Where do you find culture? Do you look for it? Make it? Stumble across it? Just what is ‘culture’ anyway?

I suppose you could think of it this way. On one hand, it’s something you are born into and grow up with. The nature and nurture of your environment serves to create an atmosphere around you that you bring forth into the world.

On the other hand, culture is something that you create as you go along through life. The atmosphere of your upbringing serves as a backdrop to your creativity. You can build upon it and move deeper into it, or use it as a springboard to differentiate yourself from it.

Culture is comprised of all sorts of things, from books and movies to fashion and dance and language. Today I’d like to drill down into two of the things that are on my front burner at the moment, food and music.

Firstly, food. It’s that one week in America when the culinary arts reign supreme. We gather to give thanks over feasts of our favorite dishes, our kitchens become the focal point of every activity.

So, with all the current focus on how America is the world’s melting pot and how immigrants from all over the world are what has always made America great, I wondered if there was a way that forward-thinking countries in the modern age could do things a little differently?

What if each incoming cultural group was encouraged and supported to offer occasional free community feasts? Like, that’s part of the process of being welcomed to a new country. To help you assimilate and knit yourself into the existing community, you’re going to start by feeding your favorite dishes to your neighbors, and you’re going to get help to do it!

Food as the foundation for friendship? Sounds like a plan! If you ask me, the melting pot could use a little bit of a stir. As the author Douglas Rushkoff pointed out this weekend on Brooke Gladstone’s On The Media radio show, hosting a neighborhood feast is one of the most radical things you can do to change society for the better in our modern world.

What follows a fabulous feast? Music and dancing, of course! Few things are more inspiring than encountering an entirely new form of music and movement, especially when it’s totally unexpected.

That’s where we found ourselves on Sunday night. One of Isabelle’s friends had an extra pair of tickets for a show at the Freight & Salvage in Berkeley. A lovely venue to begin with, and when we arrived we noticed a large seating area had been cleared to create a spacious dance floor in front of the stage.

Apparently this was a return visit. Las Migas came through town the first time back in March. Who are Las Migas you ask? And why am I exhorting you to put them on your radar and catch a live show if you can?

Hmmm… How to describe… Flamenco Fusion perhaps? This Catalonian quartet from Seville in Spain is comprised of four women and a fellow with the largest stand-up bass I’d ever seen. Two incredible guitarists, a violin virtuoso, and a singer to knock your socks off.

The five of them put on a show we won’t soon forget. Like nothing I’d ever seen or heard before, they had us in the palm of their hands and out of our seats in no time, dancing, clapping in rhythm, and singing along.

Between Rushkoff’s brilliant insight in the afternoon and Las Migas taking it to another level in the evening, it was high tide for culture indeed. You might say that culture is the soul of humanity. We get to make it by being alive and creative together.

Much love and merrymaking till next Monday!

M+

ML #603

Mark Metz
Director of the Dance First Association
Publisher of Conscious Dancer Magazine