Returning to Acarigua

The first day of my much-anticipated return to Acarigua, I stopped to chat with the núcleo director, Roberto Zambrano, while the orchestra was on break. He was on the phone, in full crisis-prevention mode.... It isn’t a real Venezuelan seminario without some kind of crisis, and once again fate had delivered in spades. There had been doubts, not just about the venue but the country itself. Some of the international faculty had bizarrely cancelled at the eleventh hour citing security concerns, despite the fact that Venezuela as a nation was at its most calm since the start of the unrest in January. But if the annual theme of the seminario, if not Sistema, if not the country, had previously been “Tocar y luchar,” this year a simple postscript could rightly have been added: “La vida continua.”

Please continue reading on my personal blog.

Jonathan Govias, Sistema Fellow '10