Keeping time with the rhythm of the city
Oceans of Rhythm festival returns to deliver message
of peace for ninth year
Basha Alperin drums with other members of Tambou Yambu Arkestra.
The young time travelers see discord everywhere. At school, students are engaged in petty arguments; at the park, adults are disagreeing, groups of teens are fighting and even the elders are having heated debates.
"There is confusion everywhere. It’s a metaphor for the world situation," explained Basha Alperin Aladé, creator of the Oceans of Rhythm festival that will be held for the ninth year in Long Branch on Sunday.
To deliver a message of peace, Alperin created the character of Peacebird, who will pitch the theme of living in harmony during a musical/storytelling play she has written as the centerpiece of the festival.
The African/Caribbean-based, multi-cultural Oceans of Rhythm festival celebrates the arts, the diversity of the community and the environment through music, dance and drama. It is co-sponsored by the Long Branch Department of Recreation and Zeybrah, an organization that Alperin founded to create community arts projects and festivals.
Grupo Iwa Dada dancers performed at the World Trade Center plaza last summer.
The festival, which will take place from 3-5 p.m. at the Long Branch Senior Center, will culminate in a joyful procession of performers and audience to the oceanfront, where music and dance will continue and a mini craft and food marketplace will be held.
At the heart of Oceans of Rhythm each year is a play written by Alperin that delivers a message and provides the setting for a large cast to perform. Themes have ranged from the greatness of prominent African-Americans to anti-smoking, and the Matawan resident explained that she had a special impetus for making peace the theme of this year’s festival.
Just weeks before the events of 9/11, Zeybrah presented One Moment in Time in the plaza of the World Trade Center as part of a 10-day Festival of Creative Community series.
"It was a retelling of the legend Miracle of the Princess and the Frog, which combined folk tale, music, dance and storytelling," Alperin said. "Afterward we went to the top of one of the World Trade Center buildings, and my daughter asked me to take her and some friends back for her birthday."
On Aug. 29,] Alperin did that and felt a sense of connection to the buildings that for her, ironically, demonstrated harmony among nations.
"People of every nation were in those buildings. For me, they were a symbol of modern multi-culturalism, of ethnic diversity," she explained. "That’s what we need in the world. Not only were people from every nation together in them, but people from all over the world came to see them and everybody was getting along.
"After the tragedy and a lot of tears," she said, "I was inspired to write a play about peace and understanding."
Alperin began producing multi-cultural African/Caribbean festivals at indoor and outdoor venues in New York 15 years ago as an outgrowth of her interest in African drumming.
The festivals celebrate multi-culturalism through the music, dance and folklore of West Africa and the Caribbean as well as other cultures. She draws on native performers to give the festivals authenticity, including groups she’s drawn together like the jazz/world beat band Tambou Yambu Arkestra; Grupo Iwa Dada, an African/Caribbean dance ensemble comprised of children and adults; and Senuba Melody, a group that combines storytelling with music and dance.
After moving to New Jersey, Alperin began looking around for a second, local venue for the festivals, she said.
In 1984, she founded Zeybrah — Zest for Education of Youth Brings Rhythm, Arts and Humanities — to promote cultural exchange and experiential learning through interactive, authentic presentations of folk art forms from Cuba, Brazil, the Caribbean, Nigeria and Senegal.
With support from the City of Long Branch Office of Community and Economic Develop-ment and the Monmouth County Arts Council, she founded Oceans of Rhythm nine years ago.
The festivals combine music, drumming, dancing and storytelling, and Alperin takes elements from the folklore of different cultures — African, Caribbean, Euro-pean, Hasidic — and weaves them together.
"What I really love to do is take all kinds of tales and blend and readapt them," she said. "I weave maybe four or five tales into one and put my own twist, my own imagination, into them."
For Oceans of Rhythm, Alperin created a local folk tale based on Troutman’s Creek, which ran alongside her home in Long Branch.
The Legend of Troutman’s Creek is the basis for the series of musical plays that are the centerpiece of the Oceans of Rhythm festival. The plays dramatize a theme and draw in a large cast of community members and performers, she said.
"Every year the point of the play is that it allows me to bring in other entertainers and make them a part of the story," she explained.
The Legend of Troutman’s Creek was derived from several Nigerian folktales, explained Alperin, who lived in that country for several years.
"In mythology there are stories about rivers, and someone, usually a woman, cries and turns into a river. In this case, a man cries and turns into Troutman’s Creek," she said.
In Alperin’s version, Troutman’s Nigerian grandfather settles in ancient Long Branch long before Columbus’ visit to the New World. He marries Dolphina, a dolphin who can transform herself into a woman. When both break vows to each other, Dolphina returns to the ocean and Troutman’s tears turn him into the creek. The adventures of their daughter, Swanita, are the basis for the musical plays that set the festival theme each year and engage the large casts of children and adults that bring the story to life.
This year, Alperin has dedicated the festival to honoring the WTC victims, and the poems and songs she has written call on people to come together and work toward overcoming differences.
Guest artists are master dancers and drummers, including former members of the Senegalese Ballet Company, and the festival will include a multi-cultural art exhibit by Red Bank artist Wendy Born Hollander.
When Swanita and her friends travel forward in time in this year’s adventure, they find a contemporary city whose citizens are divided by senseless fighting. The group sets about to restore peace and justice with the help of Peacebird, who has several antidotes to disharmony, including a magic substance he sprinkles around that transforms attitudes.
"People fall asleep and wake up happy," Alperin explains. "It represents people calling on their higher selves."
Peacebird also gives children a set of 13 peace principles to live by. The principles, which will be read aloud for the audience’s affirmation, call on children to respect themselves, others, their elders and the community; to perform acts of kindness; to strive to make peace; to seek truth; to appreciate and care for the environment; to be tolerant; and to support justice.
In Peacebird’s interactive song, Alperin has framed both a wish for peace and a call for young people to become engaged in the process of creating a peaceful world by promoting unity.
That’s because, she explained, peace must begin with each individual.
"To me, each person must call on that part of themselves that wants peace," Alperin said. "The messiah, whoever that is for you —whether it’s a popular or religious figure or someone like Martin Luther King Jr. — has to start within yourself."