Sharing Stories and Song

Students from Arts in Reach, an organization empowering teenage girls through mentoring and the arts, met the performers of Umalali and the Garifuna Collective prior to their performance at the Loft on January 19. Performing traditional songs from a community that is struggling to maintain its unique language, music, and traditions in the face of globalization, the Garifuna Collective has made it their mission to preserve and share the threatened music of their community.

The two groups enjoyed an evening of cultural exchange, finding common ground around song, dance, food, and family while sharing traditions, stories, and melodies passed down from generation to generation.

With members from Belize, Honduras, and Guatemala, the performers describe their background as one people, sharing a culture, but spread across a region. They demonstrated different rhythms of traditional Garifuna music, and taught the girls how to say “I love you” and sing a traditional song in Garifuna. This tune, often sung while baking bread, led several of the girls to reminisce about their own time spent in the kitchen with family members. The event concluded joyfully, with the girls joining the performers on stage to dance and sing together.

Following the event, Rebecca Romanoski, Program Director for Arts in Reach noted how the artists were able to draw out even the most reluctant participant in her group, sharing, “We had a wonderful time…The musicians were so welcoming and had great intuition when working with our teens.”

This engagement of The Garifuna Collective featuring Umalali was made possible through Southern Exposure: Performing Arts of Latin America, a program of Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts.