A message about getting along, in music and dance
SCHOOL shootings. A spike in gang warfare. Budget cuts in education. Youth in Southern California have it pretty rough these days and Iris Stevenson is weary from it all. As the director of the Crenshaw High School Elite Choir -- an award-winning, globe-trotting youth gospel group -- she recently lost one of her young male singers to a random shooting. “I believe we have to stop the violence,” she says. “And the more we know about one another, the less we’re going to spend time fighting one another.”
With her choir, Stevenson has introduced her Crenshaw kids to the spiritual uplift of gospel music -- a style of music deeply rooted in African American culture and history -- and across the city, other teachers are similarly engaged, introducing teenagers to heritage arts from their own cultural histories. On Saturday, Stevenson’s choir will join with three such groups -- Mariachi Tesoro de San Fernando (Mexican), Halau Keali’i O Nalani (Hawaiian) and Shakti Dance Company (Indian) -- for the inaugural Emerging Voices Concert, which opens the 2008 World Festival of Sacred Music.
In February, the four groups, composed of students from ages 7 to 19, gathered for a retreat at UCLA to share their art forms and rehearse the choreography for this Saturday’s joint performance. It was a day in which the gospel kids, who are also pretty fearsome step dancers, taught the Indian kids, dressed in saffron and cinnamon saris, how to krump. The mariachi kids, toting vihuelas and guitarrones, taught the gospel group a song in Spanish. And they all shared a meal of pineapple chicken, channa dhal, fried chicken and carnitas.
Judy Mitoma, director of both UCLA’s Center for Intercultural Performance as well as the Sacred Music festival, believes that this type of cross-pollination will sow the seeds of mutual respect, an antidote to the recent conflicts spawned by cultural differences in this polyglot metropolis. “The point of our workshop was both to validate what the young people are doing,” she says, “and at the same time to say, let’s notice that you’re not alone.”
Oftentimes, heritage arts practices like those featured in the Emerging Voices show -- the ritual Hawaiian chants or the precision dance steps drawn from South India’s temple traditions -- aren’t visible to the larger community. Drive past your neighborhood dance studio, and you’ll see classes offered in ballet, tap, jazz and maybe hip-hop. But “you will never see a studio for bharata natyam Indian dancing or Hawaiian hula” due to these groups’ limited resources, says Mitoma. “My desire was to bring [heritage arts] to the surface, to say this wonderful stuff is going on . . . we need more of this.”
During the rehearsal, the voices of the students mingled magnificently in the soaring notes of a Swahili song that Stevenson chose for the collaborative finale, a preview of the performance to come on Saturday. Viji Prakash, director of the Shakti Indian Dance Company, offered an ancient Sanskrit prayer for shakti, or peace, at the close of the retreat: “Let there be no enmity between us, teacher and taught.”
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EMERGING VOICES
WHERE: Japanese American Cultural and Community Center, Japan/America Aratani Theater, 244 S. San Pedro St., Suite 505, L.A.
WHEN: 8 p.m. Sat.
PRICE: $20
INFO: (310) 825-0507; festivalofsacredmusic.org/ voices.html
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