Balkan Arts Center

In 1968, towards the end of the North American Folk Music Revival and shortly after the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 was passed to replace the U.S. immigration quota system, Martin Koenig established the Balkan Arts Center in New York City to promote and foster an appreciation of Balkan dance traditions. Over the next few years Koenig, along with fellow New Yorker and folk music enthusiast Ethel Raim, also conducted fieldwork for Ralph Rinzler in an effort to scout artists and performers for the annual Smithsonian Festival of American Folklife (now known as the Smithsonian Folklife Festival). Raim eventually joined Koenig as co-director of the Balkan Arts Center in the mid-Seventies, around the same time as the establishment of the Folk Arts Program within the National Endowment for the Arts and the enactment of the American Folklife Preservation Act. With the financial support of the NEA, Koenig and Raim proceeded to build an organization that would focus exclusively on the music and dance traditions of New York City's immigrant and ethnic populations. Originally promoting the arts of Albanian, Macedonian, and Greek cultures, the Balkan Arts Center expanded its operations into other communities as New York's demographic makeup shifted with each new influx of immigrants. Over the course of four decades and two name changes (the Ethnic Arts Center in 1981 and the Center for Traditional Music and Dance in 1997), CTMD has worked with dozens of ethnic and immigrant communities throughout the five boroughs. According to its current mission statement CTMD is a nonprofit organization "dedicated to preserving and presenting the performing arts traditions of New York’s immigrant and ethnic communities through research-based educational programming, public performance, and community partnerships." Towards this end, CTMD has established and collaborated on a number of projects, including Community Cultural Initiatives (CCI), Sharing Traditions youth education programs, Touring Artist series, an extensive archive of audio and visual documents from over forty years of performances and events, the production of major festivals, the publication of printed materials, and the release of audio and visual recordings. These programs and projects are designed to advance the mission of cultural equity, a concept advanced by Alan Lomax in his appeal for the recognition of the right of every culture to promote and preserve its unique heritage and traditions.