BxFW: March Is Music

CHAVELA VARGAS – Born Isabel Vargas Lizano in Costa Rica, Chavela Vargas (1919-2012) ran away to Mexico City in her early teens and began singing in the streets. By the 1950s, she had become a darling of the city’s thriving bohemian club scene. Challenging mainstream Mexican morals by dressing in pants, drinking tequila, and smoking cigars while singing love songs intended for men to woo women and refusing to change the pronouns, “She was chile verde,” remembers Elena Poniatowska, the grande dame of Mexican letters.

Although she lived out of the public eye for several years due to a long battle with alcoholism, Chavela was nursed back to health by a Huichol Indian family who also helped initiate her into Shamanism. For the rest of her life, Chavela was known as “La Cupaima,” (the last female shaman). Her amazing comeback began at the age of 72 when Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar, who had featured her music in many of his films, played an instrumental role in elevating her career to international acclaim. Whenever he introduced her to the public, he would kneel down to kiss the stage before she performed at renowned venues like New York’s Carnegie Hall, Paris’ L’Olympia Theatre, and Madrid’s Plaza de España. Chavela also appeared in the 1967 movie La Soldadera, Werner Herzog’s Scream of the Stone and Julie Taymor’s Frida, and sang “Tú Me Acostumbraste” (“Because of You, I Got Accustomed”) in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Babel.

In her lifetime, Chavela was credited with recording 80 albums, received a Latin Grammy for Lifetime Achievement, and was the second woman to win Spain’s most prestigious artistic award, the Grand Cross of Isabel, the Catholic. She was close to many prominent artists and intellectuals including Juan Rulfo, Agustín Lara, Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Dolores Olmedo, José Alfredo Jiménez, Lila Downs, and Joaquin Sabina. In 2012 Chavela passed away at the age of 93 after touring to support her last album La Luna Grande, a tribute to the poet Garcia Lorca, with whose spirit she communed daily.

CATHERINE GUND, the Founder and Director of Aubin Pictures, is an Emmy-nominated producer, director, writer, and activist. Her media work focuses on strategic and sustainable social transformation, arts and culture, HIV/AIDS and reproductive health, and the environment. Her films —which include Chavela, Dispatches from Cleveland, American Rhapsody (in progress), Born to Fly (Emmy-nominated), What’s On Your Plate?, A Touch of Greatness (Emmy-nominated, Hamptons’ Starfish Award), Motherland Afghanistan, Making Grace, On Hostile Ground, and Hallelujah!— have screened around the world in festivals, theaters, museums, and schools; on PBS, the Discovery Channel, and the Sundance Channel. Gund currently serves on several boards including Art Matters, Solidaire, Osa Conservation and The George Gund Foundation. She co-founded the Third Wave Foundation which supports young women and transgender youth, and DIVA TV, an affinity group of ACT UP/NY. She was the founding director of BENT TV, the video workshop for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender youth. She was on the founding boards of Bard Early Colleges, Iris House, Working Films, Reality Dance Company and The Sister Fund and has also served for MediaRights.org, The Robeson Fund of the Funding Exchange, The Vera List Center for Art and Politics at the New School, and the Astraea Foundation. Gund’s most recent project, Dispatches from Cleveland, consists of five short films that look at the police murder of 12-year-old Tamir Rice and show how people joined together to vote out the prosecutor who didn’t have their backs. Her other film Born to Fly pushes the boundaries between action and art, daring us to join choreographer Elizabeth Streb and her dancers in pursuit of human flight. She lives in NYC with her four children.

DARESHA KYI is an award-winning filmmaker and television producer with over 25 years in the business. A graduate of NYU Film School, she also won a full fellowship from TriStar Pictures to attend the Directors Program at The American Film Institute (AFI) based on her multiple award-winning short film Land Where My Fathers Died, which she wrote, produced, directed and co-starred in with Isaiah Washington. She recently served as executive producer of the award-winning short, Thugs, The Musical starring David Alan Grier and Margaret Cho. She has also worked extensively as a television producer —most recently she was field producer on Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell, story producer on La Voz Kids (Telemundo’s The Voice for children), and writer for the weekend morning talk show Arise & Shine, hosted by Richard Pryor’s daughter, Rain. She is currently co-directing and co-producing Aubin Pictures’ Chavela and producing Dispatches From Cleveland.

This program is made possible, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council, and the New York State Council on the Arts, with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature. Southwest Airlines is the official airline of Pregones/PRTT. For a full list of our funders, visit www.pregonesprtt.org.

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