Tag: Culture

Scott Lipps

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“Sharing beauty” has been Scott Lipps’ personal mission since he founded One Management, one of the world’s leading modeling agencies. The agency represents a who’s who of beauty in America; the faces that capture his imagination become the faces that we see on billboards and the pages of magazines. He represents Helena Christensen, Eva Herzigova, Iman, Bar Refaeli, Claudia Schiffer and Poppy Delevingne. Women whose eyes, lips and skin will be remembered as what defined beauty in the 20th and 21st centuries. And reveling in the perfection of the human form is something we all deserve to enjoy, according to Lipps.

“Sharing that beauty is the thing that gets me up in the morning,” says Lipps, speaking from his office in New York. “That’s what makes me excited about doing the job—creating stars. The high you get from finding someone and the next thing you know she’s scoring cosmetic campaigns and covers of magazines. You start to see someone grow. It’s exciting!”
Born and raised in Long Island, New York, Lipps moved to L.A. as a teen and studied drumming at the Percussion Institute of Technology and media management at Cal State Northridge, during which time he played with L.A. Guns singer Paul Black. When an arm injury put an end to his musical aspirations, he took a job at NEXT Model Management, upon the suggestion of his mother, who remembered his interest in the fashion world. Natural charisma, combined with a remarkable eye for what photographs well, helped him rise quickly through the ranks. He branched out on his own and established One Management in 2002 and now reps not only models but celebrities like Nicki Minaj, Norman Reedus, Steve Aoki and Tiesto.
At that point, there were around 500 working models in New York City. Now there are anywhere from 1,500 to 2,000 world-class beauties wandering the streets of Manhattan at any given time.

“It’s inundated,” he says, acknowledging that there are worse problems for a city to have. But now, with increased competition, it’s no longer enough for a model to rely on remarkable genes to score the big campaigns; his or her beauty needs to shine from the inside too. “The newer concept of inner and outer beauty means it’s about the entire package,” he says. “You have to have a beautiful personality as well as being aesthetically remarkable. That’s what makes a model successful these days.”

Lipps’ particular take on beauty is firmly rooted in the timeless supermodel look, à la Christy Turlington and Claudia Schiffer, as opposed to edgy, trendy looks that might only last a few seasons. That timelessness doesn’t always equal perfect symmetry, though. Sometimes there’s a mystery factor, and it just works in photographs. “Someone’s face might not exactly be in proportion; there might be something a little bit untraditional and that can really work too.”
You can take a peek at Lipps’ adventures through the beauty sphere at his site, PopLipps (some of his photographs were published in his book POPLIPPS: Plus One) and in his Friday column on Interview magazine’s website. Must be a dream job, being surrounded by some of the greatest beauties of our time, day in day out. Indeed it is, although Lipps admits that after a while even beauty becomes something you get used to. “I see girls on a daily basis, thousands upon thousands over the years, and you do get desensitized.” But still, when a truly remarkable face walks in the room, his heart rate jumps. “It doesn’t happen everyday… but still, I get stunned.”
 

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THE FLETCHERS BY JULIAN SCHNABEL

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I met Herbie Fletcher when I was 16 years old. I had no idea what effect he would have on my life and how important that meeting would be. It happened through surfing-a path he would follow and guide his family on for life. I am a painter and have followed the practice of the artist, which in fact is no different from that of the surfer, who inscribes him-or herself in the ocean-a bigger canvas could not be engaged-defining their humanity in the most personal way using themselves to draw their life lines through the massive, fleeting freedom of that power. The power and majesty of the sea-Herbie shared that with me and my family as well as his own. I love and respect the Fletchers and treasure the gift of camaraderie and surfing that we have enjoyed together for what has turned out to be a lifetime.

 

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SEAN LENNON

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ASKA MATSUMIYA: I imagine you must have had a really stimulating childhood, being around lots of artists and musicians. Who were some that really influenced you?

