New York 42 A Bed-Stuy block gives away seven days of dance, drumming and wellness classes
Most free festivals in this city give you something to watch. This one gives you something to do, for ninety minutes at a time, for seven days.
The week
Art Is Alive runs 13–19 September 2026 at the Asase Yaa School of the Arts on MacDonough Street between Malcolm X Boulevard and Patchen Avenue in Bed-Stuy. Everything is free. The programming is 90-minute classes — West African dance, Caribbean dance, percussion and wellness — rather than performances to sit through.
This is the 10th edition, under the theme Rooted 10 Years Deep, and it doubles as the 25th anniversary of the Asase Yaa Cultural Arts Foundation, which runs it.
Who is teaching
Dyane Harvey-Salaam, Jeffrey Page, Mouminatou Camara — a former principal with Les Ballets Africains — Nadia Dieudonné, Babacar M’baye, and Asase Yaa’s founder and artistic director Yao Ababio.
The Saturday
The block party is Saturday 19 September, noon to 7pm, emceed by Sharon Gordon, with the Bessie-winning Asase Yaa African American Dance Theater and the Brooklyn United Marching Band, plus a street market of African and Caribbean food, local artisans and community awards.
The structure is the interesting part, and it is worth copying. A one-day street festival collects a crowd; a week of classes collects the same people repeatedly, which is how a foundation that teaches for a living turns an event into a September enrollment season. If you are going once, the Saturday is the party but the weekday classes are the actual offer — a 90-minute West African dance class with a former Ballets Africains principal is a thing people pay studio rates for the rest of the year. Come for a weekday if you want the teaching, come Saturday if you want Bed-Stuy: MacDonough between Malcolm X and Patchen is a brownstone block, and closing it is the difference between a stage and a street.
Source: Time Out New York checked against the source
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