Thursday, July 17, 2008

Into the Light World Tour

Captured during a two-night stand at a Dutch arena, this 100-minute concert special documents Gloria Estefan's lavish 1991 world tour, which underscored the Cuban-American singer's graduation from acclaim as a dance-floor diva to the ranks of female pop superstars. At its best, Into the Light World Tour displays the relentless energy, personal warmth, and crack musicianship that Estefan and her husband, producer, and principal collaborator, Emilio Estefan Jr., had evolved through her old band, the Miami Sound Machine, and taken uptown through her solo career. When the star and her band kick into high gear, percussion simmering and horns blazing in taut, deftly arranged choruses, the propulsive lure of salsa is hard to resist.

Technically, Estefan is a singer with a supple tone but modest range, hardly suggesting the caliber expected of a bona fide diva. Neither does her small, compact frame suggest a dancer's physique, despite the production's reliance on extended dance sequences. Yet she makes the most with what she has, harnessing formidable physical energy and transmitting considerable warmth to her audience. Her material, including both Miami Sound Machine hits and subsequent solo signatures, works best when staying closest to her roots, riding the giddy syncopations of uptempo Latin rhythms, or plying the lambent emotions of traditional ballads. Her exhortations to dance--"Get on Your Feet," "Conga," and "Rhythm Is Gonna Get You" being the inevitable faves--work handily with an ecstatic audience.

More grizzled viewers should be forewarned that this, like most recent concert films, isn't purely documentary--apart from backstage sequences that duly flatter the star, the live sound has been liberally sweetened during post-concert production. --Sam Sutherland
Customer Review: A great concert
I never actually saw this video. I was at the concert. The concert was awesome, so if this video does a decent job of capturing it, then it should be great too.
Customer Review: Gloria is the best and so are her concerts
Gloria is the best singer ever. On stage she's a divette. She's the best and so are her shows. The way she sings live is great, and so is her dancing. The band is great too. They know how to play and everybody goes wild in the audience!!!!!!!Always!!!!! I love her with all my heart and soul, 4 ever.....


The French artist Orlan, her actual name is unknown, is making the ultimate sacrifice for art, her own body is her canvas. She has designed the perfect woman on her computer by using the worlds most famous women portraits, like the chin of Botticelli's Venus and the forehead of da Vinci's Mona Lisa. Through multiple operations, her atelier is the operating room, she is trying to really become the ultimate female she has designed.

The art of Orlan can be seen as a comment on the body culture in our modern world, we admire the perfect body and are searching for the eternal youth. Our body culture is not criticized by Orlan, she is just showing us how narcisstic we actually are becoming. Is that a bad thing? That yours to decide, but looking at the images of her surgery performances I must say I get really frightened.

The operations themselves are filmed on camera. The surgeons are wearing special outfits designed by famous designers, like Paco Rabanne and Issey Miyake. While she is undergoing her operations, there is music, dance and poetry.

In the art world they are kind of used to the idea that artists call themselves, or their actions, the artwork. Think of all the performances and happenings we had in the seventies, but this is something different. Orlon is actually considering her own body as art, and even brings her skin, the parts that are not used in the reconstruction, on the art market.

About the Author: Hans Frontosa writes about contemporary art, erotic art and photography on the Art of Love website.

This article can be distributed on-line if the origin of the article is mentioned and linked.

Art of Love website

The art of Orlan, on the Art of Love

dj latin music

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