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The Salon Series

Poetry. Music. Dance. Artistic Exploration.

The Salon is an award-winning performance series featuring contemporary, classical, jazz, folk, world, spoken word, dance, and art. Modeled after the 19th Century European salons, The Salon builds audiences and fosters new art forms in an intimate and supportive atmosphere. The Salon is an historically relevant series. Dating back to the 18th Century, literary Salons flourished in Italy and France and came to be known by the room in which they were held. The Salon was the French parlor. In the 19th Century, these Salons included more musicians and artists and the Salons of Paris at the turn of the century featured more interdisciplinary collaborations. Andrea wanted to create a contemporary spin on the Salon by creating a diverse program that featured not only classical chamber music, but jazz, contemporary styles, world music, electronic, folk and multimedia. Alya brings in her talent for performance art, spoken word, spontaneous creations and audience participation. The Salon is essentially a celebration of the human spirit, and how we can nurture that personal connection, through the arts in community.

Co-Curators

  • Alya Howe
  • Andrea Clearfield

Over this past 5 years the Salon has been sold out and packed to the gills!

The Salon’s charm is the intimacy, the sharing, the diversity of artists, and the bridging of the gaps between artists and their audience. This work has brought many assets to the local community:

  • Support of local artists being curated to share their original works
  • Diverse programming music and other genres including classical, folk, jazz, poetry, dance, painting, photography, film, 3D virtual reality, clothing made from cassette tapes and playable as instruments, cake decorating, and world premieres of new works
  • Internationally renowned performers from across the country
  • Internationally renowned curators
  • Venue for original works, i.e. solo classical timpani performance
  • Dialogue dinners with audience and artists after the Salon
  • Celebration of Arts
  • Mentoring

Alya Howe, Co-Curator

Alya Howe is a UK born performance artist. Alya is an award recipient for her performance art both nationally and internationally has performed with companies and in her own works through out the USA and Europe. Dancing with modern dance greats, the Jose Limon Dance Company, Kei Takei; and improvising for tabla legend Zakir Hussein. Alya has been a part of the tradition of Salon’s since childhood and was a member of the famous London Salon “The 606”. Relocating from teaching at the State Ballet School in Greece to Philadelphia to join Danceteller and to teach at the Laban Institution in NYC. Later, she moved to the Roaring Fork Valley to raise her daughter and transition from a hectic performing career. Currently, Alya is the Performance Arts Programmer at Justice Snows, founding the Poetry Brothel, curator and director of Aspen’s Writ Large–a storytelling slam and developing the Salon with Andrea Clearfield. Alya is artist in residence at the Launch Pad, Carbondale where she had sell out performances
at her commissioned work “Vacuum” which will be performed again on September 16 at Dance Spectrum’s Festival. This led to a new commission “the HEaRD” premiering early November. Alya presented dance, storytelling and poetry at the recent Colorado Creative Industries Summit. She performed in an improvisational dance work at the Launchpad in early June and was a featured poet at local 5 Point Film Festival, WildFest and Mountain Fair. Just back from India where she worked with a women group in sharing the work Vacuum inspired at how through the arts we can bridge cultural differences.

 

Andrea Clearfield, Co-Curator

Andrea Clearfield is an award winning composer who has written more than 130 works for orchestra, chorus, chamber ensemble, dance, and multimedia collaborations, exploring themes ranging from freedom and oppression, to ancient cultures, mythology, healing and technology. Clearfield creates deep, emotive musical languages that build cultural and artistic bridges. Her cantata, Tse Go La (At the threshold of this life) for double chorus, electronics, and chamber orchestra incorporates Tibetan melodies inspired by fieldwork that she conducted in the remote Himalayan region of Lo Monthang. Her first opera, MILA, Great Sorcerer, based on the life of the 11th-century Tibetan yogi Milarepa, will have a 2018 premiere in New York City. Dr. Clearfield
has been a fellow at the American Academy in Rome, and has held residencies at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, Yaddo and The MacDowell Colony among others. She won the 2016 Global Premiere Commissioning Competition where her new work for marimba and string quartet will be performed nationwide, and is a recipient of the 2016 Pew Fellowship, a prestigious award given to select independent artists in the Philadelphia region. Her music is published by Boosey & Hawkes, Oxford University Press, Seeadot and International Opus. She holds a DMA in music composition from Temple University and an MM in piano performance from The University of the Arts. Clearfield has been the pianist in the Relâche Ensemble since 1990, and she is founder and host of the Philadelphia Salon, a renowned monthly performance series established in Philadelphia in 1986, which she now also curates and hosts in various locations throughout the U.S. An alumni of the Aspen Music Festival, she has been coming to Aspen for 30 years.