Doors at 7:30 pm; Show at 8:00 pm
FREE EVENT as part of the Berkeley World Music Festival
The Saturday night party at Ashkenaz, 1317 San Pablo Avenue, celebrates the Festival’s 15th anniversary with an all-free cross-cultural concert performance of percussion of the feet and body from the world’s great music traditions from Africa, Spain and the Americas.
Followed by a world dance party with DJ Corey Mason of World One Radio!
Featuring:
Yaelisa of Caminos Flamencos, Mussell Rock clogging, Chhandam School of Kathak, Chinyakare Ensemble, and Wang Dang Doodle (Keith Terry and Linda Tillery)
The Chinyakare Ensemble is a family of musicians, dancers and teachers committed to preserving and sharing traditional Zimbabwean culture, and promoting community building and education through music and dance. Chinyakare presents an electrifying performance of the traditional dance, music, and culture of Zimbabwe and Southern Africa. The music (played on mbira, ngoma, marimbas, and chipendani), songs, and dance weave colorful stories that show scenes from everyday life. Chinyakare provides audiences with a glimpse of the beauty, excitement, and spirit of traditional African dance and song.
Mhande [mahn-deh] or Amajukwa [ah-mah-joo-kwah] Mhande or amajukwa is a dance to petition the ancestral spirits for plenty of rain. This usually takes place in October and November, the season of planting and the first rains of the growing season. Accompanied by ngoma, hosho and singing, dancers beat out fast-paced rhythms on the ground with magavhu (leg rattles) attached to their legs.
Chinyambera [chin-yahm-behr-uh] Chinyambera is a hunter’s dance to bring families and communities together to dance, pray, honor, and give thanks and respect to the hunters, animals, and Mother Nature. When the hunters leave home, they do not know how far they will have to go or how long they will have to hunt before they can find something to bring back to their families, but they never give up. The dance reflects strong energies and changes of movements in a fast, slow, explosive and quiet pace that reminds us all that we live in a prayer.
Caminos Flamencos is a not-for-profit organization based in San Francisco, California, dedicated to bringing high quality arts and educational programs to diverse audiences throughout the United States. During the last twelve years,
Artistic Director, Yaelisa has spent extensive periods of time living and performing in Spain, presenting her choreography there and in the U.S. Her choreographies have been commissoned by several modern dance companies, including John Malashock & Company, Rose Polsky and Collage Dance Theatre. In 1995 she was one of 11 choreographers in Spain invited to present a piece at the prestigious Certamen de Coreografia in Madrid, and the only American choreographer chosen among them. In 1996 she returned to the U.S. where she continues to choreograph, develop and train dancers for her company. Creating innovative theatrical presentations has established her as a choreographer of merit; she is the recipient of an Emmy Award for Choreography in 1993 for the PBS program, "Desde Cadiz a Sevilla," and a Choreography Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1996.
The Chhandam School of Kathak Dance, founded and directed by internationally renowned Kathak master Pandit Chitresh Das and home to the Chitresh Das Dance Company, is the largest Indian classical dance institution in North America.
Dang Doodle -
Keith Terry and Linda Tillery
Linda Tillery and the The Cultural Heritage Choir is a Grammy © nominated, percussion driven, vocal ensemble whose mission is to help preserve and share the musical traditions of the African Diaspora with particular emphasis on music of the Southern United States. We connect this music to its West African and Caribbean origins.
Since 1992, Linda Tillery and the Cultural Heritage Choir, have become world renowned for their breathtaking performances and commitment to the authenticity of African-American roots music and music from the African diaspora. Their vocals are soulful and germane, their rhythms are a fusion of southern grit and carribean heat!!
The groups first collaboration with veteran performers Taj Mahal and Eric Bibb titled "Shakin' A Tailfeather," was nominated for a Grammy [1997] and their second collaborative effort "Hippity Hop," was awarded a Parents Choice Award (2000). The group's (2003) recording titled "Say Yo' Business", was nominated for a California Music Award.
If you would like to delve deeply into the diverse resources of African-American roots music and learn the tradition of call and response and the rhythms that drive this music and give it vitality, the Cultural Heritage Choir will teach you how to approach singing with the ears, eyes and the heart. Learn to sing Work Songs, Spirituals, Children's Play Songs, Field Hollers, Moans, Ring Shouts, Plantation Dances and a little bit of Bomba!
The cultural heritage choir is Linda Tillery, Rhonda Benin, Tammi Brown, Bryan Dyer, Zoe Ellis and Javier Navarrette.
- Using any surface for its rhythmic possibilities, Keith Terry "claps his hands, rubs his palms, finger-pops, stamps his feet, brushes his soles, slaps his butt and belly, pops his cheek, whomps his chest, skips and slides, sings and babbles and coughs, building his music out of a surprisingly varied register of sounds and clever rhythmic variations." — Village Voice
Keith Terry is a percussionist/rhythm dancer whose work encompasses a number of allied performance disciplines — music, dance, theater, performance art — which he brings together to create an artistic vision that defies easy categorization. As a self-defined "Body Musician," Keith uses the oldest musical instrument in the world — the human body (his own) — as the basis for exploring, blending and bending traditional and contemporary rhythmic, percussive and movement possibilities.
Trained as a percussionist, Keith was the drummer for the original Jazz Tap Ensemble when he found his drum patterns becoming hand claps and foot steps. Soon percussion became dance, his body his instrument, and his own style of body music emerged. Keith's influences range from Japanese Taiko and Balinese Gamelan to North American rhythm tap and Ethiopian armpit music.
...a crossing of cultures, a blurring of boundaries at its most sensitive, most humanistic, and most magical. — National Public Radio
Keith Terry is probably best known for his solo works, which toured extensively throughout the United States, Europe and Asia — from the Serious Fun Festival at Lincoln Center, the Bumbershoot Festival at the Seattle Opera House, the Colorado Dance Festival, New York's Dance Theater Workshop and Wolftrap to the American Center in Paris, the Bali Arts Festival, the Regency in Hong Kong, the Vienna Dance Festival, the Budapest Spring Festival and the Paradiso van Slag World Drum Festival in Amsterdam.
