Bakanal de Afrique 2018: Afro Urban Festival

About

"How do we give roots to the diaspora spread overseas who may never return? How do we communicate across languages forgotten, forced or adopted? Connecting the dust here to the concrete there.”

COME TOGETHER

November 2018 | Bay Area, CA | Bakanal de Afrique (BdA), is an Afro Urban festival. The gifted child of Afro Urban Society, BdA brings us together across cultures, and showcases new, emerging and underground urban art, culture and people through performance, workshops, visual media and conversations.

WEY YOU DEY?

This year, our theme 'Wey You Dey (Where were you?)' explores the history of urban African culture by asking people of the Diaspora to reflect on a specific moment in their lives and to create a story from that moment. As with our previous festivals, the audience is an active player in weaving the timeline as we explore the questions, “Where did we come from?” “Why are we here?” “Where are we going?”

WE WAKE UP LIKE THIS

We are dreaming bigger and working harder this year, and need your support to make it all come to life. This work we know how to do, and have done on meager budgets, but this year we are asking for your support to level up. We aren’t aiming to make a profit, we just want to ensure that we are producing and supporting dynamic work and helping to give those works a larger life beyond its own stage.

MAKE IT HAPPEN

With your contribution we are:

• Collaborating with over 40 Artists & 15 Organizations representing as many regions of Africa: Congo, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Ethiopia, Different Regions of the Americas, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Brazil, Colombia as well as Europe;
• Employing as many people of African descent folks in all facets of the production; collaborating with Dance Mission Theater to train Women/people of African descent in Stage Tech fields;
• Going from 3 days of programming to a month-long multi-event. Featuring not just dance and music but also film, visual and literary arts;
• Collecting personal stories and engaging various people of African descent to exchange and share them;
• Researching and presenting social movements by mapping a timeline of folkoric, urban, popular music from 1910 to 2030 from 54 African countries and 44 where people of African primarily reside/originate.

WA'GWAN?

The festival features multiple days of events in collaboration with artists and various organizational partners. Here's a few of them, with more to come.

Friday, November 2nd | 5PM Opening Night: 1st Friday: Art Exhibit Mixer @ Studio Grand, Oakland

Saturday, November 10th | 7PM “What Had Happened Was…”, An Afro Urban Musical @ The Flight Deck, Oakland

Friday, November 16th | 5PM Bakanal at the OMCA @ Oakland Museum of California

Friday, November 16th & 17th | 8PM “What Had Happened Was…”, An Afro Urban Musical @ Dance Mission Theater, SF

Saturday, November 17th | 3PM Master Dance Workshop @ Dance Mission Theater, SF

Sunday, November 18th | 10AM Writing Session for People of African Descent @ Solespace, Oakland

Sunday, November 18th | 12PM Afro Urban Dance Day @ Malonga Casquelourd Center, Oakland

THANK YOU FOR YOUR SUPPORT!!