ITALIAN NIGHT at Arcosanti, once again, was a great success. A lively crowd of visitors and many alumni enjoyed a lovely evening that began with a tour of the site and a delicious dinner served in the Vaults.
Menu consisted of
antipasto, insalata condimento alla Soleri, pasta estiva [dramatically served from wheel barrows by Paolo Soleri], Piccata di pollo per i peccatori, melanzane ripiene, fagiolini con rosmarino, and for dessert gelato al limone e biscottini.

The evenings program continued in the Colly Soleri amphitheater with a medley of songs from the operas of Giacomo Puccini, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Mascagni and Gioaccino Rossini.
Pianist VITORIA KIRSCH explained each of the pieces, the setting and circumstance as well as the character portrayed by the performers.

Dynamic voices of the evening were Soprano SUZAN HANSON and Bass-Baritone DEAN ELZINGA.
Suzan Hanson combines careers in Opera, Theater, and Musical theater, and was thrilled to be back on the Arcosanti stage.
For Susan, 2008 began in Verona as Pat Nixon in "Nixon in China", followed by a reprisal of Eurydice in "Orpheus X" for the Hong Kong Arts Festival. Blessed with a voice of exquisite beauty and power, which has been lauded by critics and audience members alike, it certainly delighted this audience.

Superb singer and actor, bass-baritone DEAN ELZINGA, is regularly welcomed on concert and opera stages, often in contemporary works requiring his unique dramatic conviction, presence and assured musicianship. He enjoyed international acclaim for Peter Maxwell Davies’s fiendishly difficult Eight Songs for a Mad King, performing it in New York and Cleveland, with Jonathan Sheffer conducting the Eos and Red Orchestras, respectively. He sang the title role in Harold Farberman’s A Song of Eddie and Schoenberg’s Die glückliche Hand at New York’s Bard Festival, and Eliot Carter’s What next? at the Amsterdam Concertgebouw.

Music was followed by Italian Night Pictograph 2008 "How the West was Peaked", once again choreographed by Tomiaki Tamura and performed by staff members Matteo Di Michele, Alex Dixon, Erin Jeffries, Jeffrey Michal and Carina Trendafilova.
"The Hydrocarbon economy has propelled our progress for the last 100 years and seemingly reached its peak. Where do we go from here looking at the next 100 years."
The theme was portrayed in a shadowplay on the mesa across from the Arcosanti site, to the music of Ennio Morricone, Falls from "Mission" and Nini Rosso "Il Silenzio".

The ITALIAN NIGHT event is the best visited event of the year, usually between 300 and 350 visitors come to enjoy a delicious dinner in the dramatic setting of the vaults.
What few visitors can realize is how much preparation it takes for our crew of staff, workshop participants and volunteers, most of whom have not been part of something like this before.
On top of which, many of the July 20. workshop participants arrived the night before and during the day, so this was their introduction to the Arcosanti experience.
This is an event that takes all hands to make possible, and all hands rose to the challenge and performed an admirable task.
There are many photos and only room for a few.
The gigantic dinner preparation was coordinated and executed by this years terrific chefs, Peter Lindgren and Carrie Krueger, who with calm and sparkling humor directed a staff of volunteers through days and nights of endless cutting and slicing and cooking and stuffing and cleaning in the tiny cafe kitchen.
[from upper left] Alumna Gypsy Kampel came for the day and individually fried all of the delicious Chicken Picata filets.
Carrie and Peter instruct the crew.

Each table setting in the vaults received plates of appetizers, fresh slices of bread and olive oil pressed from Arcosanti olives.
[from upper left] The crew formed assembly lines to distribute the prepared hors d'oeuvres on carefully washed leafs of lettuce and, then carried each tray to be kept cool in the walk-in refriderator.
Tables and chairs were set up in the vaults, 350 sets of silverwear were rolled the night before.
Tomiaki Tamura prepared the vaults serving crew in the all of the tasks that will make the dinner a smooth operation. Besides the actual serving of dinner, all of the little things that have to be thought of, like filling glasses with ice, refilling the salad bowls, making sure there is enough coffee and a myriad of detals.

The guest have arrived. The pasta is wheeled into position and Paolo Soleri graciously served the pasta from a wheel barrow.
To accommodate serving many people the quickest way possible, the vaults were set up in such a way that four teams served the dinner from islands between all of the tables, and it was a super delicious dinner.

Much other preparation is not visible here, like the weeding of the parking lot, tackling prickly tumbleweed that had grown to gigantic proportion with lots of monsoon moisture. And the preparation of the theater, cleaning and scrubbing and brushing and wiping 350 chairs. And the extra cleaning of all of the paths and common rooms for our visitors.
This event was made possible by the efforts of a terrific crew.
Report continues on 7/23/08.

The June 15. workshop participants graduated.

Congratulations to:
[from left] Lindsay Marsh, Todd Findley, Brendan Siegl, Tyler Scott, Toa Rivera, Mark Moynihan, TJ Bogan, Jonathan Schafer, Rebecca Brown, Mateo Mir Bashiri and Magda Lojewska.