Target Passport Fridays at the Queens Museum of Art: Middle East

Leave your baggage at home and bring a picnic blanket out to Flushing Meadows Corona Park for Target Passport Fridays 2010, the 6th season of the Queens Museum of Art’s annual outdoor summer festival of international music, dance and film. This year’s journey around the globe begins in South Africa in honor of the World Cup, and includes stops in Colombia, Ecuador, South Korea, Taiwan, the Middle East, India, and Mexico. Each evening begins with live dance and music performances followed by the feature film screening after sunset.

Dance: Ramzi El-Edlibi Dabke Dance Group. Ramzi’s dance career began in Lebanon as he studied with the renowned choreographer Wadia Garrar and was a principal dancer with the Caracalla Dance Co. Ramzi is also an accomplished percussion player and teacher, mastering the tabla, riq (Arab tambourine) and frame drum. Dabke is a popular folkdance in the Levant, often performed in a line at joyous celebrations.

Music: In their New York debut, Salaam Middle Eastern Music Ensemble performs traditional and modern songs of Iraq, Egypt, Lebanon, and Turkey with a highly-personalized, contemporary twist. Featuring: Dena El Saffar (jowza, viola). Amir ElSaffar (trumpet, santour, vocal), Tim Moore (percussion)and Carlo DeRosa (bass).

Film: Amreeka (Cherien Debis, Palestine/USA, English & Arabic with English subtitles). Muna, a single mother leaves the West Bank with Fadi, her teenage son, with dreams of an exciting future in the promised land of small town Illinois. In America, as her son navigates high school hallways the way he used to move through military checkpoints, the indomitable Muna scrambles together a new life cooking up falafel burgers as well as hamburgers at the local White Castle. Told with heartfelt humor by writer-director Cherien Dabis in her feature film debut, Amreeka is a universal journey into the lives of a family of immigrants and first-generation teenagers caught between their heritage and the new world in which they now live and the bittersweet search for a place to call home.