We often tell audiences to beware – tango is addictive. How did I get hooked? In the 1990’s while on a chamber music tour in Holland, I was invited by a young Dutch bandoneon player to a rehearsal of his tango band. It was Piazzolla’s “Soledad,” that  six minutes of music, that resulted in my spending the next two years with friends trying to figure out how to play tango. In 1998, five of us founded QuinTango, produced our first CD, and set out on a mission to introduce U.S. audiences to tango music.  To our amazement, we found an audience of Internationals living in D.C. who knew tango from their own countries. I especially remember an 80-yr old Turkish gentleman who tearfully told us he had waited twenty years to hear tango music in the U.S. Encouraged, we trekked to Argentina to work with great tangueros and to find arrangements (no tango music was available in US music stores back then).  One of our Argentine arrangers dubbed our fusion of classical chamber music and Argentine tango, “chamber tango” – a description we still love.

Five years ago QuinTango entered a growth spurt. We invited Argentine bandoneonist Emmanuel Trifilio, a frequent guest artist, to permanently join our quintet of 2 violins, cello, bass and piano.  We discovered we had a wonderful singer/songwriter/arranger in our bass player Ali Cook, and that both our pianist Julie Tucker and our cellist Susanna Mendlow were singers. When the pandemic struck in 2020 we had newly discovered talents and time to develop them.  We created our first music video (“Peregrina”) and Emmanuel and Ali started writing compositions for our group. We created a happy hour zoom program where our fans from all over the globe came together monthly to hear our new music.  

After 25 years, we are still trying to figure it all out. Creating new repertoire, expanding our audience, forging new partnerships, and playing for live audiences are what we love most. Last June we came out with our seventh CD, Obsesión, and toured it in Michigan, then Argentina and Uruguay in November; while in Buenos Aires, we began recording our next CD. We have a multi-arts residency on Martha’s Vineyard in March.  We are working on a Texas tour in September. In October we are invited to a festival in Mexico. Meanwhile, we are super excited about sharing our music at Creative Cauldron here in Virginia and being part of the Passport to the World of Music Festival. Playing for our local fans is always the best!

Tango began in the immigrant barrios of Buenos Aries and Montevideo at the turn of the last century. The loneliness of being an outsider in a new world, the grit required to survive in that world, and a nostalgia for the world left behind are all themes of early tangos, themes that continue in QuinTango’s classic and original music.
-Joan Singer

Over its 25-year history, QuinTango’s performances have taken them from a Command Performance at the White House to memorable concerts in 28 states, at venues ranging from Stanford University and Lincoln Center Plaza, to churches in Appalachia and Piccolo Spoleto in Charleston. They have performed at international festivals in Costa Rica, Mexico, Uruguay and the Amalfi Coast—and toured in France, Italy, Mexico, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Argentina and Uruguay.  In 2019 the group expanded its repertoire to include original tangos and vocals, both made possible by the addition of new personnel. QuinTango’s commitment to education, community engagement and global partnerships coupled with their personal performance style has created a devoted community of fans across the globe.  With 88 tangos on Spotify and 7 CDs, QuinTango’s music streams 20K times a week on six continents.

The Creative Cauldron Blog Returns! Our new "guest blog" feature welcomes performers and creators from the Cauldron community to share their process and give patrons a behind-the-scenes look at our work! First up is playwright, musician, and frequent collaborator, CAROL CAMPBELL, whose cross-genre work perfectly embodies Creative Cauldron's mission.

I was fortunate to meet Laura Hull a few years ago when I got to interview her at an event for a local radio show. I instantly believed in the philosophy behind her directorship and was heartened to learn more about Creative Cauldron’s community building that supports many genres of performance art.

I am so excited to be part of the Summer Cabaret series combining two of my greatest joys. Last spring, I staged a private reading at the Cauldron of my play, This Lucky Hand. On August 6th, my band, Favorite Child, will showcase some of our new original music and we’ll feature some of the music from the play.

The evening of August 6th offers the band an opportunity that we have not yet found in festivals and bar gigs. In the second set, we will focus on some storytelling, where I will reintroduce a couple of characters from This Lucky Hand and we will offer a few of their very personal songs.  Some folks who saw the play called these musical moments, poetic inner monologues.

