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2007's Festival Workshops:
BIRDS was honored to present the following Workshops on Saturday, September 29th of last year.
Click Here to see the 2007 At-A-Glance Schedule for Saturday.
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Noon - 1:30 > Lisa Zahiya :
Exploring Middle Eastern Rhythms for Dancers
Lisa Zahiya began the study of bellydance in 1999, and immediately fell in love with the dance, its history, and the large and diverse bellydance community. Previously living in Baltimore, Lisa Zahiya studied intensively with master teacher Piper Hunt, performing as a soloist and troupe member in the Daughters of Rhea Dance Ensemble. She also has extensively studied Turkish Romani, Greek Chiftitelli, and Turkish Oriental with teachers such as Artemis Mourat. As a founder of Baltimore's first Tribal Improv Group, Shivani Tribal, she worked to spread the culture of Tribal style bellydance in the Baltimore area. Shivani performed at numerous events, including the opening of the movie, American Bellydancer, and as the opening act for the well-known fusion band Oojami.
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12:30 - 2pm > Jaqui MacMillan : Drum For Joy!
Jaqui MacMillan found her passion for African drumming in the early 1980’s. She has since studied with many Masters, including Babatunde Olatunji, Mamady Keita, Sam Turner and at the Tam Tam Mandingue School in Washington, DC. Having performed and recorded with some of the top names in the business, she began sharing her joy of drumming with others by teaching classes and facilitating community drum circles. Jaqui has taught privately and given workshops around the country for over fifteen years through her program, “Drum For Joy!”. In 1999 and 2001, she attended the Drum Circle Facilitators Playshop and the Drum Facilitators Mentor Training in Hawaii with Arthur Hull. Jaqui has facilitated drum circles for corporate team building events, conferences, elementary and high schools, hospitals, programs for “at risk” children, juvenile detention centers and programs for homeless and battered women. She is a founding board member of the Drum Circle Facilitators Guild (DCFG), a non-profit organization dedicated to professionalism in the field of drum circle facilitation. The Washington Area Music Association, (WAMA), awarded Jaqui the “World Music Instrumentalist Award” every year from 1995 through 2002 and she was featured in the Women Drummers 2000 issue of DRUM! Magazine. As an endorsee of Mountain Rythym Percussion, Jaqui represented the company as a guest facilitator at the 2004 Summer NAMM in Nashville, TN and at the 2005 Percussive Arts Society International Conference, (PASIC), in Ohio. She is currently working on a book about women drummers and is creating a drum program for children, which includes her own line of drums and percussion instruments.
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2 - 3:30 > Sera : Bellydance, East Coast Tribal
Learn some funky bellydance combinations and techniques for dancing to electronic music. We will play with Layering, pop n'locks, bold movements, and subtle suggestions, modern tribal fusion style.
Sera is a performer/choreographer/instructor of Bellydance from NYC. The director of two dance troupes, Solstice, and the Solstice Project, Sera has created a best-selling bellydance video: East Coast Tribal, produced by World Dance New York. Presenting bellydance as funky, fierce, and fresh, arising from music/dance influences of the east coast (which may or may not coincide with what is happening out west). Sera works in collaboration with musicians of Freek Factory, a collective of cutting edge artists who fuel her choreographies. Performing with the live band, The Rhythm Shamans, Sera uses dance as a form of communication and empowerment. In 2005, she was invited to India to teach dance as a means of healing to young women who had been rescued from sexual abuse. This experience opened Sera to further discovery of dance as a medium for spiritual manifestation. Sera is a former core member of 3 nationally respected Troupes: Bellyqueen, Raqs Sahara, and The Silk Road Dance Company, a founding member of DC Tribal, and Transcendance Tribal, and Raqs Caravan West. A former student of many, but with most respect to Rachel Brookmire of Sahara Dance in DC. -
2:30 - 4 > Raquy : Dumbek - All Levels
Raquy Danziger is one of the most popular performers, teachers and composers of Middle Eastern Drumming today. Audiences worldwide are not only surprised by this young woman from America, but captivated by her virtuosity, profound musicality and the passion she brings to performances. Her varied repertoire includes traditional Middle Eastern music as well as her own compositions.
