uplifted, and carried into joy, Rachel Ravitz and Matthew Brown — a/k/a Rachael & Matti — have just released their new CD, My Love, My Friend. The CD has been a long time in the singing and in the making. I have often been in their presence when the Great Rebbi and Visionary, Yitzhak Buxbaum, has enjoined them to sing in public. Each time they have sung, everyone present has felt bliss. So, it is a great joy to have My Love, My Friend which is as...
Read MoreThe Magic Orange Tree CD reviewed in School Library Journal
Diane’s new CD of stories from The Magic Orange Tree has been getting wonderful reviews in the press — the latest of which is in the November 2010 issue of the School Library Journal: Diane Wolkstein, award–winning author/storyteller, relates five tales from the collection of 27 stories in her book, The Magic Orange Tree and Other Haitian Folktales (Schocken, 1997), originally published in 1978, first prefacing them with information about the teller and often her own...
Read MoreWinter Light Festival: Officium Novum
In the pre–concert discussion, the Hilliard Ensemble advised us that there would be six players that evening. The four members of the Hilliard Ensemble, Norwegian jazz saxophonist Jan Garbarek, and one more. The sixth would be St. Ignatius Loyola. The church itself. They informed us that, when possible, they carefully choose the hall in which they perform because the reverberations make a great difference to the success of the performance. Indeed! St. Ignatius Loyola definitely came...
Read MoreA gesture
Just the smallest gestures make such a difference. And of course, who would better know this than Haitian writer Edwidge Danticat? Paul Holdengraber, Director of Public Programs at the New York Public Library, interviewed her tonight at Live at the NYPL. She spoke about wanting to write about the complexity of the Haitian people, who are somewhere between resilient and wretched. She said she wasn’t hopeful about the situation in Haiti because the one and half million people who are...
Read MoreWhite Light Festival: Judith
“Judith’s glory shall endure,” sings Katarina Livljanić in her New York premiere of a recrafting of the Biblical story of Judith from Renaissance Croatia. What an unexpected and gorgeous blending of music and theatre. Katarina, musicologist and singer (and director of the group Ensemble Dialogos), creates, using Gregorian and Glagolitic sources to accompany the sixteenth century text of of Judita by Marko Marulić. The repetition of notes, the simplicity of the...
Read MoreWhite Light Festival: Sutra is Play
I can’t tell you how the title Sutra relates to the piece choreographed by Flemish/Moroccan choreographer/director Sidi Larbi Cjerkaoui. I can say that the piece is Fun. It’s Play. It reminded me of my three years old (and six months, he insists) grandson, Judah. When we play together, he will suddenly jump up, cry “Grrr…” and do three or four swift karate moves and then return to Lego or the book we’re reading. And the piece has sixteen moveable very large wood Lego...
Read MoreWhite Light Festival: Splendor Rising
Warum ist das Licht gegeben, Op. 74 by Johannes Brahms, the first piece of an evening called Splendor Rising, was sung by the Flemish baroque ensemble Collegium Vocale Gent and the Accademia Chigiana Siena, and played by the Belgian Wind ensemble I Solisti del Vento, at Alice Tully Hall last night. Part of the White Light Festival, Warum ist das Licht gegeben was beauty transcendent. It still fills my heart and senses the morning after. The blending of the pure clear voices of the Flemish vocal...
Read MoreWhite Light Festival: Silence
The Conversation on Silence by four eloquent intellectuals was produced by the White Light Festival of Lincoln Center. My guess is that it was Jane Moss, the producer and conceiver of this remarkable festival, who chose these apt experts. Jane cares for Silence. The conversation was scintillating, engaging, exhilarating. Karen Armstrong, historian of religion, spoke about how the ancients built silence into their rituals. Silence moves toward finding Being itself, she said. She spoke about...
Read MoreDiane on An Invitation to World Literature
Public television viewers, take note: Diane is one of the featured guests on An Invitation to World Literature, a new education series co–produced by WGBH Boston and currently airing on most PBS stations throughout the States. You will find Diane in Episode 7, “Journey to the West,” in which she speaks about (as well as tells sections from) the Monkey King Epic. Also featured are Richard Thurman, playwright David Henry Huang (M. Butterfly), and translator and Professor...
Read MoreFairytales: One Antidote to Bullying
The following essay by author Elizabeth Cunningham (The Maeve Chronicles) first appeared on her Elizabeth and Maeve blog. In light of the recent and tragic suicides of GLBTQ youth who were bullied online, we wanted to share this with you. “Life is no fairytale,” people say, meaning there is a dearth of happy endings. But that last traditional line “and then they lived happily ever after” is not what the story is about. In most fairytales there are terrible perils and ordeals....
Read MoreThe Magic Orange Tree CD wins Parents’ Choice Gold Medal!
Diane’s new CD, The Magic Orange Tree and Other Haitian Folktales, has just received this fall’s only Parents’ Choice Gold Award medal in their Audio/Storytelling category, with Parents’ Choice singling out Ms. Wolkstein’s CD for being not only an “invaluable resource of Haitian culture,” but also an “engaging, moving, and inspiring album for the whole family and classroom.” How exciting! You can purchase your copy right here: Share...
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