São Paulo – The 20th edition of the Immigrant Festival, which takes on June 14th, 20th and 21st in the city of São Paulo, will include Arab attractions. The community will be present with exhibitions of handicrafts, food stands and dance presentations. In total, more than 40 nationalities will be represented in the festival at the Immigration Museum. The goal is to recover the stories of the immigrants that stayed in the Immigrant’s Lodge (Hospedaria de Imigrantes) in Brás, the place where the Immigration Museum is located today.
“The communities of Arab immigrants and descendants have crucial roles in the festival, traditionally taking part in several parts of the program”, says the executive director of the Immigration Museum, Marília Bonas. The museum, an institution within the Culture Department of São Paulo state, has been organizing the festival for twenty years already.
Among the Arab attractions in this year’s edition, Bonas points out the presentation by Espaço Artístico Malaika, on June 20th, at 5 PM. The school will present five dances. One of them will feature dancers playing the snuj (Arab cymbals) while they dance. They will also perform a folk dance with a jar, a modern belly dancing number, the folk dance khalij, where they dance in a circle, and the dabke, which features a group of men.
The director of the Immigration Museum also emphasizes Arab participation in the museum’s daily routine and the richness of the handicraft of the region, which will be, according to her, one of the highlights of the Immigrant Festival. “There is a significant number of several communities in the museum’s neighborhood that always visit the space and will be present in the program”, Bonas said to ANBA.
Last year, 19,000 people attended the festival. This year is the 20th anniversary of the event and that’s the reason for some new attractions, such as the concert by singer Jerry Adriani, who was born in Brás and is celebrating the 50th year of his career. He will sing Italian songs, besides his musical hits, on June 14th at 4 PM.
There will be 41 food stands, 29 handicrafts stands and 42 artistic groups. There will also be handicraft workshops, dance workshops and gastronomy classes. A ride in a traditional Maria Fumaça steam train is scheduled each hour and there will be a special space for the children, with games and storytelling.
There will also be solo handicraft exhibitions from Iraq, Germany, Portugal, Peru, Russia, Colombia and Mozambique. In the Arab cuisine area there will be food stands from Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon and Syria. In this gastronomy area there will also be food prepared by immigrants from Mexico, Poland, Bolivia, Greece, Hungary and Turkey.
Service
20º Immigrant Festival
June 14th, 20th and 21st, 2015
From 10 AM to 5 PM
Rua Visconde de Parnaíba, 136 – Mooca – São Paulo
Tickets: R$ 6 (US$ 1.92)
Further information: (11) 2692-1866 or www.museudaimigracao.org.br
*Translated by Sérgio Kakitani