SEAN LENNON: Well, yeah, I guess. I mean, I wonder if that’s really true. Because my dad wasn’t around, you know, when I was young, and my mom is a musician. I did see her make records, but she’s not intrinsically a musician; she sort of thinks about art as conceptual, so the medium, whether it’s music or film or sculpture or painting, is sort of secondary and the concept of the art is first. And so I was kind of raised around her ideas of art being conceptual and so I don’t know—it’s not like I had the Beatles hanging out jamming in my house. I was actually living alone with my mom and sort of watching her make art from her perspective, and I wouldn’t really say that I was brought up around a lot of musicians. I wasn’t, really. However, we did have pianos in the house, and that’s how I came to music. Just playing the piano.

AM: What’s some of the music or even projects of your parents that were most formative? What were the different things that you think really helped you develop as an artist?

SL: I feel like what initially got me into playing music was, you know, the fact that my dad was a musician and he was in the Beatles, and I listened to that music a lot when I was a kid. So I think when he died I remember feeling like there was sort of a vacuum that had been left, and I used to just try to play the piano to kind of connect with my idea of what I thought he was, being a musician and stuff. I think at first my inspiration came from just wanting to find some connection to my dad.

AM: So music was almost a way for you to get to know your father?

SL: Yeah, and I would say it still is.

AM: What are some of your favorite songs of his?

SL: I tend to like the more elaborate stuff. I like the period between Revolver and The White Album; that period is my favorite. So, Sgt. Pepper’s, Magical Mystery and then the more psychedelic stuff; that’s just where my taste is, because I like the more experimental songwriting, more progressive songwriting. It seems a lot more ambitious, you know, very orchestral and sort of experimental recording techniques, so my favorite songs are like “Strawberry Fields” and “I Am the Walrus.” The stuff that’s really more out there

AM: What about your mom’s music? What are some of your favorites? I love her lyrics.

SL: Her lyrics are really great. Actually I got to produce her last two records, which were really some of my favorites, and Plastic Ono Band.

AM: What’s your process of working with her when you’re producing her records?

SL: She’s very spontaneous, so she writes really quickly—she’s very different from me in that. I sort of belabor the lyrics. It really takes time to figure out what I want the song to be, whereas she just doesn’t hesitate. She writes really quickly, so often we’ll just be kind of jamming in the studio and she’ll start writing lyrics and she’ll be done with the song within a few minutes. She doesn’t like to keep working on it over and over again. She gets kind of bored, I think. I feel like she thinks that the magic is the spontaneity; she likes to work really fast, and she kind of gets disinterested in something that’s too prolonged. She’s incredible in terms of her lyrical capability. I mean, she’ll write like three or four songs a day in the studio. That makes it really fun, so often we’ll make it up as we go along.

AM: How did she go about introducing or even teaching music and art to you?

SL: She’s not really that kind of parent. She never really went out of her way to introduce me to anything. She just sort of does her thing. She led by example. She would be making records, I would often be just sort of hanging out in the studio because I was a kid and that’s where she was, so I would just sit around and hear her record or watch her. I feel very comfortable in the studio because I spent a lot of time in the studio as a kid. She wasn’t that kind of person to sort of force anything on me; she’s not one of these people who’ll sit you down and say like, “Learn this and this is what you have to know and not know.” She has a pretty laissez-faire attitude.

AM: I understand you recently played with Paul McCartney. I was wondering what your relationship is with him, and what you thought about his recent collaboration with Kanye West.

SL: I actually haven’t heard the music he did with Kanye, but I thought it was really funny that people didn’t know who he was and all the Kanye fans were like, “Man, that Paul is going to be really famous after Kanye worked with him.”

AM: Yeah, that was the best.

SL: That was really funny. I haven’t heard what they are doing together, but I’ll definitely check it out. I think it’s cool that Paul wants to work with Kanye. It’s kind of fun—it makes the world more interesting that those two people want to collaborate. But I don’t really know; I haven’t heard the music yet. Kanye often seems silly but I think he is a real artist and I do like his music.

AM: Do you feel writing music comes really naturally to you?

SL: Yeah, I would say that it does. You know, I don’t know why that is, but it does come pretty naturally. I don’t know if it’s something that I learned or if it’s something that I was born with, but I always hear music really easily. But it takes me a lot longer to write the words.

