The World Music and Dance Festival will combine a week’s worth of workshops and a concert to promote diversity on campus.
The World Music and Dance Festival will teach students traditional dance and music from countries around the globe in a weeklong workshop series dedicated to diversity.
From Monday to Friday, hands-on instruction and lectures will introduce students, faculty and staff to a global view of music and dance. The week’s activities will culminate in a concert featuring performances by guest artists and workshop attendees. The concert will take place in Templeton-Blackburn Alumni Memorial Auditorium at 7:30 p.m. on Friday. The show is free to Ohio University students, and general admission is $12.
A workshop featuring Caribbean dance, a steel drum workshop, “Brazilian samba drumming” and “African Drumming and Dance” will be led by guest artists, and a lecture on the music of Uzbekistan will be presented. The workshops and lectures will be held in various locations throughout the week.
OU student music groups along with the workshop instructors will be featured. New Chords on the Block, OU Percussion Club and the OU World Music and Dance Ensembles will join the final concert.
The festival is the directorial domain of Zelma Badu-Younge, a professor of dance, and Paschal Yao Younge, a professor of music. Since its creation six years ago, the festival has allow the two to bring students a way to experience diverse cultures.
“(It is) a way of having what we did in the classroom come alive,” Badu-Younge said.
Showing pictures and describing a culture or an art form can be educational, but Badu-Younge said seeing it in person and experiencing it leads to a deeper understanding.
“(Students can) carry (the experience) for the rest of their lives,” she said.
The two professors have traveled the world. As they meet artists along the way, they recruit and bring them as guests to OU. Many of those artists will be featured as the workshop teachers.
Abbos Kosimov, an internationally recognized instrumentalist, recently has been recognized as a “master of doyra,” a ceremonial percussion instrument of Uzbekistan. Kosimov will share his knowledge of Uzbek music and culture in two lectures during the week.
Another guest artist, BaKari Ifasegun Lindsay, will lead the Caribbean dance workshop. Lindsay is a co-founder and director of the Collective of Black Artists, a company that portrays Africanist social themes through dance.
In the workshops, students will get hands-on experience with the samba dance of Brazil, the steel drums of Trinidad and a number of other artforms. Attendees who learn the skills quickly will even have a chance to be a part of the performance at the end of the week.
In the past, the event has uncovered a number of artists in the student body — sometimes putting students on a stage for the first time in their lives, Badu-Younge said.
By providing international students an opportunity to engage with the music and dance of their home countries, Badu-Younge said the students can feel more welcome.
“(We) have students coming from several countries, backgrounds. It is important to make students feel (they) belong,” she said. “One way is to bring the culture of these students to Athens.”
Another goal is to open the students’ sometimes “narrow-minded view of the world,” Younge said. The workshops will not only instill an appreciation but also an understanding, Badu-Younge added.
“(Understanding culture is) not just about eating Chinese food,” Younge said.
He said people must seek out different aspects of culture, such as music and dance, to get a complete understanding.
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The event uses that “grounded and holistic” approach, Badu-Younge added.
“This is our lives,” Younge said. “Our goal is to educate.”
In the end, both said they believe the arts unite people.
“It’s not just putting on a show,” Badu-Younge said. “(We are inspired) to create opportunity for students to learn about the world.”
@graceoliviahill
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