By Kiernan Dunlop
Posted Aug 17, 2019 at 8:14 PM
Updated Aug 20, 2019 at 9:39 AM
If you were walking through Downtown New Bedford on Saturday, you might have been confused by what you saw. 3rd EyE Open Hip Hop Festival not only had break dancers, but also everything from graffiti artists giving demonstrations to farmers selling sunflowers to families playing miniature golf.
“Just the sight of alpacas walking around the hip hop stage is so cool to see,” Allison Faunce said.
Faunce is one of the founders of Southcoast Open Air Market (SOAM) and she teamed up with the organizers of 3rd EyE Open to host the market in Custom House Square during the festival.
While the combination of a hip hop festival and a market with alpacas; farmers; and vendors selling pottery, soaps, and other artisan craft goods may seem odd to some, to Faunce it makes perfect sense.
“I think our chain or link is just the creative community,” Faunce explained, “Creativity comes out in so many different forms.”
“We figured it would be a great collaborative effort to bring cultures together and cross demographics and show that we can have unity even when you may think two things don’t necessarily mesh,” Tyson Moultrie, one of the organizers of the festival and current mayoral candidate in New Bedford, said.
The festival was originally founded in 1998 and was held in Buttonwood Park. After a three-year hiatus the festival returned in 2017, but this time to Custom House Square.
The collaboration with SOAM is one of many 3rd EyE Open has fostered with local community groups since their return.
“Ever since the festival came back and got planted in downtown, we’ve been collaborating with more and more local businesses, making other partnerships, and just growing and trying to make the community stronger and better,” Moultrie said.
One of those partnerships is with A’s Before J’s, a nonprofit based in New Bedford that stresses the importance of academics to athletes.
The non-profit ran a 3-on-3 basketball tournament for middle and high schoolers during the festival in the Carter’s parking lot.
A team of four girls from the MCW Starz AAU team won the middle school division and out of the six teams from that age group, they were the only girls team.
“It felt good,” one of the players, Ahnay Adams, said about winning, “Payback from last year from all the boys talking trash.”
The team, including Alexia Thompson, Armani Rivera, and Tisharona Blackwood in addition to Adams, had to play and win four fourteen-minute games to win their division.
“They play basketball the right way,” said A’s Before J’s co-founder Manny DeBrito, “It’s so fun to watch them play fundamental basketball.”
Children were doing more at the festival than competing in basketball, they were also among the 35 performers on the event’s main stage.
IPC Dance company out of Pawtucket, Rhode Island is made up of nine 5 – 17 year olds and they performed an over 15-minute dance at the festival, the longest they’ve ever performed in front of a crowd, according to their instructor Kethy Santos.
Their performance featured elements of hip hop, Cape Verdan, merengue, and West African dance styles and to prepare the group practiced four hours a day for four days in the week leading up to the event.
Santos said she wanted her group to perform at the festival, “Because it’s for the community – anything for the community that’s what I do – I’m with it for the kids, from the 3rd Eye theme, which is just being comfortable with yourself, not thinking that you can’t overcome anything.”
12 year-old Jayla Gibau said dancing in front of so many people was overwhelming at first, but the time went by fast and she thought they did a good job.
One of the drivers behind 3rd EyE Open is to foster talent in young people like Gibau.
“Specifically 3rd EyE is for the younger audience to cultivate their talents so we have children’s performances sprinkled throughout the day,” Moultrie said.
3rd EyE Open has been cultivating homegrown talent when it comes to Shanai Barboza. Barboza graduated from New Bedford High in 2017 and has been performing at the festival for years.
She performed on Saturday with her group Mos Def Dance Crew.
The crew, which formed during their time in New Bedford High’s hip hop club, focuses on break dancing, hip hop, and popping and their routine featuring a staged robbery and masks drew a large crowd.
Barboza explained that the group was only able to perform because 3rd EyE Open gives them a free and safe place to practice.
Other performers on Saturday included Brockton resident Carlene McNair, whose stage name is Chosen., who sang and performed a spoken word poem.
McNair called the festival amazing, specifically because musicians and artists were coming together.
Bringing things together isn’t foreign to McNair who works in the mental health field, “I bring what I know at work into my art to enlighten the community about mental health.”
Much of the 3rd EyE Open Festival focused on lifting the community up and after working on the festival for two years Moultrie said it could have indirectly influenced his decision to run for mayor.
“When you get so entrenched with the community and you get to hear some of their needs, their concerns, their desires, their wants, sometimes you can’t help but want to stand up and step up for them and overall make it better for every resident of New Bedford,” Moultrie said.
Original story here.