Dance, Music, Storytelling: Where the River Meets the Sea in Brooklyn's Folk Imagination

Brooklyn Arts Council's Harborlore Festival was a series of 12 free dance, music and storytelling events throughout Brooklyn exploring the role of water in the artistic traditions of the borough’s diverse immigrant and diaspora communities in a post-Sandy world.

Harborlore Festival featured folk arts such as tashlich, a Rosh Hashanah (New Year) rite of renewal that in Brooklyn is performed at the East River (among other places) by observant Jews; the symbolic  boats paraded life-size at Scandinavian and Italian festivals in Bay Ridge and Williamsburg; the baptismal spirituals such as “Dip Them Leeward” sung in the African-Caribbean churches of East Flatbush; songs and chants sung in praise of water deities, such as the African-Brazilian mother of the ocean, Yemaja, a fishing feast dance called hukilau from Hawaii and more.

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. In post-Sandy New York, Harborlore Festival signals the importance of learning new respect and reverence for the power of water. We are excited to work with an amazing array of folk artists and partner organizations for Harborlore Festival.