Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA (CAP UCLA) is hosting a Balkan Dance Party on the Royce Hall Terrace Tuesday, Oct. 8, free and open to UCLA students, faculty and staff. Starting at 6:30 p.m. and featuring performances from Free Range Orkestar, Tzvetanka Varimezova and Ivan Varimezov, and the Nevenka Folk Ensemble, the event is a celebration of CAP UCLA’s first world music performance of the season and the return of charismatic composer/bandleader Goran Bregovic to the Royce Hall stage.
Goran Bregovic and his Wedding and Funeral Band will perform at 8 p.m., in a program that showcases Bregovic’s latest album "Champagne for Gypsies," a collection of original music created as a reaction to the extreme pressure that Gypsies (Roma) continue to experience across Europe and the world.
Cover for Goran Bregovic's latest album, "Champaigne for Gypsies."
"It was incredibly important to us, at the start of our season and of the school year to create a sense of welcome for everyone who calls the UCLA campus home," said Meryl Friedman, director of special initiatives for CAP UCLA. "And, as we prepared to present Goran Bregovic on our season, we were delighted to discover the rich and vibrant Balkan music culture in our city, making this a perfect chance to showcase local talent as we welcome the UCLA community to our season of performances." Two master musicians from Bulgaria, Ivan Varimezov and Tzvetanka Varimezova join the festivities. In 2002, Tzvetanka trained and directed the UCLA Balkan Women’s Choir and Ivan taught gaida (a bagpipe from the Balkans and Southeast Europe) and tupan (a large double-headed drum played with sticks) to individual students as well as directed the department’s bitov wedding bands.
Free Range Orkester started out as a Serbian-style brass band and has grown to encompass other instruments and traditions from across the Balkans. Several members of Free Range Orkester are members of the UCLA community. Nick De Carlo, the group’s helicon player (a tuba-like instrument) is a graduate student in the UCLA Department of Germanic Languages Aaron M. Bittel, sax and clarinet player is Archivist-Librarian for the UCLA Ethnomusicology Archive and an alumnus (M.A.) of the Ethnomusicology Department. And Jake Bluenote, who plays guitar, bouzouki (a guitarlike instrument with origins in Greece) and accordion has been taking courses from UCLA Extension since the age of 16.
Free Range Orkester, which includes several members of the UCLA community, performs.
Nevenka Folk Ensemble is a Los Angeles-based women's folk chorus which focuses on performing songs from Eastern Europe.
All the performers will gather to end the Terrace party in a raucous collaborative finale.
The Tuesday performance also marks the second installment of "Dig Deeper," a new CAP UCLA initiative developed in collaboration with UCLA Library Special Collections to contextualize the art forms and performers the organization brings to campus. Margarita Nafpaktitis, Librarian for Slavic & East European Studies and Linguistics will be in residence for the pre-show event in a new Pop-Up Library space in the Royce Lobby. She will show examples of films scored by Goran Bregovic, and share research guides and links related to Balkan music and culture.