Thursday, November 09, 2006
By Clayton Hardiman
CHRONICLE STAFF WRITER
If you're one of those people who have a hard time locating Somalia on a map, don't fret.
A slice of Somalia is coming to see you.
Ilays, a group of Somali multicultural artists, arrives in Muskegon today. And for those who know Somalia only through headlines as a site of violence and upheaval, a revelation awaits when Ilays performs for the public on Saturday evening at the Mona Shores Performing Arts Center.
Somalia is a coastal nation on the Horn of wAfrica in eastern Africa. You may have heard of Somalia through world headlines in the 1990s when intermittent fighting in the country claimed the lives of 18 U.S. troops after a helicopter was shot down in Mogadishu, the nation's capital. The event was dramatized in the motion picture "Black Hawk Down."
But if that's the extent of your knowledge of Somalia, then you have a revelation in store. What is revealed in the work of Ilays is a flowering of storytelling, music and dance that shows the breadth of artistic expression in Somalia.
That flowering is being discovered by people across the American Midwest as Ilays continues its tour. It is not the kind of cultural expression that communities like Muskegon typically would have the resources to host. But the Midwest World Fest, a community-wide cultural exchange program, makes such visits possible, said Sylvia Kaufman, chairwoman of the Midwest World Fest and one of its founders.
Muskegon was one of 11 Midwestern communities throughout nine Midwestern states to host the Midwest World Fest. "What they're doing is getting the fests to underserved communities," Kaufman said. "The bigger communities already have all of this."
Even in larger cities, however, it can be difficult to find Somali music and dance. Arts Midwest, a program designed to connect people to arts and understanding across boundaries, oversees the Midwest World Fest. When officials went looking for a Somali multicultural arts group to tour Muskegon and other cities in the Midwest, they couldn't find one. So they created Ilsays.
The interest grew out of the presence of a growing Somali community in Minneapolis, which is also the site of Arts Midwest's headquarters. "We were interested in finding a Somali ensemble that could represent traditional as well as contemporary Somali culture," said Ken Carlson, senior program director of Arts Midwest.
What they found were a number of individual artists, instead. They contacted Said Ahmad, a Somali writer and poet whom Carlson described as "highly celebrated."
Through Carlson's contacts, the ensemble came together.
The Muskegon area will interact with Ilays through more than just the Saturday night public concert.
"Our musicians do not simply perform one evening and leave," Kaufman said. "Our ensembles conduct residences, where they perform at schools and at community events. They conduct workshops about their culture, their language and their history."
Source: Muskegon Chronicle, Nov 9, 2006