Culture Minister Baca Suspends Concerts

Culture Minister Susana Baca said Tuesday that she has suspended her upcoming concerts, amid criticism that her music career and traveling was affecting her cabinet work.

On Monday, Cabinet Chief Salomon Lerner Ghitis said that Baca’s appointment to the ministry would be re-evaluated if she was unable to fully commit her time, daily El Comercio reported.

Baca had accepted President Humala’s invitation to join the cabinet on the proviso that she could wrap up a series of international concerts already scheduled for this Read more…

Susana Baca appointed Humala’s Culture Minister

Prominent Peruvian singer Susana Baca has been appointed to be the next Minister of Culture by President-elect Ollanta Humala, the incoming government announced by Twitter.

Baca, 67, was born in Lima’s Chorrillos district and is a winner of the Latin Grammy Award for Best Folk Album, for her Lamento Negro disc.

“I think I am the first black cabinet minister in Peru,” Baca said during an interview on RPP radio, adding that she was proud to be the first in the Afro-Peruvian community to hold such a high office in the government.

“I have a difficult year ahead of me, with many concerts, but I have always been interested in working for Peru,” she said.  “I will work to ensure that culture is not something that is only enjoyed by the people who can afford it, but that it be democratic, that it reach everyone and be inclusive.”   

Baca, a composer and researcher as well as a performer, has been internationally recognized at the forefront of the revival of Afro-Peruvian music, as well as a director and supporter of nonprofit cultural organizations.

Baca will replace Juan Ossio, an anthropologist who was appointed by outgoing President Alan Garcia as Peru’s first minister of culture, incorporating the former National Culture Institute (INC) as well as a number of museums and arts schools, including the National Fine Arts School.  Ossio telephoned Baca to congratulate her on the appointment.

The day after her swearing- in on July 28, she is scheduled to be in Ecuador for a disc-launching concert.

Hidden Jewels of Lima: Parque de Bellas Artes, La Victoria

By Tony Darrington

This part of the Lima district of La Victoria is known for its car accessory traders. Any spare part, anything for or connected to the motor vehicle can be obtained on or near Avenida Mexico.

What you are not expecting to find are works of art. Read more…

Gov’t awards Szyszlo the Order of the Sun

Peru’s government awarded painter Fernando de Szyszlo on Tuesday the country’s highest accolade, the Order of the Sun, in recognition of his artistic work and defense of human rights.

Foreign Affairs Minister Jose Antonio Garcia-Belaunde said during the ceremony that Szyszlo’s art presents “intense abstraction” of Peru’s culture.

“As well, the master is a fierce defender of human rights,” state news agency Andina reported Garcia-Belaunde as saying. Read more…

Garcia surprises Sweden with plans for legal action to recover Paracas textiles

President Alan Garcia announced Monday that Peru is to begin legal action against the city of Gothenburg in Sweden over the return of 100 items from the Paracas culture, state news agency Andina reported. 

The announcement, made at a conference on international cooperation for the protection and repatriation of cultural heritage, came as a surprise to Gothenburg authorities who were already in good negotiations with Peruvian diplomats in Stockholm. Read more…

Celebrations for Machu Picchu anniversary ready to begin

Celebrations for the 100th anniversary of the rediscovery of Machu Picchu are ready to begin on Saturday, the head of the commission responsible for organizing the festivities, Ricardo Vega, said.

“We are all ready, even though there are always last minute logistical difficulties, but I think they can be overcome,” state news agency Andina reported Vega as saying. “We feel happy with the team of workers and the coordination with the Cuzco authorities.”

The celebrations of American historian and explorer Hiram Bingham’s rediscovery in 1911 of the ancient Machu Picchu ruins, which are today Peru’s top tourist attraction and a UNESCO World Heritage Site, will begin with a photo exhibition called Remembrance of Machu Picchu. Read more…

Hidden Jewels of Lima: La Agonía de Rasu Ñiti

By Tony Darrington

This week we have a Peruvian Ballet as our Jewel, not the National Museum itself, for it is hardly hidden and people have yet to take the building to their hearts as a jewel of architecture – though it doesn’t look bad at night-time, illuminated.  We also include a detour to the Ballet Folklórico de México – in only a few senses can that be considered the same genre – in order to wonder, for a moment, where the Ministry of Culture should be putting its sponsorship. Have we here in a Ballet Clasico-Folklórico a genre in its own right – one that might have world appeal?

For Arguedianists, the performance on May 20 at the National Museum theatre was a dream come true. José María Arguedas captured a quintessential, Read more…

Ballet Folklorico de Mexico

By Tony Darrington

We had a chance to see the Ballet Folklorico de Mexico performance, just 10 days after the Rasu Ñiti debut in Lima, at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City on May 29. That building is, architecturally speaking, as artistically luscious (below) – marble plated, art deco – as the Lima Museo de la Nación is functionally puritan: exposed concrete and harsh rectangular lines.

The “Bel-ar” (Belles Arts), as our French-speaking friends would have it, was built as an extravagant contrast to the economic greyness of the 1930’s depression and as a statement that Mexico was emerging from the chaos of the Revolution.

The Ballet Folklórico de Mexico takes familiar – sometimes well-known – mariachi and ranchero music and astounds the audience with lavish, colorful choreography: more Moulin Rouge than Covent Garden.  Photos by PG/SM on May 29, 2011.

 

 

Paul McCartney storms Lima

By Tony Darrington

Let it be, let it be, let it be, let it be.
Whisper words of wisdom, let it be.

If you were unable or unwilling to fork out the rumored several hundred soles for a McCartney Concert 9 May 2011 ticket try http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghkDt2CIiAE .  Lima’s reception of the Beatle (later Wings leader) was said to be a record as was the number of pirated videos of the concert which suddenly appeared on YouTube. The concert provided temporary respite from the torrent of election propaganda put out by the media.

A recent reminiscence in the Peruvian Times about a certain visiting Beatle has prompted this detour in the Jewels of Lima series. I can’t claim to have met Paul McCartney, who played for Liverpool. But his counterpart in a London team, Mick Jagger, now that was a different matter. Read more…

Paul McCartney, the Maharishi and Me

Nicholas Asheshov, Editor of the Peruvian Times during the 1970s and 1980s, recalls how in the Swinging London of the 1960s Sir Paul McCartney, who plays in Lima on Monday 9, helped him to his first break. —-

I first met Paul McCartney in a Kensington drawing-room in 1967 when he was already world-famous. I was on Fleet St, a reporter trying to make my name in the man-bites-dog jungles of the world’s most ferocious newspapers, each of them great empires selling millions of copies.

Mine was the Daily Sketch, a bumptious right-wing tabloid owned by Lord Rothermere with headlines like “The Duke and Mandy -Palace Denial,” probably a story floated by the Sketch itself. This was the tough end of Fleet St and we were paid much better than the schoolmasters on The Times. Read more…

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