Welcome to niacentre.org Nia Centre for the Arts is a new organization that is creating a Afro-Diasporic arts and cultural space in the City of Toronto.
Come and check out our website and our blog again and again to hear about our progress and what is going on in the arts and cultural scene in Toronto.
Nia Centre for the Arts is envisioned as a centre to support the holistic advancement of Afro-Diasporic people in Toronto, in Canada and one day internationally. We strive to use arts and culture as a means to support young people specifically in achieving their fullest potential.
dance Immersion will host the 24th Annual International Association of Blacks in Dance (IABD) Conference & Festival in Toronto, Canada on January 26-29, 2012.
The conference theme is “Connecting Our Diasporas through Dance”. This four day event brings people together from around the world to be educated and to educate each other around issues that are relevant to dance within the global dance ecology.
The conference is open to professional & aspiring dancers, educators, administrators, managers, youth groups, supporters and lovers of dance. The primary conference site is the Sheraton Centre Hotel in downtown Toronto. The Showcase Presentations will take place at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre, CNE Grounds, Toronto, Canada.
Don’t miss this opportunity to be a part of the 24th Annual IABD Conference & Festival, Connecting Our Diasporas through Dance!
A performance by the Jamaica Youth Theatre as part of our Project Groundings Research Project.
The piece was put together through a project the Jamaica Youth Theatre collaborated with a youth group in Denmark. Using the theme of graffiti, youth created a theatre piece around photographs of graffiti in Kingston. This piece was inspired by a piece of graffiti that said “The Pickney Dem a Dry”
The piece is two fold, although both are not shown here. After the poetry piece, participants would write names of young people they know who have died violently and would hang them on a clothes line, and speak a sentence about who that person was, their age, and how they died.
In this case, members of the community were asked to speak about Shauna-Kay Shaw, a community organizer who was killed violently on Tuesday January 18, 2011 in Woodside.
“the pickney dem a dry, the youths dem a cry, the pickney dem a dry like the clothes pon de line”
“live up live up, we all bleed red”
Performers Andrew Grant Frankie-Lee Franklin Randy McLaren on Drums
This quote is stuck in my head until now. It’s simple yet so meaningful. It was my first time seeing “‘da Kink in my Hair” last Friday and I was blown away by the play’s realness. It doesn’t matter what race you’re from, what’s important is for us to learn to appreciate everyone for each of us is fighting our own battle. And that we have to look beyond what our eyes can see for only the heart can see what’s real. If one thing ends, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the road is done; sometimes we have to risk something in order to keep moving forward. That’s what the play taught me.
We’ll be screening Joel Gordon’s documentary “Embracing Da Kink” today @ Yorkwoods Library, come and check out the behind the scenes action!!
