Bare Feet With Mickela Mallozzi

The West Indian Day Parade may be on hold this year, but the Carnival culture is still going strong! Mickela heads to the Little Caribbean neighborhood in Crown Heights, Brooklyn to take outdoor soca dance classes, learn the steel pan with Tropical Fete, dance on stilts with the KaisokahUSA Moko Jumbies, and of course, eat the local dishes in the West Indian Market!

Mickela connects with the Arab-American communities in New York from learning Algerian Rai with Esraa Warda to exploring Bay Ridge’s “Little Middle East” in Brooklyn to celebrating a Palestinian wedding with the Freedom Dabka Group - Muslim and Christian brothers and sisters share their culture, food, and traditions with Mickela across the boroughs!

Little Sri Lanka in Staten Island is one of the largest concentrations of Sri Lankans outside of the island nation. Mickela dances with the Sri Lankan Dance Academy and visits the family-owned restaurants on Victory Blvd. in Tompkinsville cooking up traditional dishes. She celebrates with the incredibly diverse community through song, dance, and...cricket!

Mickela heads to The Bronx to meet with the largest Garifuna community in the United States, a people of Afro-Caribbean culture with Central American influences. She learns the dances and music that have miraculously survived generations of impossible odds, and she features the Casita Maria Center For Arts & Education and the local delicacies in the neighborhood.

Hispanic and Latinx communities span the entire city! From the historic and artistic “Loisaida” (Lower East Side) neighborhood, to dancing Dominican bachata in Central Park, to dancing tango at the Astoria Tango House in Queens, to drumming the powerful samba reggae rhythms with Batalá, Mickela travels through the boroughs to get a taste of these Latinx flavors!

With so much on hold during the COVID-19 lockdown, these inspiring stories of dance have kept communities healthy, safe, and connected! From the powerfully healing Table of Silence performance in Lincoln Center for the 20th Anniversary of 9/11, to the Pacemakers, the elderly hype dancers for the Coney Island Cyclones, Mickela is inspired and invigorated with the power that dance has for EVERYONE!