January 7th is Christmas Day on the Julian calendar. The old calendar Christmas date, thirteen days after the Gregorian/Roman Christmas date, is observed in Ukrainian Orthodox as well as Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Churches in the United States, such as St. George’s Ukrainian Catholic Church at 30 East 7th Street in New York City’s East Village. I […]
Read More
Beginnings Tamara Zaika Chernyakhovska was born just after the Second World War in southeastern Ukraine, in the city of Dnipropetrovsk, in Ukraine’s industrial center, then under Soviet rule. Tamara’s mother, Anastasiya Rubanenko, grew up in Diivka-Kodaky, the oldest part of the Katerinaslav district. In the early 1930s, as a young woman, she found work in […]
Read More
The Meaning of a Name When I talked by phone with Jailton “Dendê” Macedo, director, dancer, and drummer with the traditional Afro-Brazilian musical ensemble Ologundê, before the group opened CTMD’s Heritage Sunday performances at Lincoln Center in August, one of the first questions I asked him was where he got his nickname. As it happened, […]
Read More
On a cold, rainy night in April 2007 I traveled with CTMD artistic director Ethel Raim by subway to Astoria, Queens to interview Greek Island singer Amalia Papastefanou at Dahdoo Productions’ studios. Studio director Richard Khuzami and HellasFM radio producer and host Athanasios (Thanasis) Tzouvelis welcomed us warmly, ushered us inside, and introduced us to […]
Read More
