Eight-year-old Mir and his family live in the mountains of Afghanistan. It's 2001 and the long-oppressive Taliban regime has been toppled by U.S. and allied forces. Mir and his family have already fled from the Taliban and drought in their village in the North to the caves of Bamiyan. It's here that filmmaker Phil Grabsky [...]
All week, Arts Desk profiles area artists heading to Texas for the South by Southwest Music Conference, March 15-20.
On last year’s exceptional summer mixtape, The Letterman, DMV rapper Phil Adé made his intentions and aesthetics perfectly clear:“I’m the only 21-year-old that raps like he’s 30.”
Adé’s flow is mature and smoky. Catch his guest verses alongside area MCs [...]
The Kennedy Center’s Maximum India Festival opens today with just one performance, a free U. Shrinivas concert from 6 p.m. to 7 p.m. on the Millennium Stage, but over the next 20 days it will feature 73 events involving music, dance, theater, literature, comedy, visual art, cuisine, and film. While the celebration may not include [...]
If food is the new rock, and eco-friendly food is the new punk rock, then this announcement makes perfect sense: The Strokes will headline this year's Sweetlife Festival on April 30. Because, really, the Strokes are closer to "rock" than "punk rock," and sweetgreen—the chain of eateries founded by three Georgetown grads—is closer to this [...]
Not content with simply booking one-off cajun and zydeco events and teaching folks how to spin and strut to those genres, last year Sharon Schiliro and Michael Hart organized the first Dancing by the Bayou Festival at Glen Echo Park. The festival's back this weekend, with the addition of a pre-fest kick-off dance tonight at [...]
You can’t go three feet on the Internet without reading about the death of the book. No one is buying novels anymore. Bookstores will soon be obsolete. In the not so distant future, people will consume all of their content in Twitter-length bursts delivered directly into their cerebellums by nanobots. But if you go offline [...]
Filmmaker Dalia Tapia's debut feature, Silent Shame, premieres at the National Geographic African Diaspora Film Festival Saturday at 12:30pm: It's a well-paced drama with tough subject matter—a man confronts the HIV-related death of his mother, who contracted the disease from his estranged father—that hits all the right notes. It's suspensful, and its characters are authentically [...]
There are ways, it turns out, to travel to ancient South America without owning a time machine. The "MAKIYKUMANTA-Peru: Arts and Cultural Legacy Festival" is a weeklong celebration of traditional Peruvian culture. It includes a variety of activities for time travelers of all ages.
Learn how to dance from Inca Son, take [...]
The 44th annual Smithsonian Folklife Festival came to a close yesterday. As I noted earlier, due to financial reasons, this was the smallest Folklife Fest ever, but it remains a well-curated, exciting event. It could be publicized better, but for those who did attend, there were unique things worth seeing.
I spent much of the final [...]
The birthday weekend of this immigrant-built country includes a number of gigs featuring immigrants and other international visitors. The Smithsonian Folklife Festival continues through Monday and spotlights a number of traditional Mexican groups as well as area-based Asian-Americans. The Mexican groups that may prove most interesting are Chinelos de Atlatlahucan, a costumed Mardi Gras/Indian-type ensemble [...]
