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Lisner's Flamenco Festival 2005 - Contest Wednesday January 19, 2005 I hope that you already have your tickets for Lisner Auditorium's Flamenco Festival this coming February 2-12, 2005. That's two weeks away! The clock is ticking--ticket sales will go up and the best seats will soon be gone. TIP: Do yourself a favor. Buy your tickets now! Don't ask me why, but despite all my hard work in keeping the DC flamenco community informed (ahem!), many of you still wait until the last minute to buy tickets. You know who you are! But guess what? Exclusively for DC Flamenco readers like yourself, Lisner Auditorium is giving you the opportunity to win a pair of FREE tickets! The prizes:
The rules:
The winners:
Congratulations to both of you! Thanks to everyone who participated in this contest. Good luck next time. Happy 9th Birthday DC Flamenco! Monday January 10, 2005 It was born January 10, 1996 but there's no big party planned. I'm just going to publicly pat myself on the back for a job well done. It's hard for me to believe that I've been maintaining the DC Flamenco website for almost ten years. I still get the occasional congrats on the street from total strangers. People just walk up to me as if they've known me for a long time (and in a way they have) and say things like, "Hey Miguelito. Thank you for the DC Flamenco website." You're welcome. Nothing pleases me more knowing that through all my hard work I've made more people aware of the DC Flamenco scene--and not just here in the USA. I have regular readers from all over the world. I was planning to do a major cosmetic makeover for this website in time for the birthday, but I received many emails begging me not to change a thing. Still, I couldn't resist making some minor changes that improve the quality of the content:
So why did I start this website in the first place? A lot of it has to do with how the DC flamenco community works. You got dancers and dance companies all striving to get their name known to the general public for the purpose of advancing their career in the performing arts, recruiting students etc etc. Each company might have one or two major performances a year where they'll actually pay for premium publicity in the media. But the rest of the time, the "little" shows get little if no publicity at all. Flamenco guitarists (ahem, the real ones!) are very rare in DC. If you're lucky enough to be one, it's very likely you will be the guitarist for more than one dance company. I was one of those lucky ones back in 1996 and I found myself regularly rehearsing and performing with three companies (Danza del Río, Ziva's Spanish Dance Ensemble and Spanish Dance Society). Dancers generally stick to one company, whereas guitarists get around. So, when company X wanted to know what company Y was up to, they would naturally come to me because I knew what all the companies and dancers were working on because I played for everyone! Yours truly was and still is the flamenco information center. Being the central source of flamenco info for DC, I needed to setup a webpage so that people can lookup the DC flamenco info instead of bugging me all the time. In 1996 I had an America Online (AOL) account and at the time they gave AOL members two megabytes of webspace. I started with one very plain webpage with a very short list of my own shows. Nine years and four webhosting services later, the website has grown to more than 200 webpages, 350 megabytes of files (mostly photos) with an average of about 200 visits daily. It was one of the first flamenco websites on the Internet and continues to be one of the best websites to regularly cover a local flamenco scene. [earlier articles][later articles][main index] |
On Tuesday January 25, 2005, at Las Tapas I asked a girl I had just met to do the random drawing from the submitted entries. Dancers Aleksey Kulikov and Anna Menendez were my witnesses. :)