Festival Blog

Songs with politically sensitive lyrics are often censored. In this discussion session from the 2014 Smithsonian Folklife Festival, panelists discuss how this happens across multiple geographies, and why musicians always find it meaningful to fight back.

This recipe is from Chef Wang Peng 汪鹏, who is from Huai’an, Jiangsu Province. His home province is the birthplace of one of the most influential cuisines in China, the Huaiyang style

While Americans are dressing in costumes and going from house to house asking for candy on October 31, Peruvians will be celebrating their country’s criolla (creole) culture.

This fish dish from the Kenyan island of Lamu is usually made for some kind of special occasion such as a wedding, but it is also especially popular during the month of Ramadan.

You can’t even hear yourself think, let alone someone else speaking, when you’re standing between two competing karaoke stations. So we just kept moving through the covered walkway in the middle of the park

When I ask my American friends what impressions they have of China, the most common answers I get are Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, and kung fu.

Winyo performed throughout the 2014 Folklife Festival, representing the Kenyan benga music scene. At the Ralph Rinzler Memorial Concert: Tribute to Pete Seeger, he played his song “Everything Is Okay.”

Ali Abdalla Skanda comes from a family of carpenters and dhow builders in Lamu, Kenya. For the 2014 Folklife Festival, he donated one of his dhows and restored it on the National Mall.

This recipe was taught to me at the 2014 Folklife Festival by Amina Harith Swaleh and Fatma Ali Busaidy, two women from the island of Lamu, just off the Kenyan coast.