Past Projects: Half the Sky Festival
Brooklyn Arts Council welcomes you to Half the Sky Festival, an exploration of gender and diaspora in Brooklyn women's traditional performance. The festival encompasses six weeks of concerts, panels and workshops featuring music, dance, narrative, verbal arts, urban performance and ritual traditions. The old Chinese proverb "women hold up half the sky" is a stepping off point for recognizing that despite the 50% statistic alluded to in the phrase, women's traditional performances are still often segregated and domesticated. In Brooklyn, the effects of diaspora have altered both the practice and meaning of some women's traditions.
Featured in this video is Tamara Chernyakhovsky, a performer of traditional Ukrainian song and dance. Here, she shares a traditional Ukrainian women's wedding cry sung by a bridge before her marriage. Several important issues about gender and culture addressed in Half the Sky Festival are raised in Chernyakhovsky's recitation and explanation of the lyrics to this song. You may see Tamara Chernyakhovsky perform in Half the Sky Festival's 'Folk Feet Females' event on May 12, 7:30-9:30pm, and in 'Women's Rites & Rituals: The Art of Transformation' on June 3, 2:30-5pm.
Half the Sky Festival provides a unique opportunity to expand our concept of women's traditional performances in diaspora. It looks to the past and the future in celebrating and questioning what it means to be a woman performing culture. In Brooklyn, half the sky is filled with amazing women traditional artists we'd like you to know.