Krik:Krak! Storytelling & Songs wraps up the season at Tastes of Brooklyn October 2012
On Saturday, October 20th, HCX hosted the last session of a four-part series of Krik:Krak! Storytelling and Songs at Brooklyn Borough Hall as part of Tastes of Brooklyn. Tastes of Brooklyn is a local food festival supporting Seeds in the Middle, the only local farmer’s market in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.
The unusually warm and sunny Fall afternoon had most of us in shorts or short sleeves. The plaza was busy, with families trying to juice the last bit of summer out of the city. Under a canopy tent, on a big blue rug in the center of the festival, chairs gathered around and both children and parents looked interested in something to entertain them while they drank the first early autumn batch of Buzzard Crest Vineyard grape juice (snuck over the boundary from the Borough Hall greenmarket) and savored delightful bites such as the bready, veggy, well-herbed goodness of rebollita (a tuscan bread soup which literally translated to “reboiled” prepared by Locanda Vini e Olii).
Storytelling was led by musician and performer Goussy Celestin with drumming by Jean Marie Brignol. Goussy wove Haitian folktales and songs as children and parents sang along as they munched on local Brooklyn restaurants’ gourmet tastes. Though the audience was very diverse and the tales unfamiliar to most, the stories brought some real laughs and sighs from the audience. “Bouki Dances the Kokioko” culled from collected folkstories in Diane Wolkstein’s The Magic Orange Tree made children giggle as Goussy mimicked the erratic and silly dance moves of Bouki trying to impress the king. Goussy also read Running the Road to ABC by Denize Lauture, a beautifully illustrated alphabetical tale that follows a group of children in the Haitian countryside and their crack-of-dawn encounters with creatures and characters on their run to school.
With the conclusion of Krik:Krak! Storytelling & Songs for the 2012 season comes a bit of sadness, but I want to challenge you, story-lovers. Tell your own tales, sing your own songs around a crisp evening fire and keep the Krik? Krak! sounding strong until next year!
Take a minute and read about the rest of this year’s Krik:Krak! Storytelling & Songs here.
We again would like to thank the Brooklyn Arts Council, Community Arts Fund for supporting our Krik: Krak! program.
-Kassandra Khalil Program Coordinator, HCX
Comments