For the past few years, Raquy has been going to Egypt to teach and perform, where she has collaborated with some of the most famous musicians, including Said El-Artist and Hamish Henkish, she has appeared on regional TV including Al-Jazeera Channel and National Egyptian Television and was interviewed by numerous magazines.
A classically trained pianist, Raquy first discovered hand drumming during her travels in Varanase, India where she immersed herself in the study of Indian rhythmic cycles. Later, in Israel, Raquy was drawn to the dumbek (otherwise known as tabla) and the groove of Middle Eastern music.
In the last few years, Raquy has found her own voice as a soloist, group leader and composer. She writes compositions for ensembles comprised of her students as well as master players from the Middle East. She also formed Raquy and the Cavemen, a group in which she also plays the Iranian kemenche, a rare and exotic bowed instrument.
Raquy's infectious enthusiasm for Middle Eastern music has made her one of the most sought after teachers of Middle Eastern drumming in NYC. An inspiration to scores of students locally and hundreds more at drumming camps and retreats around the country, Raquy is single–handedly responsible for the wave of "Dumbek Fever" sweeping the metropolitan area.
Raquy has released a Dumbek Instructional Kit - "Dumbek Fever" - which includes a book, a DVD and a CD that's selling all over the world. She also released 4 albums: "Naked" (2007), "Jordan" (2005), "Dust" (2003) and "Masmudi" (2001). "Dust" has reached the top 20 on the CMJ world chart and "Jordan" debuted at the top 30. -
4 - 5:30 > Mahiri-Fadjimba Keita : Djembe Dounoun Ensemble
Mahiri-Fadjimba Keita has been drumming for over 2 decades. He was a lead drummer at the age of 8 in Trenton, NJ. Mahiri participated in his first international tour at 14 years old, while performing with the Maimouna Keita School of West African Dance Children’s and Adult Company (NY) at the Sorano Theater in Dakar, Senegal. Mahiri continues to commit his life to studying Mandingue drumming extensively with master musicians and historians of Mandingue and other West African traditions, including Mamady Keita (Guinea), Famoudou Konate (Guinea), Fadouba Oulare (Guinea), and Djimo Kouyate (deceased-Senegal). He has toured internationally and nationally as a lead drummer with several professional performing companies, including Mamady Keita’s production tour “Sewakan”, Memory of African Culture Performing Company and Wo’se African Dance Theatre. As a graduate of Tam Tam Mandingue (TTM), a school of percussion founded by Mamady Keita, Mahiri was their first appointed instructor in the US.
4:30 - 6pm > David Kuckhermann : Frame Drum and Rik
David is a pioneer in the field of hand- and fingerdrumming. After studying with teachers such as Glen Velez, Behnam Samani, Ramesh Shotham and Ustad Fayaz Khan he created his personal style, incorporating techniques and rhythms from the handdrumming traditions of Iran, India, Egypt, Europe, Turkey and Africa.
David has worked with Omar Faruk Tekbilek, Dead Can Dance, Levent, the medieval music ensemble Cordatum and in contemporary music together with Helmut Bieler-Wendt and the Taner Akyol Trio. David has toured in Spain, the Netherlands, Germany, Greece, Italy, France, Poland, Estonia, Ireland and the USA. In 2006 he released the first two DVDs of series of instructional DVDs on hand- and fingerdrumming.
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6pm - 7:30 > Brad Sidwell - Bulgarian Drumming
Introduction to Balkan Music
For the BIRDS festival, Brad will give an introduction to odd-meter Balkan rhythms, using Macedonian clarinet/darbuka music as examples.
Bio: Brad Sidwell has been involved in Balkan music since the mid 70s. He began as a dancer and was a member of Balkanski Igre, a performing group based at the U of Chicago. Later he began playing darbuka and, as a potter at the time, began making darbukas by hand.
In the Washington, DC area, Brad played with a Balkan brass band for 18 years. He was the only non-Greek member of a Greek band for almost a decade, playing for Greek weddings, Christenings and Church festivals. He has played Romani (gypsy) music from Macedonia, Serbia, Bulgaria, and more recently, Turkey. Over the past several years, Brad has traveled to Turkey and made field recordings of Romani darbuka players.
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