Oh! Hello Othello. Othello, Seattle’s most multi-cultural neighborhood, located on southeast Seattle’s LINK light rail line, invites the world to its annual Othello Park International Music and Arts Festival August 14 from noon to 6:00. Admission is free.
As in years past, southeast Seattle’s mélange of East African, Asian, Filipino, Fijian, African-American and other immigrant communities will gather in Othello Park just a short block from the Othello Station to demonstrate their solidarity as one international community. Othello Park’s permanent performing arts stage will transform its surrounding pastoral meadow into an amphitheater for music, dance and art performances beneath a high canopy of trees. A dance floor laid out in front of the stage will invite everyone to join in the fun of learning steps and rhythms of many cultural dances. Featured guest performers this year will include the Women’s Steel Pan Project, Global Heat, and Clava Kubana and many more.
Encircling the meadow will be an array of vendor, craft, and community information booths. Food choices will include Asian, Jamaican, Ethiopian and Indian cuisines, to name a few. Besides dancing, features of special interest to children of all ages will include art creation stations, Othello Park’s playground and giant hillside slide, bouncy houses, a petting zoo with a variety of animals including the Festival trade mark, a camel. Othello Park Alliance, Mona Lee said, “The Festival brings together the neighborhood’s many separate ethnic communities and unifies them into one. This is a microcosm of what needs to happen for the entire world.”
To fulfill its mission of enhancing the Park as a beautiful community gathering place, the Othello Park Alliance convenes the Festival every year to culminate the Rainier Valley Culture Fest Weekend, an official Seafair event.
