🆓 FREE!
An afternoon of outdoor performances, creativity, dancing, and revelry en plein air!
Featuring:
🎶 Honk N’ Groove - Kids Dance Class with Natalia
🎶Bloco Honk - Kids Drumming Class with Angela
💃 Peniel Guerrier - Hatian Dance and Drum Class
🎶 Tarab Ensemble ft. Zafer Tawil
🎺 HONK Family Band
🎶 Pressure Point Brass Band
🎶 Mambembé NY
Plus:
🎪 Our Craftivation Station!
🖨️ Live screenprinting with Darkin Brown
About the Bands
Honk N’ Groove
Natalia Muñoz is a Colombian, Brooklyn-based Multidisciplinary Artist and Educator, Theatre Practitioner, Movement Facilitator, and Artivist. As a multidisciplinary artist, she uses the transformative power of both the performing arts and visual arts to unlock the unique creative potential of young people, guiding them to develop their creative competencies, connect collectively, and find their personal voices to become leaders within their communities. Natalia is deeply passionate about using the power of the arts to transform oppression into a source of power, healing, and creative awareness.
Bloco Honk
Angela Rey is a percussionist, conductor, and educator with 14 years of teaching experience. Every year she travels to Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, to study with master percussionists from Timbalada, Olodum, Ilê Aiyê, Dida, Yaya Muxima, Agbelas, and more. She teaches primarily in English, with experience leading lessons in Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese. In New York, she is a conductor and percussionist with Mambembé NYC, serves as a Brazilian percussionist at Mark Morris, and is an active member of the city's Brazilian percussion and dance community.
Angela is the founder of Rey Music & Arts and has built working relationships with the Brazilian music and dance community both nationally and internationally. She also runs a piano studio, is an educational partner of Steinway & Sons, and collaborates with leading performing arts institutions in San Francisco and New York City. Her students have a track record of a 100% pass rate on internationally standardized piano exams.
Her own path began in San Francisco, where she trained as a scholarship student with Alla Gladysheva at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. As a young adult she immersed herself in the city's Cuban and Brazilian music scenes, playing with ensembles in both traditions, before earning her BA in Global Jazz Studies at UCLA under the mentorship of Arturo O'Farrill.
Peniel Guerrier Dance
Peniel Guerrier, teacher, choreographer, performer and founder of Kriye Bode, focuses on the research, preservation, education, promotion and presentation of Haitian culture through music and dance. He began his formal dance training in 1987 under the supervision of Haiti's most prestigious teacher, Herve Maxi. Subsequently, Peniel danced with the National Dance Theater for 8 years and toured all over the world: Venezuela, Paris, Hungary, Japan, Germany, Montreal, Santo-Domingo and the United States. During this time, he also toured with the Bacoulou Dance Company.
Peniel’s vision has different aspects, but the most important is to establish and extend the Haitian folkloric structure and technique. Peniel Guerrier draws on his extensive knowledge of Haitian folkloric dance to create original combinations within the different traditional Haitian rhythms. His dances enhance the energy and flow of traditional forms with beautiful, vivid body shapes. Peniel is highly regarded as a teacher because of his thoroughness, his kindness, and the individual attention he gives to students of all levels. Peniel has been teaching Haitian dance structure for the past 15 years. Currently, he teaches at Djoniba Dance and Drum Center (Peridance) New York, Fit 4 Dance Brooklyn, PMT studio in NYC, and different public schools and universities throughout the New-York area.
Peniel’s dance and teaching experience has provided him with numerous opportunities to work with individuals of varied ages, backgrounds and cultures all over the world. His teaching has included work with children where he was successful in providing them not only with an appreciation of dance, rhythm and an understanding of Haitian culture, but also an introduction to the concepts of teamwork and cooperation.
Tarab Ensemble ft. Zafer Tawil
Zafer Tawil is an accomplished Palestinian musician and a virtuoso on ‘oud, qanun, violin, and Arab percussion. He performs across the U.S. and in the Middle East with such musicians as Sting as well as celebrated world music artists. He was a featured composer and performer in acclaimed director Jonathan Demme’s Oscar-nominated film “Rachel Getting Married” and is composing and performing for Demme’s next film project, Zeitoun. Zafer is continuously exploring the boundaries of Arab music, and often performs collaborative concerts involving classical Indian and Persian music, as well as Jazz fusion. He has been a guest teacher at workshops on Arab music at many institutions and universities across the United States. A native of Jerusalem, he resides in New York City.
https://www.instagram.com/zafertawil/
HONK Family Band
To close our opening night, Indofunk Satish will curate a jam session celebrating the spirit of jazz, New Orleans street bands, and spontaneous collaboration. Bring your instrument, meet some fellow musicians, and jump into the music. Songs will be drawn from the New Orleans brass band repertoire, but all you need is your enthusiasm for improvisation!
Pressure Point Brass Band
With members spanning the musical worlds of klezmer, jazz, Balkan, ska, and more, Pressure Point Brass delivers critical social justice insights with the beauty of woodwind and brass voices, alongside generous helpings of the kinds of fun, offbeat covers that you didn’t know you needed.
IG: @pressurepointbrass
Mambembé NY
A bembé is a party for the Orishas. During a bembé the Orishas are praised, saluted and entreated to join the party through `mounting' one of the priests or priestesses in attendance. This is done through a confluence of the song, rhythm, and movement, all calling to the Orisha in such a way that the Orisha will recognize themselves in the lyrics, rhythms and dances as they have been performed for them for perhaps thousands of years.
The rhythms play an important part of the equation and the drummers practice assiduously for years to be able to play the intricate rhythms correctly. This is important since the drums are actually speaking to the Orishas as the Yoruba language is a tonal one and the drums are tuned in such a way as to play the tones of Yoruba speech. For this reason some rhythms are never played unless it is in religious context as it would offend the Orisha. These rhythms are actually prayers to the deities with each Orisha having its own rhythms associated with them.
