We’re leaving California after almost 50 years of creating original works of art.
Our time in California has been wondrous, challenging, remarkable…and now…it’s over! We leave for the balmy climes of Chicago where we look forward to living near our daughter and starting a new chapter in our personal and artistic lives.
Many artists and individuals have graced our work over the years and we are grateful to all of you. You have enriched our lives, and, hopefully, we have enriched yours.
The video below is our ending celebration. It’s a look back at our beginnings with A Traveling Jewish Theatre, our education program, ALICE: Arts and Literacy in Children’s Education, our current performing arts organization, Black Swan Arts & Media, and the original jazz event—The Lost American JazzBook. Enjoy!
Helen Stoltzfus and Albert Greenberg, Co-artistic Directors, Black Swan Arts & Media
Watch excerpts from almost 50 years of creating original works of art in California
THE DREAM INSIDE US
The Dream Inside Us is a solo autobiographical performance of one woman’s reckoning with the climate/biodiversity crisis. Sixteen dispatches trace her journey from the Alaskan tundra to the Mongolian desert in search of the threatened grizzly bear--and from a Superfund site in San Francisco where residents fight deadly toxins--to northern Minnesota to halt the Line 3 oil pipeline threatening Anishinaabe tribal lands. The play also recounts Civil War resistance stories of her Mennonite ancestors as well as her own activism in helping to shut down banks that fund the climate catastrophe.
THE LOST AMERICAN JAZZBOOK
The Lost American JazzBook won "Jazz Vocal Album of The Year" from both the 14th and 18th Independent Music Awards. How swell is that?
BURNING LIBRARIES
Stories from the New Ellis Island
Burning Libraries: Stories from the New Ellis Island premiered in 2010. The title comes from the saying, ‘If a person dies without their story being told, that’s like a library burning down’ (unattributed). Burning Libraries is an original performance work that brings to life 35 immigrant stories—from Yemen to Guatemala and from Vietnam to East Texas—through music, dance, aerial arts, puppetry, and video, etc. It was drawn from over 400 oral history interviews, that we conducted over a 6 year period from children in Oakland schools. Because of the enormous challenges that these immigrant communities face, we are working to bring Burning Libraries back into the world.
THE PREPARED TABLE
The Prepared Table: A Feast of Foods, Live Performance and Stories from Iraq, Afghanistan and the F.O.B. (Forward Operating Base of the U.S. Military) was presented on November 11, 2015 as an alternative Veterans Day event at the Bellevue Club. It premiered one day before the terrorist attacks in Paris. Looking back, it feels that in some small way we were able to create an island of sanity in a world gone mad—at least for a few moments. As imperfect as it is, the San Francisco Bay Area is a safe harbor for all of our multicultural identities, including the Iraqis, Afghans and military veterans who so generously agreed to be interviewed, and who were present at The Prepared Table. And there were a lot of multicultural identities among our performers—from a Palestinian-American singer to a Japanese/Filipina dancer to an Israeli-American pianist. It’s what makes our part of the world a living, breathing answer to all the xenophobia that infects so much of this country and the rest of the world.
Why Black Swan Arts & Media?
We’ve taken the name, “Black Swan” from an expression that was popularized in 16th Century London. Because there were no black swans in Europe, the phrase, “black swan” first came to symbolize something that had no basis in reality.
Then in 1697, the Dutch explorer Willem de Vlamingh discovered black swans in Western Australia. The metaphor took on a whole new meaning. Any system of thought could be upended by a single observation. In an instant the unimaginable could become reality—like a black swan.
We have chosen to adopt this vivid metaphor for our work in media and the performing arts, such that a “black swan event” is characterized as: beyond the realm of normal expectations and impossible to predict.