The Bahia-based network interconnecting creators, creative entities, and creative academics & professionals worldwide.
In this matrix it's not which pill you take, it's which pathways you take, pathways originating in the sprawling cultural matrix of Brazil: Indigenous, African, Sephardic and then Ashkenazic, European, Asian... Ground Zero is the Recôncavo, delineated by the Bay of All Saints, earthly center of gravity for the disembarkation of enslaved human beings — and the sublimity they created — presided over by the ineffable Black Rome of Brazil: Salvador da Bahia.
("Black Rome" is an appellation per Caetano Veloso, son of the Recôncavo, via Mãe Aninha of Ilê Axé Opô Afonjá.)
Bio:
Choreographer, instructor, dancer and creator of the Silvestre Dance Technique, Rosangela is a native of Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, where she graduated with a Bachelor's Degree in Dance and post-graduated specializing in choreography, achieving her degree from the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA).
She has researched dance and music in Brazil, India, Egypt, Senegal and Cuba as part of her ever-evolving and eclectic palette of movement. She acquired training in such diverse techniques as: Martha Graham, Limón, Horton, Floor Bar, Classic Ballet, Dunham Technique, and has experienced diverse dance expressions - such as Germany Theater Dance, Contemporary, Folkloric, as well as Traditional dances of Africa and other continents.
Her instructors include Raimundo Bispo dos Santos (Mestre King), Mercedes Baptista, Clayde Morgan, Carlos Moraes, Nelma Seixas, among others, beginning in the late 1970s.
Since 1981, Ms. Silvestre has been travelling in and out of Brazil to teach, to train dancers, to perform, to lecture and to demonstrate, to consult, and attended seminars and residencies in diverse universities, dance festivals such as: Colorado College Dance Festival; New Orleans Dance Festival; dance camps such as the California Brazil Camp each year. She has choreographed numerous dance pieces for companies based in Brazil - Balé Folclórico da Bahia and Odunde - as well as Cleo Parker Robinson Dance Company, Ballet Hispanico Repertory Company, American Academy of Ballet, Roots of Brazil, Dance Brazil, Viver Brasil, Muntu Dance Theater, and the Kendra Kimbrough Dance Company.
Her dance investigation and constant development created an opportunity to connect with the eclectic American musician Steve Coleman, with whom she traveled to diverse countries which have African roots in their music and dance. With Steve Coleman, Rosangela developed an idea to have the body as an instrument that provides the movement-form of any sound that can be captured - thereby discovering and creating dance at any moment.
Rosangela's use of her voice is an integral part of her work in dance. In September 2011 she completed the CD "Voices of Nature" recorded and produced by Mike Zecchino at The Nail Recording Studio in Tucson, Arizona.
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"Dear Sparrow: I am thrilled to receive your email! Thank you for including me in this wonderful matrix."
—Susan Rogers: Personal recording engineer for Prince, inc. "Purple Rain", "Sign o' the Times", "Around the World in a Day"... Director of the Berklee Music Perception and Cognition Laboratory
I'm Pardal here in Brazil (that's "Sparrow" in English). The deep roots of this project are in Manhattan, where Allen Klein (managed the Beatles and The Rolling Stones) called me about royalties for the estate of Sam Cooke... where Jerry Ragovoy (co-wrote Time is On My Side, sung by the Stones; Piece of My Heart, Janis Joplin of course; and Pata Pata, sung by the great Miriam Makeba) called me looking for unpaid royalties... where I did contract and licensing for Carlinhos Brown's participation on Bahia Black with Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock...
...where I rescued unpaid royalties for Aretha Franklin (from Atlantic Records), Barbra Streisand (from CBS Records), Led Zeppelin, Mongo Santamaria, Gilberto Gil, Astrud Gilberto, Airto Moreira, Jim Hall, Wah Wah Watson (Melvin Ragin), Ray Barretto, Philip Glass, Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd for his interest in Bob Marley compositions, Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam and others...
...where I worked with Earl "Speedo" Carroll of the Cadillacs (who went from doo-wopping as a kid on Harlem streetcorners to top of the charts to working as a janitor at P.S. 87 in Manhattan without ever losing what it was that made him special in the first place), and with Jake and Zeke Carey of The Flamingos (I Only Have Eyes for You)... stuff like that.
Yeah this is Bob's first record contract, made with Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd of Studio One and co-signed by his aunt because he was under 21. I took it to Black Rock to argue with CBS' lawyers about the royalties they didn't want to pay (they paid).
MATRIX MUSICAL
I built the Matrix below (I'm below left, with David Dye & Kim Junod for U.S. National Public Radio) among some of the world's most powerfully moving music, some of it made by people barely known beyond village borders. Or in the case of Sodré, his anthem A MASSA — a paean to Brazil's poor ("our pain is the pain of a timid boy, a calf stepped on...") — having blasted from every radio between the Amazon and Brazil's industrial south, before he was silenced. The Matrix started with Sodré, with João do Boi, with Roberto Mendes, with Bule Bule, with Roque Ferreira... music rooted in the sugarcane plantations of Bahia. Hence our logo (a cane cutter).