Welcoming the World's Rhythms

When I first moved to Dayton from Los Angeles, I had culture shock, or maybe multiculture shock. I missed the completely unmelted melting pot of LA, where my son's junior high had to send out family communications in more than 100 languages and dialects, and music and food and arts and lifestyles reflected the world's diversity not in a once-a-year festival but in daily exposure. Dayton seemed to pale, literally, in comparison.

Both my knowledge of Dayton's deeper historic diversities and the region's real diversification have grown phenomenally in the last 16 years, and both of those developments delight me. The more I get to know the history and living presence of Dayton's African American, Appalachian, Middle Eastern, Puerto Rican, and Eastern European communities, the more I appreciate the subtleties of what at first seemed to be a monochromatic cityscape. And the more that diversity grows, with more recent arrivals of African, Russian, and Turkish, South Asian, Mexican, Caribbean, Filipino, and Latin American groups, among others, the more at home I feel. I'm proud as punch that Dayton, bucking the current isolationist trend in many other US cities, has put out the public welcome mat to immigrants. (See the website for Welcome Dayton.)

Yesterday afternoon, I sat in the cavernous auditorium of the Dayton Masonic Temple and experienced the power of cultural fusion to lift the human spirit and blast asunder all the boundaries and border fences our small minds can invent. Soul Rhythms, the culminating celebration of CityFolk's 8-week Culture Builds Community education outreach initiative, brought together internationally known artists representing African American, Mexican, Turkish, Celtic, and Appalachian cultures, local artists working in the same traditions, and young people from 5 Dayton Public Schools. Through music, song, dance, stepping, and spoken word, all focusing on percussive rhythms and the theme of migration, these folks rocked our world for 90 minutes of unrelenting joy, tears, and astonishment.

You had to be there--and my only regret is that more people weren't. The audience was largely composed of the kids' families, which was terrific, because you heard spontaneous shouts of personalized approval (and not a few Amen!s and Preach it!s) throughout, but it would have been even better to have more of populace be reminded in such an amazing way that culture does indeed build community. (To be fair, it wasn't lack of interest or scant promotion that kept a larger audience away, but the downside of one of the other reasons I'm in Dayton On Purpose: There are just a whole lot of things to do on a Sunday afternoon, and we haven't learned bilocation yet.)

Nothing I try to describe can convey why I think my ticket purchase was the best $12 I ever spent, and if I single out individual artists or kids to praise I'd be shortchanging the seamless excellence of it all. So I'll just send a big MWAAH to CityFolk (itself a reason to be in Dayton) and all involved. And I'll put out a couple of special pleas to folks who live in the Dayton area:

• Get on board the Welcome wagon. No matter who we are, we're better for being part of a community as wide as the world.
• If you've never sampled what CityFolk has on offer (which includes the annual folk and traditional music and arts festival that draws the most diverse and happy crowd I've ever seen in one place), don't waste any more time.
• Stay informed about CityFolk's efforts to keep the kids who've participated in Culture Builds Community programs involved in the arts all year long, and support those efforts as generously as you can. School budget cuts have starved our hungriest kids of the food for the soul that participation in the arts supplies, and that famine has tragic consequences. On the upside, it doesn't take much--8 weeks on a wing and a prayer will do it--to transform a child's life utterly, sometimes in literally lifesaving ways.

If you don't live in Dayton, think about migrating. Seriously, I lived most of my life in one of the most diverse cities on the planet, and I had to come to Dayton to find out the truth: Every culture has its unique percussive rhythms, but underneath it all it's just one and the same. It's the beat of the human heart. Preach it! Amen!

Disclaimer: CityFolk's Education and Outreach Coordinator is Jean Howat Berry, my BFF and another huge reason I'm in Dayton On Purpose, but I'd have written every word of this even if she hadn't been involved. (Though I am biased enough to think that if she hadn't been involved it might not have been nearly as jaw-droppingly amazing. Just sayin.)