World music is an English phrase for styles of music from non-Western countries, including quasi-traditional, intercultural, and traditional music. World music's inclusive nature and elasticity as a musical category pose obstacles to a universal definition, but its ethic of interest in the culturally exotic is encapsulated in Roots magazine's description of the genre as "local music from out there".
WOMAD is an international arts festival. The central aim of WOMAD is to celebrate the world's many forms of music, arts and dance.
Simon Shlomo Kahn, known professionally as SK Shlomo and previously as Shlomo, is a British singer-songwriter, beatboxer, music producer and live looping technologist.
Dance Theatre of Harlem (DTH) is an American professional ballet company and school based in Harlem, New York City. It was founded in 1969 under the directorship of Arthur Mitchell and later partnered with Karel Shook. Milton Rosenstock served as the company's music director from 1981 to 1992. The DTH is renowned for being both "the first Black classical ballet company", and "the first major ballet company to prioritize Black dancers".
Bembeya Jazz National is a Guinean jazz group that gained fame in the 1960s for their Afropop rhythms. They are considered one of the most significant bands in Guinean music. Many of their recordings are based on traditional folk music in the country and have been fused with jazz and Afropop styles. Featuring guitarist Sekou "Diamond Fingers" Diabaté, who grew up in a traditional griot musical family, the band won over fans in Conakry, Guinea's capital city, during the heady days of that country's newfound independence. Bembeya Jazz fell onto harder times in the 1980s and disbanded for a number of years, but reformed in the late 1990s and toured Europe and North America in the early 2000s.
The Baga are a West African ethnic group who live in the southern swampy lands of Guinea Atlantic coastline. Traditionally animist through the pre-colonial times, they converted to Islam during the mid-eighteenth century under the influence of Muslim Mandé missionaries. Some continue to practice their traditional rituals.
Peter Stewart Wiggs is an English musician and DJ from Reigate, Surrey.
Formerly known as Auckland Festival, Auckland Arts Festival or Te Ahurei Toi o Tāmaki Makaurau is an annual arts and cultural festival held in Auckland, New Zealand. The Festival features works from New Zealand, the Pacific, Asia and beyond, including world premieres of new works and international performing arts events.
Gideon Obarzanek is an Australian choreographer, director and performing arts curator. He was Artistic Associate with the Melbourne Festival (2015–2017), co-curator and director of 'XO State' at the inaugural Asia-Pacific Triennial of Performing Arts (2015–2017). Obarzanek was appointed Chair of the Melbourne Fringe Festival in 2015 and Strategic Cultural Engagement Manager at Chancellery at the University of Melbourne in 2018.
The Darbar Festival is an Indian classical music and dance festival that takes place annually over three months in London. It uniquely curates music from the north Indian Hindustani and south Indian Carnatic classical traditions as well as dhrupad and percussion.
Kyle Abraham is an American choreographer and dancer. He founded his own company A.I.M by Kyle Abraham in 2006 in New York City and has produced many original works for A.I.M such as The Radio Show (2010), Absent Matter (2015), Pavement (2012), Dearest Home (2017), Drive (2017), INDY (2018), Studies on Farewell (2019), and An Untitled Love (2021). Kyle has also been commissioned to create new works for international dance companies such as Untitled America (2016) for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, The Runaway (2018) for New York City Ballet, The Bystander (2019) for Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, Only The Lonely (2019) for Paul Taylor American Modern Dance and Ash (2019).
Mark Kidel is a documentary filmmaker, writer and critic, working mostly in France and the UK.
His award-winning films include portraits of Cary Grant, John Adams (composer), Elvis Costello, Boy George, Ravi Shankar, Rod Stewart, Bill Viola, Iannis Xenakis, pianists Alfred Brendel and Leon Fleisher, Derek Jarman, Brian Clarke Balthus, Tricky, Robert Wyatt and American theatre and opera director Peter Sellars.
Sohini Alam is a British singer of Bangladeshi descent who sings in the bands Khiyo, Lokkhi Terra, and GRRRL. She has performed internationally on stage, radio, and television and worked on music for dance, theatre, and film. Alam is a founding member of the arts company Komola Collective and co-music director of the documentary film Rising Silence. After providing vocals for dancer/choreographer Akram Khan's DESH, she spent three years touring internationally with his show Until the Lions.
Ballet Nimba from Guinea is an African dance theatre company and music recording artist. It is the first of its kind to be based in Wales, UK. It was founded in 2010 by Guinean choreographer Idrissa Camara with its home in Cardiff and is made up of a collective of about 15 dancers and musicians.
Jupiter Bokondji is a musician from Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). He and his band, Okwess International, released their first album, Hotel Univers, in May 2013 in the United Kingdom. The band was created in 1990, and they toured the African continent. However, at the same time that their popularity grew, a civil war broke out in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Some band members fled to Europe to escape violence, but Bokondji stayed in Kinshasa. As the war died down, his popularity grew again, and in 2006 he was featured in the documentary Jupiter's Dance. This brought him to the attention of UK producers and musicians, which led to him joining the African Express tour, the production of Hotel Univers, and performing at the 2013 Glastonbury Festival.
Akosua Adoma Owusu is a Ghanaian-American filmmaker and producer. Her films explore the colliding identities of black immigrants in America through multiple forms ranging from cinematic essays to experimental narratives to reconstructed Black popular media. Interpreting the notion of "double consciousness," coined by sociologist and civil rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois, Owusu aims to create a third cinematic space or consciousness. In her work, feminism, queerness, and African identities interact in African, white American, and black American cultural spaces.
Greensboro Ballet is a professional ballet company in North Carolina. It is the only ballet company in the Piedmont Triad. It is one of the few non-profit ballet companies in North Carolina. Greensboro Ballet has presented works by George Balanchine. The company also has performed a number of works made especially for the Greensboro Ballet by Rick McCullough, Jill Eathorne Bahr, Leslie Jane Pessemier, Elissa Minet Fuchs, and Emery LeCrone. Maryhelen Mayfield, who served as artistic and executive director of Greensboro Ballet from 1980 to 2019, choreographed over twenty-five works for the company.
Msafiri Zawose is one among the prominent contemporary Gogo musicians. His name is associated with his traditional Gogo style music, which relies heavily on the zeze and ilimba in combination with distinct lyrical harmonies.
Unlimited is a commissioning programme that celebrates the work of deaf and disabled artists, originally conceived for by Arts Council England for the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad. Since its inception, the programme represents a multi-million pound investment which to date has commissioned more than 70 pieces of work across theatre, dance, visual art, music, literature, film, poetry and performance art. Several Unlimited-commissioned pieces have gone on to have a global reach, such as Sue Austin's Creating the Spectacle, which has reportedly been seen by more than 150 million people worldwide. Others have won critical and industry acclaim within their field, such as Touretteshero's Backstage in Biscuit Land, which earned the company the 2014 Total Theatre Award for Best Emerging Company. Unlimited is currently delivered in partnership between Shape Arts and Artsadmin with senior producer Jo Verrent.
Robin M. Gee is an American dancer, choreographer, and filmmaker. She serves on the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro as a professor of dance in the UNCG College of Visual and Performing Arts and was the founding faculty advisor for Delta Chi Xi Honorary Dance Fraternity, Inc.
