Serving Boone, Blowing Rock, Banner Elk, and other towns of the North Carolina High Country
Founded 05-05-05
March 27, 2008 issue
Free Entertainment, Food at Diversity Celebration April 8
Story by Anna Oakes
The seventh annual Diversity Celebration will take place on Tuesday, April 8, at the Plemmons Student Union at Appalachian State University, offering plenty of free entertainment, activities, food and knowledge.
The event’s slogan is Discover the World in Our Backyard. It is a multicultural festival of performing arts, craft workshops, educational and experiential exhibits by local and regional presenters and artisans and ethnic foods from local chefs.
“This free event provides a safe environment for learning about others, while encouraging a deeper exploration of differences,” the Diversity Celebration website said.
The festival lasts from 3:00 to 9:00 p.m. and includes Native American and Appalachian folktales, gospel music, old-time mountain music, belly dancing, blues and jazz, clogging, African dance and drums, dance theatre, Celtic music, Serbian and Chilean guitars, a cappella singers, praise dancing, bluegrass, puppets, poetry, jari (Finnish music), salsa lessons and hip hop.
The Diversity Celebration also includes the 12th annual Unity Festival, a community development project founded by Watauga County citizens to raise the level of diversity acceptance in the county. The first Unity Festival was held in 1992 in response to Ku Klux Klan marches in Boone and Blowing Rock. The Diversity Celebration and Unity Festival have been held in conjunction since 2006.
Unity Festival activities will take place in the Blue Ridge Ballroom of the Plemmons Student Union from 3:00 to 9:00 p.m., featuring presentations of arts and cultural traditions from five continents, such as henna painting; a chopsticks lesson; Japanese fans; tribal beading from Africa; Appalachian butter making; spinning and weaving; a French words game; Aboriginal face painting and zero waste cultures.
Last year’s Diversity Celebration, produced by more than 200 volunteers, presented 27 different cultures, 15 art forms, 10 ethnic foods, 18 crafts and family activities, 17 ASU student organizations, 14 local performers and presenters and 12 performers and presenters from off the mountain. It also featured the first People of the Planet Soccer Tournament, to take place again this year.
For more information about the Diversity Celebration, Unity Festival and soccer tournament, call 828-262-2144 or 828-262-6252 or click to www.celebration.appstate.edu.
Want To Go?
Date: Tuesday, April 8
Time: 3:00 to 9:00 p.m.
Location: Plemmons Student Union, ASU
Cost: Free
Ethnomusicologist Deborah Wong To Lecture April 7
Story by Anna Oakes
Prior to the Diversity Celebration, ethnomusicologist Deborah Wong will speak at Belk Library Room 421 on Monday, April 7, at 5:00 p.m. Her talk is titled Looking (at Taiko, at Performance, at Alterity).
Wong indicates that Japanese American drumming suggests a new kind of visual ethnomusicology. She offers a model for visual documentation of taiko that folds the history of the colonial gaze into a mindful practice of looking.
“Contemporary heritage festivals are in many ways multiculturalized versions of the world expositions at the turn of the last century,” she said. “It is impossible to do visual documentation of any kind (still photography, video, etc.) without reenacting colonial and tourist traditions of looking. These acts of looking are unavoidably the way that we see, and are the way that anyone—including taiko players themselves—are forced to ‘see’ taiko. I offer an unbeautiful, uncelebratory visual ethnomusicology that acknowledges the guiding force of colonial surveillance, National Geographic, Kodak, and Benetton in our ability to see, and yet I try to deploy visual technologies to get inside the performance of alterity, from the viewpoint of a participant.”
Wong, who holds degrees in anthropology and music, teaches at the University of California at Riverside and specializes in the music of Asian America and Thailand. For more info, click to www.honors.ucr.edu/prof_of_year03.html.
Want To Go?
Date: Monday, April 7
Time: 5:00 p.m.
Location: Belk Library Room 421, ASU
Cost: Free