By Terelle Jerricks, Managing Editor
The San Pedro Festival of the Arts is back but for the first time in its six-year incarnation, it won’t be at Ports O’ Call Village since it’s closed for redevelopment. This year, the festival will be hosted in the parking lot of the USS Iowa and the line up is exciting as ever.
Known primarily for the dance performances, the SP Arts Festival will kick off on Sept. 22 featuring 17 dance crews.
The most striking aspect of this year’s festival is a large number of San Pedro-based dance groups relative to past years, or at least it seems to be. Local dance troupes include Peoples’ Place Pacers, Tango San Pedro, Jrick & the Hot Flashers and San Pedro City Ballet.
Tango San Pedro was founded by Tango instructor Silvia Askenazi. Born in Buenos Aires, Askenazi migrated to Los Angeles in 2004. When she arrived, she began learning from the many local and visiting milongueros – milongueros are persons who spend time dancing social tango.
JRick and the HotFlashers is a dance crew formed in 2013 of people older than 50 years old who perform old-school hip-hop and Michael Jackson dance routines.
Jan Kain’s People’s Place Pacers is a fixture at the SP Arts Festival. People’s Place Pacers specialize in line dancing even while Kain’s Peoples’ Palace Dance studio practice a variety of dance traditions including swing in the name of physical fitness.
Then there’s San Pedro’s City Ballet, the school from which one of American Ballet Theatre’s principal dancers Misty Copeland emerged. San Pedro Ballet teaches their students ballet, tap, jazz, modern, contemporary and hip-hop dance.
These dance companies are not the only exciting troupes to perform at this year’s festival.
The schedule of performances on Sept. 22 and 23 are:
Sept. 22:
San Pedro City Ballet, Showtime-Katusha, Degas Dance, Re:borN Dance Interactive, Authentic: Grooves, Kairos Dance Company, Bradford Chin & Dancers, Fuse Dance Company, Peoples’ Place Pacers, Grupo Folklorico Tzintzuni
Sept. 23:
Tango San Pedro, Jrick & the Hot Flashers, Santa Barbara City College Dance Company,
Moving Chanel Dance Company, VIDA – Vannia Ibarguen Dance Arts, Firusi Dance
Company, Megill & Company, Louise Reichlin & Dancers/Los Angeles Choreographers &
Dancers, White Crane Dance Theatre, The PGK Project
This year a single band, called, The Urban Renewal Project will be performing. This Los Angeles-based band features a big band horn section, a singer and a rapper who perform upbeat originals and fresh interpretations of everything from jazz standards to recent hits. They’ve toured nationally from New York’s Rockwood Music Hall to the San Jose Jazz Summerfest, and their recordings have received airplay on tastemaking radio stations across the country, including KCRW–Santa Monica and WDCB–Chicago.
Time: 11 a.m. to 5p.m. Sept. 22 and 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Sept. 23
Cost: Free
Details: www.triartsp.com
Venue: USS Iowa, 250 Harbor Blvd., San Pedro