I do hope you can join us for a rare chance to see music, storytelling and playwriting come together in a very intimate way.  Get your tickets here!

Warmly,
Carol

​As we launch our 10th season of theater, music and educational arts programs, I am channeling some early memories.   With each season, Creative Cauldron has grown into a vibrant, diverse, and talented circle of artists supported by a dedicated Board of Directors, and a loyal family of patrons and donors.  I am so grateful for what we have achieved together and wanted to share some of the highlights and anecdotes from each of our past 10 seasons. I’ll do this over 10 blog posts in the coming weeks and I encourage you to share your favorite memories with us along the way.
 
2009-10 Season
After seven years as vagabonds, renting various community facilities and outdoor amphitheaters, we finally took occupancy in ArtSpace in June of 2009, a herculean accomplishment. We began with our popular Arts Adventure Camp summer program.  Then in September, we presented our first professional production Martin: The King of Pizza—a pourquoi tale about the origins of pizza.  Matt Conner wrote the clever and tuneful musical score and Helen Hayes Award-winning actor, Sam Ludwig, played Martin. We had no seating platforms, no lights on the grid, and our set was a castle wall made from the colored locking mats that we put on the floor for our summer camp (thanks to the ingenuity of our new artistic partner and scene designer, Margie Jervis).  The musical was inspired by the improvisational drama workshop that Matt and I were doing with a diverse community of students at Bailey’s elementary school.  In looking back at this first foray into producing original musicals, I think we created the essential framework that would carry us through the next 10 years of invention and creativity.  I think we should revisit this little gem sometime in the future.
 
Christmas Cabin of Carnaween, our second professional show premiered in December.  I adapted the script from an Irish folktale and enlisted two accomplished Irish musicians to underscore the tale with Irish music.   Margie created an astonishing set design that included brush that she collected from Greenspring Gardens, and a stone farm wall reminiscent of the Irish countryside.  We solicited our neighbor Sisler’s Stone and asked if we could “borrow” these stones from their stock.  Sisler’s delivered a palette (2,000 pounds of stone!!) to our doorstep and Margie and I, and a few volunteers brought them in to the theater one stone at a time.  Our new LED lights funded by a grant from Dominion Power were in the grid and the production, a poignant tale set in the time of the Great Potato Famine, delighted and moved our audiences. We revived this production for the next four years, but Margie and I wisely decided that a half palette of stones would do nicely for the set.  That’s still 1,000 pounds of stone!
 
That spring, we launched our first Learning Theater program with a production of Many Moons.  It was adapted from the children’s book by James Thurber.  My concept for the Learning Theater program was to give young students an opportunity to work with and be mentored by adult professionals in a professional production.   There were only 3 children involved in this first production that featured Stephen Gregory Smith as the King and Anna Brotman-Krass as his daughter. Our Learning Theater is now one of our most sought after programs and the current ensemble for our fall production of Peter Pan and Wendy has 31 students participating.  We certainly have come a long way!
 
One of the biggest highlights of that first season was our production of Tinner Hill: Portraits in Black and White.  This world premiere funded through grants from the Virginia Commission for the Arts and the Arts Council of Fairfax County (now Arts Fairfax) explored the stories of African American Civil Rights pioneers of Falls Church.  Working with Nikki and Ed Henderson of the Tinner Hill Heritage Foundation, our creative team spent a year researching and learning the amazing stories of resistance and resilience of E.B. and Mary Ellen Henderson, Joseph Tinner and so many others. Oran Sandel (who is sadly no longer with us) led the project, bringing his passion, and insight.  I had known Oran from my days at Arena Stage when he was the Artistic Director of Arena’s social outreach arm, Living Stage.  With the help of writers Jennifer Goldsmith and Lisa Hill-Corley, two recent graduates of the Creative Writing program at George Mason University.  Their final script was fresh, inventive and thought provoking, asking us to acknowledge some of the difficult history of Falls Church, but also inspiring us to celebrate the power of the human spirit.  When I watch the video of the performance I am still amazed at how we pulled off such an ambitious and important project that first season.
 
 
Laura Connors Hull
Creative Cauldron Founder and Producing Director
 
Were you with us that first year?  What are your favorite memories or stories?