AM: What ignites you to make music?

SL: It’s hard to say. I find everything pretty inspiring. I get really inspired by films, and other people’s music and, yeah, the world can be such an overwhelming place, you know. Violence, American and European international policy, the Middle East—I find myself always driven to write music as a way of processing all the stuff that’s going on. I feel like that’s why I end up making music or making art, as a way of venting frustration. You just have to let it out somehow.

AM: Your parents definitely expressed their political and worldviews in their music.

SL: Yeah, they definitely did, and you know I think they were probably some of the best at doing that, at sort of merging their political philosophies with their art. I don’t think everybody’s that good at doing that, you know. I think it often comes off as pedantic or heavy-handed or preachy, you know, when artists try to tell you how they feel politically, but I think my parents were very adept at merging their spiritual and philosophical views with their music, their art—they were uniquely fitted for that. When somebody tries being political they can sound condescending or something, but I think when they did it, it was really inspiring and it made you want to jump on the train, you know.
AM: Is there anything of theirs in particular that really made an impact on you?

SL: I think it’s different for me. It’s like somebody might be a fan, like I’m a fan of Jimi Hendrix, you know. There is a performance that he did of the song “Machine Gun” that sort of represents a period of my life in a certain way that’s really important to me, but when it’s your parents it doesn’t really feel the same way. It’s not like you stumble upon some aspect of their work and it resonates with you the way you would with your favorite musician or your favorite film. With your parents it’s like everything they are is a part of you, you know, it’s in your cellular structure. So it’s harder to identify or pinpoint certain ideas or certain lyrics or certain pieces of work that might represent something to you, because everything they did is inside you. It’s like trying to identify your face from your mouth and your heart. I think that with my parents they’re sort of the baseline of all of my views of the world and my perspective on everything in the world. I mean, I learned how to pee in a toilet from them, so it’s a little hard to distinguish the lyrics from how to use a knife and fork, and I know that everything that I am, from learning how to walk on the right side of the street or cross the street when the light changes, I learned everything from them, so I really couldn’t distinguish any specific piece of work that I resonate with more or less because it would almost be silly. They actually taught me everything.

AM: How do you create your own identity working in a field where your parents are both such icons? How do you distinguish yourself?

SL: It’s sort of interesting. I think it’s going to take me a lifetime to come to grips with the degree of their influence and their presence in the world. It’s so strong, and I think ultimately it’s impossible for most people to perceive my personality, my characteristics independently from my parents, which actually took me a long time to understand. I think I’m still trying to understand it, because for me, I’ve never struggled with trying to identify or distinguish myself from my parents. I think people who are close to me don’t have any trouble distinguishing me from them. But I think the world at large still does, and most people will never be able to distinguish me from my parents. It’s complicated, but let’s put it this way: It’s just never been a great motivator for me, this idea of trying to separate myself from them, because I never really felt that I wasn’t my own person; it never occurred to me that I might not be. I guess I never really felt responsible for other people’s struggle with figuring out who I was.

AM: Does it affect your approach to creating music? Like, I would imagine that maybe you’d be a little nervous to share your music with the world.

SL: Well, I think in the beginning I was less nervous, because I didn’t really have any idea of what people were like; I didn’t realize that people were only seeing me through the lens of my dad. I had never encountered that kind of distortion before. My friends and family never presented their views through John Lennon’s ideas. So when I first started music I wasn’t worried at all. I just thought everyone was going to see my music the way I saw it, so it was sort of like a shell-shock, going out to the world and realizing that no one really was going to look at me, that I was only going to trigger a memory of someone else. I realized my dad is so universal that I was almost invisible; it was impossible for people to see me as anything other than a trigger for the memories and ideas of him, and I think that made it more and more daunting to make music, but at the same time I think that my personal relationship to music was really evolving.

AM: My last question is what do you think our generation is going to be remembered for musically—what’s our contribution to music history?

