1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
Artist Statement:
These photographs were taken on a recent trip to Havana. This was my second trip; the first was nine years ago, before President Bush prohibited American travel to Cuba. One more wrong-headed attempt to cut off meaningful cross-cultural exchanges between our two peoples. This time I could feel pulsing through the society a sense of impending changes, though
the Cubans I spoke to at length (and they spoke far more openly than they did nine years ago) were uncertain about what was coming next.
The dance studio was free of these questions, at least for the time we watched and photographed the moves the dancers made as they danced non-stop for an hour. The class, a mixture of Modern and Afro-Cuban, demanded a rigorous and exacting technique. At one point, I saw a dancer go to an open window and throw-up from exhaustion; then she quickly returned to class. A beautiful dancer was illuminated in a shaft of light coming from a window and to me she was a symbol of the glowing Cuban spirit.
Artist Bio:
Judith Taylor is the author of two books of poetry, Selected Dreams from the Animal Kingdom, and Curios. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Poetry, Antioch Review, Pleiades, Seneca Review, Fence, Conduit, and Court Green as well as in anthologies. The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Ucross Foundation, the Djerassi Foundation, the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo have awarded her Fellowships, and she’s the recipient of a Pushcart Prize. After teaching in UCLA’s Writer’s Program for many years, she presently teaches private classes in Los Angeles. Taylor is co-founder and co-editor of POOL: A Journal of Poetry. She currently takes a lot of photographs.
View more of Judith's work: Judith Taylor
View poetry site: Pool Poetry
ISSUE:
S U M M E R
2012
SUPPORT THE ARTS
GET A T-SHIRT
DONATE TODAY!
By accessing this site, you accept these Terms and Conditions.
Copyright © 2010-2012 TheWritingDisorder.com ™ — All rights reserved