Hands Across the Harbor

Hop on the ferry and meet us in Snug Harbor for performances and interactive learning with artists from Brooklyn and Staten Island at the Noble Maritime Collection at the Snug Harbor Cultural Center. Staten Island artists include Gayle Heyward singing African American spirituals, Bob Wright singing Staten Island harbortown songs, Seetha Wickramasuriya performing Sri Lankan kavi poems, Eva Yawo telling Liberian tale about fish, National Women’s Dance Troupe of Sri Lanka performing a narrative water dance and others. Brooklyn artists include Gurdeep Kaur singing Punjabi songs about water-drinking etiquette, Hafida Torres telling Moroccan tales, Vongku Pak bringing Korean water songs and more. Plus, you’ll hear real-life stories drawn from the working waterfront in a story circle with Lenny Speregen, Brian Deforest, Samir Farag, and other pilots, divers, dry dock workers and salt extractors. Come early at 1:30pm and enjoy a brief tour of the Noble Maritime Collection with Nick Dowen.

Presented by BAC in partnership with Staten Island Arts (formerly COAHSI).

THIS EVENT IS PRESENTED AS PART OF:

Harborlore Festival
Where the River Meets the Sea in Brooklyn’s Folk Imagination
Dance, Music and Storytelling 

May 10 – June 15, 2013

It’s no secret that Brooklyn is surrounded by over 50 miles of water from Greenpoint to Canarsie, and is also home to thousands of immigrants hailing from coastal locales across the globe—Jamaica, Bangladesh, Italy, Guyana, Egypt—where water is omnipresent. These immigrants, especially the artists among them, have brought cultural traditions to Brooklyn that capture the beauty, meaning and vulnerability of living at water’s edge.  For Harborlore Festival, BAC presents a series of free concerts, panel discussions and performing arts events exploring the role of water in the artistic traditions of Brooklyn’s diverse immigrant and diaspora communities. In post-Sandy New York, Harborlore Festival signals the importance of learning new respect and reverence for the power of water.

SPONSORS

Harborlore is sponsored by TD Bank.

BAC Folk Arts is sponsored by Con Edison.

Major support for Harborlore is provided by public funds from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature, and from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the New York City Council. Additional support is provided by New York Council for the Humanities. 

Promotional Partner: Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance. Media partner: WNYC Radio.