SL: It’s an interesting question. I think it’s a very exciting period, an innovative time, you know; music is in an interesting place. I mean, I’m feeling very hopeful. The kids I meet today, they know so much about music history because of the Internet, and they’re able to listen to every record that’s ever been made and a thousand times if they want, and so they become experts and sort of scholars in the history of music. Maybe in a few generations who knows where that’s going to lead to. I mean, it could lead to a total renaissance in music, and there is going to be some artist coming up in the next 10, 20 years that leads to some sort of golden era of creativity that’s going to be birthed out of all of the things that are available now.
 

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IMOGEN POOTS

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First, a disclosure. Personally, I am massively fond of Ms. Imogen Poots. There is good reason for that. Without her help, and her courage, at a very specific and delicate time, the film I’ve been trying to make for the past decade called Frank & Lola would have fallen apart, almost certainly for good. So I know firsthand what this 26-year-old with an unnervingly old soul is capable of—as an actress, as a human, as an artist—and trust me, it’s rare, and worth your attention. Take Grace Kelly, mix in a little Annie Hall, add some pixie dust and a bit of British je ne sais quoi and Immie (as she is known to everyone who’s ever met her) materializes. Also, she’s a blonde. Hitchcock would have loved her.

Born and raised to a pair of journalist parents in London’s Chiswick district, Poots has lived under the industry spotlight ever since her first speaking role, at just 17, with a fearless, precocious performance opposite Robert Carlyle in 28 Weeks Later, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s impressive follow-up to Danny Boyle’s visionary digital-video horror epic 28 Days Later. Young, beautiful, talented actresses are a very rare commodity in Hollywood, and Immie, who scored a British Independent Film Award nomination for her work, checked all the boxes. She signed with a major agency while still in her teens and was soon booking at least three films a year. Along the way, the fashion world fell in love with her, which led to modeling work (she’s currently the face of Miu Miu) and regular appearances at shows and CFDA balls. At 22 years old she made the obligatory move to L.A. and more work followed, a balanced mix of studio gigs (2014’s Need for Speed) and prestigious indies (film god Terrence Malick’s upcoming Knight of Cups). But something still didn’t feel right. A change of location was in order.

At the end of 2013, Poots went with her gut and moved from Los Angeles to New York. That’s when everything began to fall into place. “Moving here just felt like the right thing to do,” she says over yet another dinner at the West Village outpost of Frankies Spuntino, the famed Brooklyn eatery. (The restaurant’s co-founder, Frank Falcinelli, served as the inspiration for my movie’s hero, a chef from Queens who’s since moved to Las Vegas, which is where he meets the elusive Lola, played by Poots.) “I first came here at 19, and I just fell in love. When I walk down Broadway, and I pass those stands with the roasted nuts—that smell is just so comforting, even though I’ve never bought them, ever,” says Poots, who now calls the East Village home. “In New York, you’re surrounded by a group of people who put the creative element first. This industry can be a really thrilling place to be, but there’s also another side to it that I don’t love. I don’t feel that side when I’m here, where actors, writers, directors walk into a room and then just get together and do it. I’ve never felt happier or more at home anywhere.”

By the time I met Immie at the Bowery Hotel early last summer to discuss my eight-years-in-the-making film, she had already made the dive headfirst into the creative inspiration New York provided her and firmly taken the reins as architect of her own career. I told my financier at the time that I wanted her to play the lead role in my film. He was so impressed by my pitch that he insisted that she was the only actress for the part, but that we had to go into production before the end of the year or all bets were off. There were a couple of problems with that ultimatum: Immie had already booked back-to-back jobs for the fall—Anna Axster’s A Country Called Home and Jeremy Saulnier’s Green Room—which meant there was only a three-week window in December that would work, and she’d have to drop out of another, bigger project she had committed to months earlier.

Immie made her choice, and a few months later we were in production. Despite arriving on set only a week after wrapping Green Room (which she started just a few days after wrapping A Country Called Home), she showed up in Vegas as ready as I could have ever hoped her to be and was, needless to say, an absolute dream to direct. Now it’s on me to finish the film in a way that does her extraordinary performance justice. No pressure.

