Barbea Williams is a dancer/choreographer, director, visual artist, and educator dedicated to sharing dance, theater, and visual cultural traditions from Africa and the African diaspora, including traditional West African, Afro-Brazilian, Afro-Cuban, and Haitian forms. She has directed the Barbea Williams Performing Company (BPC), Arizona’s premier …
Archives for March 2018
Deeper than the Cut: The Dunbar Barber Academy
by Kimi Eisele Tio Harris has been cutting hair—including his own—since he was seven years old. Before that, his father was the household haircutter. “But he always left blotches and bald spots,” Harris says. One day at school, Harris was asked to take his hat off and was so embarrassed about his hair that he came home and said to his father, …
VIDEO: Line Dancing with the Tucson Slide Society
by Kimi Eisele Every Thursday evening, DJ "Mista T," aka Terry Thomas, of the Tucson Slide Society teaches a line dancing class at the Dunbar Pavilion in Tucson. Highly democratic, the class shares choreography for everyone and furthers a tradition of collective dance that evolved in the United States through European immigrant communities and …
Thinking Like a Folklorist: Making Space for the Ancestral
by Debi Chess Mabie If “being a steward” is one of the principal notions of thinking like a folklorist, then the day I walked into the Dunbar Pavilion, I became something of a folklorist. It was as if a GPS was set toward the building and its history. Something deeply familiar to me is embedded in way the Dunbar operates. The word that comes to …
La Doce Barrio Foodways Project Celebration
The public is invited to honor the food traditions along “La Doce” (as locals calls the stretch of 12th Avenue from the I-10 Freeway to Drexel Avenue) on Friday, March 30 with a celebration, including the screening of a mini-documentary, a self-watering container workshop by Tierra Y Libertad Organization, a local tianguis (market), and the release …