Educational performances
Seen by more than 800,000 people over twenty-eight years.
For nearly three decades Nelson has taken Latin American music into schools, parks, libraries and colleges across Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin. The shows have also travelled to Miami and to the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in Washington, and have been seen by more than 800,000 people.
They are bilingual and they are participatory. Students do not sit and watch — they clap the rhythm, name the instruments, learn where a song came from and why it travelled, and by the end of the hour most of them are dancing.
The shows share their names with the books, because they are the same body of work: La Bamba, a country-by-country journey through Latin America, and The Key to Latin America, told as a story. A teacher can book the show, then keep the book.
Nelson is also Executive Director of Growing Together / Creciendo Juntos, Inc., the non-profit founded to carry this music into schools, and has been invited as a keynote speaker at educational conferences and parent organisations.
The programs
- La Bamba: A Latin American Journey — a country-by-country tour in song
- The Key to Latin America — the story of how the rhythms travelled
- Cha Cha Cha: Latin American Dances — the rhythms, and how to move to them
- First Songs of My Grandfather — for pre-school and early years
- Keynote talks for educational conferences and parent organisations
Nelson replies to every enquiry himself.