“It was really incredible to work on three films consecutively that I was crazy about,” says Poots, who kicked off the year as the lead in Cameron Crowe’s much-buzzed-about pilot Roadies. “In hindsight, you recognize how much that you got done. It’s a reminder again that there are people out there who really love movies, and who have really weathered the storm of having been fit into a box and then got through it. This is a funny old job. You meet some extraordinary folk along the way.”

 

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BESTIA

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The converted loading dock that is Bestia is tucked down 7th Place, a side street that dead-ends at the Los Angeles River. For decades the neighborhood was rather desolate—an industrial extension of nearby skid row that was popular with artists for its cheap raw space—but all that is changing. “Us bringing people here,” explains chef and co-owner Ori Menashe, “I hope opens people’s minds a little.” With no through traffic on the dead-end street, it’s a place you have to find, though it’s become more obvious the crowd of parked cars now marks Bestia, which for two years has been one of Los Angeles’ most sought-after Italian- restaurant reservations.

Menashe was born in Los Angeles, moved to Israel at age 7 and returned after his compulsory military service in 2001. He’s now a 10-year restaurant veteran as well, including a stint as chef at Osteria Angelini. Bestia is the first restaurant he can call his own (he’s opening a Middle Eastern concept restaurant nearby in the future), so he created the kind of place he’s always wanted. He started with an open kitchen plan, something he’d never had before. “I wanted to feel the vibe from the dining room,” he explains while walking through the various kitchen stations, each buzzing with activity at 3 p.m. as the morning and evening shifts change over. I lost count of staff past 50, but Menashe puts the total at a bit over a hundred, with around 75 employees working each day, including the dozens of prep cooks I am watching. “There is so much in the preparation,” Menashe continues, “and that’s why we’re not open for lunch, because our processes are so exhausting. We overstaff, because I want everything to be perfect.”

Menashe quickly reads my wandering eyes, reaches into the glassed-in temperature- and humidity-controlled charcuterie case and slices off a piece of a three-month-aged pepper salami, perfectly tangy and sweet. Menashe has been working on charcuterie for six years, starting with stages at butcher shops and honing his skills at Napa Valley charcuterie shop The Fatted Calf. “When I was staging there, I was butchering as fast as I could, so I would have time to force them to teach me how to make the cured meats. If you didn’t have time, they wouldn’t let you do it. Consistency was really what I learned there. How to make an environment that’s controlled—humidity, temperature. How you make quicker and slower fermentation.” He’s done well.
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ALMINE RECH

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An uncompromising commitment to a radical vision is leading gallerist Almine Rech’s favorite quality in an artist. “Radicalism has always been the narrative for me,” she says, speaking on the phone from London. “I love it when artists take big risks and don’t feel the need to justify them, despite any notions of good taste or bad taste. They just go for something radical, and they make zero compromises.” One could say that Rech herself, one of the few female gallerists in Paris, is likewise a woman of zero compromise. There is little room in Rech’s heart for artists who bend to please the fickle whims of the art-buying public. “It’s a special feeling you get when you are in front of someone who is not going to try to please people. Someone who is going to impose their vision. That’s when I feel confidence. They don’t even need to say it. You just feel it.”

The daughter of famed French fashion designer Georges Rech (founder of one of France’s first ready-to-wear companies) and the wife of Picasso heir Bernard Ruiz-Picasso, Rech fell in love with art as a child, painting alongside her father on the week- ends. “He would paint landscapes, with no intention of showing his work to anyone except his kids and my mother. It was really for pure pleasure.” For Rech, it was all about people, and she painted many portraits of her mother and two younger sisters. Family friends began commissioning her to make portraits of them too, in her trademark Hockney-esque style. On weekends she would stroll around the museums of Paris, eyes wide. “My parents were always bringing us to the Jardin des Tuileries at the Louvre, and they have the most beautiful Impressionist paint- ings at the Musée de l’Orangerie there. We used to live close to the Musée Marmottan near the Bois de Boulogne, dedicated to Monet. All my childish first discoveries about great paintings happened in Paris.”

Art is in her blood on both sides: Her great-grandfather, Mai Trung-Cat, the Regent of Vietnam, was a renowned calligrapher at the beginning of the 20th century, and you can still see his work in the region of Haiphong in northern Vietnam, where the ancestral home is. Her grandfather’s brother was Mai-Trung Thu, another renowned painter. So it came as no surprise to anyone when she decided to attend art school, at ESAG Penninghen in Paris, but within just a year, she realized that the artist’s life was not for her after all. “I very quickly noticed how lonely it is to create. To be in your studio, alone, all the time. What a life. Truly, I don’t believe good artists decide to become artists. They have no other choice. Because it is not an easy life.” Instead she turned her focus to cinema. After three years studying French and German film, she pursued art history at l’Ecole de Louvre, and then a brief stint working at Drouot auction house. By then, her extensive formal education was complete. Rech was ready to explore her life’s calling—the discovery and distribution of great art.

She opened her first gallery, Galerie Froment-Putman, in rue Charlot in the Marais, with Cyrille Putman, son of design legend Andrée Putman, who would later become her husband. Oddly enough, despite her early love for figurativism, she found herself most strongly drawn to minimalist and conceptualist artists. “I was most attracted to very radical artworks. Perhaps because I had had my fill of painting. When I discovered Donald Judd, John McCracken and James Turrell, it was such an aesthetic shock— this radicalism of perception. I had already been interested in the way that minimalism and Bauhaus had influenced theater and film. And when I discovered its application to art, it was like falling in love. So powerful.”

For the gallery’s inaugural show, in November 1989, she placed the work of visionary California light artist James Turrell in a commercial gallery setting in Europe for the first time. She had seen his work at an exhibition at a museum in Nîmes and spoken with Turrell, telling him her plans to open a gallery in Paris. So full of enthusiasm was she, Turrell agreed to show his work with her, even though at that point there had been no major light-based artworks shown in European galleries (although there had been a few museum exhibits). Rech hoped to create, or tap into, a completely unknown market. She hired an architect to prepare the space based on the few images and notes given over the phone by Turrell. Shortly before the opening, Turrell himself came and looked over the gallery. He said it was perfect, and Rech felt confident ahead of the opening. “It wasn’t until I had an interview with a small radio channel that I started to feel worried. They asked me, ‘Aren’t you afraid about going bankrupt after this show?’ and I said, ‘Oh my God. I hope not.’ ” She and Putman went ahead and launched their gallery with one piece by James Turrell and hoped that a buyer would share their brave vision. “In those days, people liked art that you could hang on walls,” she points out. Luckily, there was a buyer—the Centro Televizo Mexico’s museum bought the Turrell piece, its director, Bob Littman, traveling all the way to Paris to buy it. “That was my very first sale,” she reminisces. “And it taught me everything I needed to know about the art world.”

Nearly 25 years later, Turrell is still represented by Rech in Europe. And the gallery has held important solo shows by such luminaries as McCracken, Richard Prince, Jeff Koons and Liu Wei. Rech now has three more galleries, including a new space in Paris and one in Brussels, where she also lives—in a three- story brick villa designed in the ’30s by Adrien Blomme, which, naturally, boasts many Picassos, as well as Martin Szekely coffee tables, a James Turrell light piece, an Ed Ruscha word painting from 1974 (in which “actress” is spelled out on moiré silk) and a half-ton Jeff Koons sculpture of inflatable pool toys in trash cans. When we speak she is in London, where she has just opened her latest space upstairs from one of the most esteemed bespoke tailors on Savile Row, Huntsman. “The owner is a major collector too,” says Rech. “It’s perfect.”

She is still possessed by the same passion for radicalism that motivated her in the first place. And she still admires those artists, both young and established, who are brave enough to remain uncompromising. Like London-based Ayan Farah, whose work was presented by the Almine Rech Gallery in Brussels in October 2014. The exhibition, titled Notes on Running Water, included “Eldfell” (2011), a piece made from the polyester–cotton lining of a sleeping bag buried for six months at the foot of the Icelandic volcano that gives the work its title, and “Eylon” (2014), a work stained by mud and clay from the Dead Sea. Before that, Almine Rech Gallery exhibited photos by Saint Laurent designer Hedi Slimane. Her remit, while extending beyond typically conceptual art, still remains firmly entrenched in the cutting edge.
“Artists have changed, in that they are acutely more aware of the market and are therefore perhaps more cautious than they used to be,” she says. But those artists are not interesting to her. “Art that is purely commercial will not remain in art history,” she explains. “It’s maintaining their conviction that is the most difficult thing. Those are the ones that will remain.”

 

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ELOÍSA MATURÉN

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Eva, the woman Eloísa Maturén plays in Fina Torres’ 2014 film Liz in September, wanders into a community of fierce women. Eva has just lost her son to cancer and left her cheating husband. When her car breaks down, the women, most of them lesbians, take her in. Liz, a strong and striking woman who has not yet admitted to herself or her friends that the cancer she has is deadly, takes it upon herself to seduce Eva. It was all shot in Venezuela in 2012 and 2013, beachside in idyllic Maracay, west of Caracas.

It was 35-year old Maturén’s first film role, a new phase in a career that has taken her from the stage to background and then, unexpectedly, back onto the stage.
Maturén trained as a dancer. Seven years studying at La Escuela Ballet Artein Caracas led to a position in the National Ballet Teresa Carreño Theater. She danced with the company for 10 years, watching as older dancers aged out of their craft. “What is cruel for the ballet world,” she says now, “is that when a dancer is mature enough to bring actual life experience into the craft, she is too old to dance.” Some of the older dancers she knew became choreographers, but she worried that wasn’t the right career path for her.

While still dancing, she began taking night classes in journalism at Universidad Central de Venezuela. She spent the early 2000s working in journalism, writing for El Nacional and hosting radio shows. This is what she was doing when she met Gustavo Dudamel, not yet the iconic, wild-haired conductor of the L.A. Philharmonic he is now but already artistic director of the Orquesta Sinfónica Simón Bolívar, the youth orchestra that famously gave him his early musical training.

The orchestra played at their wedding, and, a few years later, one of Maturén’s first forays into film production would be the documentary Dudamel: Let the Children Play. It gives a backstage look at the rise of a conductor—Dudamel had just signed his first contract with the L.A. Phil—but also a glimpse into the thoughts and perspectives of children participating in Venezuela’s El Sistema music program.

“It not only changes the life of kids who actually play,” Maturén says of El Sistema,“but it also changes their environment, the sensibility they have toward life.” This knowledge and belief in the effect art can have led her to create an arts festival in Caracas in 2008. Called Vive la Danza Festival, the multimedia event includes new work commissioned by emerging choreographers and happens out in the city. “We do everything on the streets,” she says.

Maturén had just finished the festival’s third edition when she met film director Torres at a dinner party in Caracas. She was describing the festival to Torres, who has been making films about strong, self-searching women since the 1980s, when Torres began discussing her own newest project. The director had been struggling to find an actress to play one of the leads.

“Don’t worry. Here, you have a lot of talent,” Maturén told her, and started suggesting various names. Torres left the party soon after but returned in a matter of minutes. “You know what,” she told Maturén.“You are perfect for the role.”

“Are you crazy?” Maturén recalls thinking. But she read the script and within a week she had the role. “The artistic side of me had been on hold,” she says. But it came back into play as soon as she began working with the all female cast and crew. “It was like school,” she says. “I was like a sponge.” The character she plays, Eva, is a sponge too, encountering a new, different world and realizing her life could take paths she hadn’t imagined.

Maturén, who has a 4-year-old son named Martín with Dudamel, had been traveling back and forth from Caracas to Los Angeles for the past few years. She and Martín moved to Los Angeles permanently at the end of 2014, primarily so she could take classes from Stella Adler Method experts Milton Justice and Gordon Hunt in Hollywood. She’s enamored with the craft.

“Acting is telling a lie and making it sound like the truth. And in order for you to make a lie sound true, you have to do so much work,” she says. “You have to—if it’s possible—understand human nature. And the first subject you have is yourself.”

 

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