WASHINGTON POST
"I liked when he was shaking his butt," said Jayshauna Riley, 9, among the hundreds of local elementary school students watching the performance at Flint's Whiting theater. "I never saw dancing like that before."
Hassan and other members of Ilays Somali Multicultural Artists are refugees from Mogadishu who reunited in the United States a year ago and recently toured the Midwest through a program called Midwest World Fest.
The program's mission is to foster interaction between international artists and residents of small Midwestern cities and towns that are not on the touring circuit, such as Flint, a hardscrabble city of 120,000 where 1.5 percent of residents are foreign-born.
"Isolation is us," said Taylor Barnes, director of the Arts Center, which hosted World Fest artists in Jamestown, N.D., population 15,000. The program, run by the nonprofit Arts Midwest, places artists for weeklong residencies that include performances along with informal interaction and collaboration.
To reach people outside the concert-going set, the artists perform and do workshops in unconventional locations, such as prisons, factories, banks, schools for the disabled, hospitals and city halls.
In Jamestown, a bamboo-flute player from Japan's Bamboo Orchestra jammed with local American Indian flutist Keith Bear, who gave the visiting artist a flute he had made.
In Fairmont, Minn., a bashful Latino boy in an otherwise all-white class gained new respect from his peers by translating for the Son Jarocho-style band Chuchumbe, visiting from Mexico.
In Portland, Ind., Anita Singleton-Prather and the Gullah Kinfolk had local church choirs singing ebullient spirituals from the Gullah culture, a Creole society that developed during slavery on South Carolina's Sea Islands and still exists today.
Arts Midwest program director Ken Carlson said the Gullah songs, in which singers simulate drums and other instruments, were "quite different" for the Indiana congregations. "Here in the Midwest, a lot of us are from a rather reserved Western European heritage," he said.
Unexpected challenges sometimes arise. In Fairmont, residents donated their humidifiers to heal the Bamboo Orchestra's instruments, which were cracking in the dry winter air.
The Israeli group Darma attracted a flock of police cars after ignoring an officer trying to pull them over. "In Israel, they said, you don't pull over when lights are flashing," said Michael Burgraff, managing director of the Fairmont Opera House. "They finally remembered what to do from things they'd seen in the movies. So here were four guys in a van who didn't speak English well -- the police thought they had a group of terrorists right here in Fairmont."
At the International Academy of Flint, Hassan and his wife, Gobay, wrapped four student volunteers in flowing traditional Somali garb and taught them folkloric dances. Joanna Bird, 14, covered her face in embarrassment as she winced through the dance. But Milton McLaughlin, 14, hammed it up, augmenting the dance's traditional hand movements with his own basketball-shooting pantomime.
Adults at a reception at the home of D.J. Trela, dean of arts and sciences at the University of Michigan at Flint, admitted they Googled Somalia before the Ilays visit. Like the students, they were full of questions about Somali culture and traditions and about prospects for peace in the war-torn Horn of Africa nation.
"There is so much ethnocentrism," said Ilays member Ali Kusow, who works at a recording studio in Minneapolis. "You view other cultures through the lens of your own. But we are teaching people to basically appreciate the similarities and differences of cultures, and to learn about other cultures while teaching your own."
Most of the seven members of Ilays knew each other in Mogadishu. After leaving the country in the mid-1990s, they ended up in the United States, most of them in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, where there is a large community of Somali expats. A year ago, singer Adar Kahin and Said Ahmed, a playwright and poet who serves as the group's director, decided to reunite Somali performers into an ensemble that could spread their music and traditions to a wider audience.
"People suffered so much from the civil war, we lost the structure of our country and all our property," Ahmed said. "But singing and performing together keeps us in touch and takes away some of our pain."
Kahin, 43, tracked down Osman Hassan by phone in Boston, where he is a parking attendant. In Mogadishu, they were members of the group Waberi, which Kahin described as the "top group" in the country. "Someone had told me he came to America," she said. "When I found him, we were crying. He is like my brother."
Arts Midwest pays for transportation, visas, marketing and daily stipends for the international artists, and local host organizations such as the Whiting in Flint and the Fairmont Opera House provide lodging, venues and other support.
Burgraff said Fairmont has not been the same since Midwest World Fest. Membership in the opera's subscription series shot up from less than 300 to 430 after the series. Now the opera house is working to bring other groups from Africa. "French Canadian was
Source: Washington Post, Nov 25, 2006