Community Culture
Photo by Mahmood Al-Yousif — 
Some Rights Reserved
As we read your posts from around the world about the latest in festival work, artists, and audiences, we are often struck by the clear integration of culture and community. The more you go through KadmusArts, the more one can “hear” the sounds of communities coming to share stories, music, and dance together.
This kind of coming together is surely one of our most ancient and universal rituals. All societies and cultures have created a focal point for some kind of performance: to retell or create anew a group’s culture.
This week in Fest News we highlighted a culture-building initiative taking place online. Elham, a grass roots organization in Bahrain, provides a platform for talent and a forum for energizing creativity. (Bahrain is making its way on to our site, with the Bahrain International Music Festival as its first post.) Recently, Elham hosted an evening devoted to the role bloggers have in developing culture.
The story is playing out in Bahrain, on individual blogs, and via Global Voices. Global Voices’ mission
seeks to amplify, curate and aggregate the global conversation online – with a focus on countries and communities outside the U.S. and Western Europe. We are committed to developing tools, institutions and relationships that will help all voices everywhere to be heard.
In other words, this is a really cool site that you should make a point of checking out on a regular basis — and jump into.
Some of the really interesting approaches to the issue in Bahrain come from the introduction by Hisham Khalifa about the power of the individual and community to create culture outside of, if not in spite of, those in power.
The blogger Nido joins the conversation from a different angle. In looking through the identifiers on Facebook, Nido notes the ever-present self-tag as a moderate.
To Nido’s point, there hasn’t been a lot of revelatory, let alone long-lasting, art that has been created by moderates. Remove the absolute passion, inspired point-of-view, and determination to tell an urgent story and what do you have — certainly, not art.
As culture is the unfolding story of creation, so is the use of the online world to connect and build communities for “hearing” these stories.
Take a moment to absorb this: no matter where you are reading this, you are now part of the community, and the developing story, in Bahrain.
What’s your role?
- Bill Reichblum
