Chi-chi Nwanoku's Chineke's All Black Orchestra Soars In Classical Music World

Chi-chi Nwanoku is a double bass player and professor of Historical Double Bass Studies at the Royal Academy of Music in London. She was a founder member and principal bassist of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, a position she held for 30 years. The New York Times profiles Nwanoku, whose Chineke! Foundation has formed Europe's first professional all-black orchestra. 

Though Ms. Nwanoku had quickly formed a board of directors and had already selected most of her players — 62 musicians representing 31 different nationalities — she was constantly reminded that it would be hard to promote their first concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall at the Southbank Center here in September 2015 or to even set up a website without a name.

Searching for a name for her new orchestra, the answer came to Nwanoku at 4am, causing her to bolt into a sitting position in her bed and shouting 'Chineke!' Simply stated, the word is derived from her father's Nigerian Igbo tribe and it means 'wonderful' or 'wow'. 

Chineke has been a splendid success in Europe and beyond. In May, some members aligned with the Sphinx Organization, Detroit-based and also dedicated to the development of black and Latino classical musicians, will appear with 'Chineke' in the Netherlands.

With musicians of color remaining rare in classical orchestras, Chineke's critical purpose if so inspire young people of color to pursue studies and practices in classical music. Mr. Kanneh-Mason, who last year was the first black person to win the BBC’s Young Musician of the Year award, sums up the passion orchestra members have for Nwanoku's artistic vision. “It has been inspiring to see lots of other young musicians like me,” he said. “I plan to be involved in Chineke until Chineke becomes unnecessary because eventually the aim will be for diversity to be the norm in classical music.”

These Women Playwrights Are Giving Theater A Moral Compass

Playwrights Lynn Nottage, Anna Deavere Smith, and Paula Vogel, photographed at the Cort Theatre, in New York City.Photograph by Mark Schäfer.

“I wanted to write a new play,” explains the playwright at the center of Paula Vogel’s Indecent, “that posed contemporary moral questions, that forced us to face some uncomfortable truths.” Vogel’s inventive portrayal of a 20th-century Yiddish theater troupe struggling with controversial material does just that, as do Anna Deavere Smith’s Notes from the Field and Lynn Nottage’s Sweat, for which Nottage received the Pulitzer Prize in Drama.

Vanity Fair profiles the trio . three gifted artists delving into oppression and loss, giving complex voices to complex issues from America's Rust Belt to a young black man's police confrontation in Baltimore. 

Spanish Women Face Hate Crime Charges Over Plastic Vagina Protest

Three women who staged a 2014 May Day protest are facing charges of "crimes against religious sentiment" for parading "a plastic vagina a couple of metres high in the style of the Virgin Mary", according to court papers. 

The protest was designed to highlight issues of discrimination against women in the workplace and also restrictions on women's reproductive health as part of the national Workers’ Day march in Seville by the Spanish union the General Workers' Confederation (CGT).

The legal case was already dismissed in Spain's judicial system but the Association of Christian Lawyers appealed the decision and the previous judge's ruling that "not believing in the dogmas of a religion and manifesting it publicly falls under the freedom of expression". The new case claims to contain 'new evidence' that the protest was a deliberate insult to "religious sentiments of Cathlics' with "a mockery of the Easter procession."

Lawyers for the three women contend that there was no intention to offend in the act. One attorney Pastora Filigrana says:

"The objective was to reclaim the right to a choice [to have an abortion] as well as to workers' rights. There were no insults to churchgoers nor was the action directed at the Church. There were no crosses." via