Happy Nowruz 2012!

FOURTH WEEK

Happy Nowruz! We wish all the best for the New Year in celebration of renewed friendships and new friendships. We hope that the traditional Nowruz values of giving, caring, and mutual friendships will continue through through difficulties during the upcoming year. In honor of celebrating these values, we are excited to present our first short film clip of the Afghan-American dance that the children of AFCECO (http://www.afceco.org/) and youth and students of the Washington community have contributed to through their own dance movements. You may watch the clip in the video posted below. We look forward to your thoughts and any feedback!

03.19.2012

This weekend, I had the delight and opportunity to meet with Executive Director of the AFCECO orphanages in Afghanistan, Andeisha Farid, at the Nowruz Commission's (http://www.nowruzcommission.org/) annual Gala held in Washington, DC. We had the chance to discuss and exchange ideas about the Nowruz Dance Initiative's project of compiling an Afghan-American dance for performance at a Nowruz celebration at the end of April here in Washington, as well as the potential of the dance being performed by AFCECO's children this coming Friday, March 23rd at their Nowruz celebration in Kabul, Afghanistan.

With the help of all the individuals who contributed to the choreography of the dance, we were able to compile a short video of our first installment and instructional of the Nowruz Dance Initiative's Afghan-American dance who's performance we look forward to hearing about in a few days. A special thank you to the individuals involved in the preparation of this video. With a time constraint of 26 hours, we were able to combine Afghan and American dance segments, rehearse, and record an instructional video! I am very grateful to all the wonderful talent I have had the opportunity to learn from.

Below, you will find the first video of the combined Afghan-American dance that we are developing, as well as the the two original dance segments used in the compilation of the dance.

Our first instructional video recording of our developing

Afghan-American dance in preparation for this Friday's

Nowruz celebration in Kabul Afghanistan.

The dance that AFCECO children worked on and performed

in honor of International Women's Day on March 8, 2012.

A clip of the dance that youth and students in Washington,

DC have been working on for the past three weeks (see pre-

vious blog posts for more on the process of its development.

Again, thank you to all who made these dances and videos possible. I look forward to continuing the process and working with you!