Film and Live Performance!
THUNDER SOUL at DISCOVERY GREEN

Thunder Soul has been moved due to inclement weather, to James D. Ryan Middle School Auditorium (2610 Elgin Street, Houston 77004) at 6:45 pm
Kashmere Reunion Stage Band will perform after the screening
Please arrive early
Click for directions

Kashmere Reunion Stage Band
Over twenty former band members return to the stage to honor "Prof" Johnson and celebrate the Houston premiere of Thunder Soul. "Under the able baton of late, legendary Houston music educator Dr. Conrad Johnson, Kashmere High School's band program became a force to be reckoned with in the '60s and '70s. Augmenting the traditional symphonic repertoire with everything from jazz to James Brown, the Kashmere Stage Band cleaned up at virtually every regional, state and national contest it entered. The bands also released several albums that were originally intended as fund-raisers but became highly sought-after collectibles and sampling gold mines for adventurous DJs such as Houston-born Premier of Gang Starr. Dozens of KSB alumni went on to become professional musicians and music educators in their own right." (Chris Gray, Houston Press)

The Steinmenauts
For the team from Chicago's Steinmetz Academic Centre — Lamar, Kevin, Jésus, Big C, and She’Kira — poetry is family. A working-class school on Chicago’s far West Side (most famous alum: Hugh Hefner), Steinmetz typically has little to boast about. Yet against all odds, their slam team, in its first year, won the 2007 "Louder than a Bomb" slam poetry competition. A film about the Steinmenauts and other high school contestants in the 2008 competition, Louder than a Bomb won both the Jury Prize and Audience Prize at this year's Woods Hole Film Festival, and screens in the Cinema Arts Festival on Friday and Saturday.

Joe Ray Sandoval
Joe Ray Sandoval is a multimedia artist, performance poet, and youth advocate from Santa Fe, New Mexico. Sandoval is the co-writer and inspiration of Spoken Word, a new dramatic feature starring Ruben Blades screening in this year's Cinema Arts Festival. He has taught creative writing workshops in both the public and private sectors as a member of WritersCorps in Washington, D.C. as well as independently in New Mexico. His work has been published, seen and performed from New York to Los Angeles and in Caracas, Venezuela. He co-directed a documentary on the poetry reading series, "Poetry Allowed."