Heritage Works program teaches rhythm and roots

When Rhonda Greene started Heritage Works 10 years ago, she was looking for a way to put Detroit kids in touch with their African roots and she found it in teaching African drum and dance.

Greene's M.F.A. is in poetry, but she has been practicing African dance since she was 12 years old, finding it a natural extension of self expression. "Rhythm is language," she says. "There's something so poetic about the drums."

After returning to Detroit to start her family in 1993, the mother of two quickly realized there seemed to be a hole in kids' education where their heritage and culture should have been. She took her two boys with her to study dance with Fabayo Manzira of Detroit.

Eventually she decided that all Detroit kids deserved the same opportunity, so she founded the nonprofit Heritage Works to fill that need. Manzira became one of her main instructors.

"A lot of times you have a sense when you're young that you have a rhythm, or when you hear music that you have to move, but you never understand why you feel like you feel," Greene says. "So when you come into a class and understand that it's a natural response, something that's been going on for ages, you feel like you're coming home."

The 44-year-old Corktown resident is doing much more than teaching kids movement and percussion. This is the hook that grabs her students and keeps them coming back. But Greene uses these art forms as a gateway to expose them to issues of culture.

She talks a lot about embracing and understanding all cultures, not just fostering a love of African customs. "It's important for people to know that loving one's culture is not hating another culture."

So besides the primarily West African drum and dance, students learn about Asian Taiko drumming and the pattin' juba or hambone dance style of the American South.

"The more we can look at how we express things differently, the more we'll know and understand and feel comfortable with each other," she says.

"Not only do you get the understanding of learning how to talk to people who are different from you, you get an understanding of who you are. Just the exercise of being able to look at things from different perspectives — it's just invaluable."

But "the first step in cultural competency is understanding your own," says Greene. And for a generation of kids who get most of their cultural exposure from TV, that means having little idea of where their ancestors came from and how that background influences them today.

Dance instructor Manzira, 57, says kids have little idea of what modern Africa is like. "They're often surprised the people wear shoes," she laughs.

"So if we're doing a dance from Guinea we'll talk about the politics of Guinea, about the culture, how people dress," Manzira says. Food, language and history are also part of the mix.

"Long term it gives children a sense of perspective, that their history didn't start with slavery, but goes back much further than that," Greene says. "So you can reach back to stories that bring personal pride and community pride."

Preparing kids for the work world is never far from her thoughts either. In the Heritage Works Youth Ensemble, students learn responsibility, planning, leadership and presentation skills.

Greene's own sons Kamaal, 19, and Immanuel, 17, have been dancing and drumming with her since the beginning, and now the two of them take active roles in leading the ensemble and helping teach classes.

Right now they're organizing a dance-a-thon to raise money for costumes, to be held July 23 at the Boll YMCA.

One of her dreams is that every youth in Detroit would encounter their culture in a meaningful way before they reach high school. That would mean finding funding to implement a citywide program in the schools.

But for now Greene offers after-school classes during the school year and a summer program at Don Bosco Hall in northwest Detroit and at the Matrix Human Services Center on the northeast side.

She has also founded the Michigan African Drum and Dance Youth project, bringing Heritage Works together with three other groups, Kuungana African Drum and Dance Company of Flint, and Nanou Djapo and Thiosane Performing Arts Company, to collaborate on performances.

They are preparing to perform together at the African World Festival.

One of the great things about African dance, Greene points out, is that anyone can do it. You don't have to be tall and lithe like a ballet dancer. Body type doesn't matter, and neither does age. "Young people dance with energy," says Greene, "but older women dance with style.

"It's really about your energy," she adds. "Somebody will get up and they may do the move totally wrong, but if they bring the right energy and the right zest to it everybody will stand on their feet and clap. If you do it with enthusiasm and love, you'll bring the house down."

To find out more about the summer program, the Heritage Works Youth Ensemble, or the dance-athon, go to www.heritageworks.org or call (313) 438-2800.