Soul Rhythms Gets Underway Monday!

Soul Rhythms, our intense residency project, begins Monday March 5! For the next seven weeks, artists will be working in each of the five Neighborhood School Centers (so named by the Fitz Center at University of Dayton) sharing culture through the rich resources of artists, neighbors and students combined! Visiting artists will collaborate with local artists and students, devising dance pieces on the theme of migration. Artistic Director, Rodney Veal, will pull those pieces together into a dance concert performance that will showcase all collaborators! This will be the performance called Soul Rhythms.

The residency is about learning, through relationships between people, sharing traditions and culture, collaboration, compromise, action, commitment and art! The work is about celebrating our uniqueness, our commonalities, our beautiful diversity as the collective, greater Dayton community!! We are Dayton! This is our home! And we come from all over the globe!

Cityfolk’s Culture Builds Community program invites you to participate as well, as audience members at the culminating performance April 22. You will witness a community of performers, built from five different working groups: Jazz/African American roots, African American Fraternity Step Dance, Irish step/Clogging/Hip Hop, Turkish folk dance and Mexican foot percussion. Cityfolk welcomes the visiting artists that will work with local artists in each school:

• LaFrae Sci (Fairview School) with Renee McClendon, Sierra Leone and Stivers Jazz Band.
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• Step Afrika (Edison School) with Central State University Steppers
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• Hammerstep (Cleveland School) with Beth Wright and The Corndrinkers
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• Hasan Isakkut (Ruskin School) with Twin Towers Turkish Dance Collaborative
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• Sones de Mexico (Kiser School) with Orgullo Mexicano

Track the process of the residency here on Cityfolk’s blog or through the Culture Builds Community Facebook page. Nearly 100 students will be involved from the Dayton Pubic Schools, including members of the Stivers Jazz Band.