This photo is full of contrasts: black and a little poorly-dressed white children and adults – a black man in a bright elegant clothes. He is talking, or no, he sings, and you are silent, to hear him, to look with curiosity and astonishment. Have you ever seen a Black? Even a foreigner? Or amazed you, because they are impressed by the strong Opera voice?
he, Too, is curious, in this strange world. It is at the end of December, a Park in Leningrad, 1955. Everywhere is snow, everything is shrouded in White, and the children slides. This image, one can reduce immediately to a Exoticisation, radiates warmth, despite the cold of winter. Here is a miraculous human encounter takes place not had been for decades possible.
The man who acts as father Frost, is Moses LaMarr, the baritone of the Everyman Opera Company, an Ensemble with Afro-American singers, founded in 1952, even before the civil rights movement. With “Porgy and Bess” by George Gershwin, you can travel to Leningrad and Moscow, and the first theatre so that troops from the United States, in the Soviet Union since 1917 appearance. Is accompanied the tour of Truman Capote, writes about the journey a extensive Reportage for the New Yorker.
The State Department has supported this production of “Porgy and Bess” as the most expensive foreign culture, a project of the American government. For four years the Ensemble is in the world. Only the trip to the Soviet Union is not sponsored, paradoxically, because it is considered “politically premature”.
the piece, which is about the poverty of Black people in the United States, could be American from the Soviet government for anti and anti-capitalist Propaganda used to be feared. So the Soviet Ministry of culture to undertake the complete financing of this guest game.
