PERFORMING THE BRONX
A project by Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful and Collaborators: Seventh Action of the Series

Dr. Drum and Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful
 
Friday, December 21st, 6:30 pm
The Princess Room at
Andrew Freedman Home
1125Grand Concourse 
Bronx, NY 10452
https://andrewfreedmanhome.org/

Dress in White
Admission Fee: a handful of Earth as an offering to the Drums

TO RSVP: 
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/performing-the-bronx-winter-drums-tickets-53510494329?utm_source=eb_email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=new_event_email&utm_term=viewmyevent_button
 
Winter Drums
For the seventh chapter of Performing the Bronx, Dr. Drum and Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful host a winter ritual to welcome the first day of the season. And perhaps snow will fall. The voices of drums are at the center of this ceremony. Come and heal, sample some of the fruits of the Earth, move your bones, dance in community, or simply lie down on the floor and absorb the vibrations of the percussion. Open to all!

About Performing the Bronx
Estévez Raful works with a group of iconic Bronxites to co-develop with him performative actions that they present together in private or in the Bronx's public realm, focused on the histories that tie these individuals to specific communities and neighborhoods in their borough. These otherwise ephemeral gestures are recorded in photography, video and/or writings.  All of these materials will serve as the basis for a future publication conceived and edited by Estévez Raful.

Performing the Bronx is an expansion of Estévez Raful’s on-going efforts to generate work with and within different communities in the Bronx. It is also representative of his interest in recovering, reclaiming and remembering histories of the area’s inhabitants that run the risk of being effaced by time, lost in the midst of neighborhoods in flux, or dismissed by dominant discourses that often position themselves at the center of the conversation. With Performing the Bronx Estévez Raful continues contributing to the archives of the place he calls home. Past collaborators include Bill Aguado, Wanda Salamán, Mili Bonilla, Danilo Lachapel, Arthur Avilés, and Caridad De La Luz ‘La Bruja’.
 
 
Dr. Drum
Born on December 3rd, 1958, at New York City’s St. Vincent Hospital to Puerto Rican parents, both from Caguas, Puerto Rico, Dr. Drum is known as one of the Top National Afro Rican Bomba Artists. Bronx native Jose Ortiz, aka: Dr. Drum, is a nationally highly acclaimed professional on-stage performer, educator in Pan-African, Caribbean and Latin culture, and is a self-taught percussionist of Afro Caribbean rhythms. For these past twenty years, he has been an adamant advocate for the cultural arts as well as an adamant activist, organizer and educator of Afro Puerto Rican Bomba, a traditional African derived music and art form which was brought to the Americas by African slaves. Dr. Drum has performed at Madison Square Garden, Lincoln Center, and the United Nations, among other venues. He has taught at numerous after-school programs throughout NYC since 1999, where has developed an original curriculum for teaching percussion to youth. Dr. Drum is presently the co-founder and Musical Director of BombaYo Afro-Puerto Rican Arts’ Project. His work helps members of all ages, cultures, backgrounds, race and ethnicities develop a strong sense of identity and responsibility through actively exploring their cultural roots. 
http://bombayo.org/index.html

Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful treads an elusive route that manifests itself performatively or through experiences where the quotidian and art overlap. Concurrently, this path has been informed by a strong personal interest in immigration, cultural hybridization and Estévez Raful’s understanding of identity as a process always in flux. He hence approaches the concepts of home and belonging to the U.S. American context from the perspective of a Lebanese-Dominican, Dominican York who was recently baptized as a Bronxite: a citizen of the Bronx. While ephemeral by nature, Estévez Raful’s work gains permanence through audios, photographs, props, drawings, rumors, embodied memories, costumes, websites, videos and publications. http://hemisphericinstitute.org/hemi/en/e-misferica-81/dumit-estevez

Performing the Bronx is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council and the Bronx Council on the Arts. Special thanks to Mothers on the Move (MOM), and to Andrew Freedman Home.