An Open Invitation to Amplified Currents Festival of the Arts

Published October 8, 2020

Amplified Currents Festival of the Arts
October 16-18 and 23-24
Attendance is free, all are welcome. Donations appreciated.
Live at Massawa NYC, streamed online.
Register here.

Born out of conversations wanting to create an open space for people of all backgrounds to participate in innovative exploration of the arts, Amplified Currents will be presenting its inaugural festival this month! Amplified Currents is aimed at curating intimate performances and conversations with a particular focus on interdisciplinary collaboration, the creative process, and community engagement. The festival will emphasize non-traditional performance practices by featuring interdisciplinary performances, roundtable discussions, visual arts presentations, spoken word, and conversations with living composers and scholars. All events are free and open to the public for guests of all ages, hosted in person at Massawa NYC and streamed online October 16-18 and 23-24, with social distancing practices in compliance with New York City safety guidelines.

Our host venue, Massawa, is the oldest African eatery in NYC, serving Eritrean-Ethiopian cuisine in Harlem. According to their website, “Massawa is a family-owned business founded by Almaz Ghebrezgabher and Amanuel Tekeste. Almaz, an Eritrean immigrant, spotted the location Massawa now calls home on Amsterdam Avenue while driving a cab in the 1980s. Inspired by her love of cooking and desire to serve authentic East African food to residents of Harlem and the Upper West Side, she opened the restaurant with the support of her family in 1988.” We are excited to bring our work to Massawa and are tremendously grateful for their support.

We are thrilled to welcome an incredible lineup of artists from many fields and genres, eager to contribute to the development of our mission. With a focus on unraveling artistic processes, we invite attendees to actively engage with the arts as not just observers, but as partners in the collective creation of our work together, reinventing the space we experience. In doing so, we are using conversation and collaborative interdisciplinary performance to shift attention away from the product to demystify the journey and highlight the concepts of constant learning, reform, and community. This is the space for engaging with artists in bold, empathetic expressive freedom.

The Artists: